Donna, I recently worked out how much money parents could save instead of sending their kids to watch videos at Duke.
Folks, if you’re going to drop tens of thousands of dollars a year to give your kid a collegiate education, you should at the very least make sure he’s in a collegiate curriculum. It pains me to say it, as one with a B.A. in English Literature and Language, but be very suspicious of the humanities. There are many, many good courses and professors out there, so don’t be completely cynical. But too often humanities courses combine academe’s fondness for “political overcorrection” (thanks to MK for that; it’s far preferable to “political correctness”) with the discipline’s subjectivity, yielding disastrous results in scholarship, teaching and learning. Another casualty is also the beauty of the disciplines themselves (not to mention the pursuit of beauty in the arts).
My favorite (I use the term ironically) example of this: a few short years after receiving my degree, I learned that the professor who taught the undergraduate Shakespeare classes I took at N.C. State, then from a merely feminist viewpoint, had chucked all reliance on the texts and was now teaching such claptrap as King Lear had molested his daughters … before the play began.
