/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13905751]

>students needed to know Greek and Latin to get into top universities 100 years ago
>moderately educated people would quote Shakespeare, Horace and other classics by heart in normal every-day conversation

What lead to the decline of the study of the humanities?

[Anonymous No.13905758]

Blame Dewey's educational reform and the promotion of upper education for all sorts of people, even students with a D average.

[Anonymous No.13905759]

>>13905751
You don't know Latin anon?

[Anonymous No.13905762]

>>13905751
The vast majority of people were not educated. It was a rich man's game

[Anonymous No.13905765]

>>13905751
The reverence people held for Einstein and his achievements lead to an over-estimation of the value of STEM

[Anonymous No.13905769]

>>13905751
mass literacy and mass education alongside the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of pleb democratic values, all accelerated by new communications technologies that created a cacophony of pointless noise that has not stopped for over a century, drowning out all remotely intelligent and sane conversation

[Anonymous No.13905775]

>>13905751
>moderately educated people would quote Shakespeare, Horace and other classics by heart in normal every-day conversation
...and other hilarious fictionalized accounts of the past you can tell yourself

[Anonymous No.13905776]

>>13905751
Liberalism, cut and dry. It only took a century of liberalism to ruin higher education with its corruptive forces.

[Anonymous No.13905779]

>>13905751
You can still learn those languages and people still do quite Shakespeare. Lmao.

[Anonymous No.13905784]

>>13905775
Based.

[Anonymous No.13905787]

>>13905765
One can see the appreciation for science and mathematics in the works of philosophers all the way from Plato to Husserl. Hume and Kant held great respect for geometers and algebraists, even if they weren't too sure about those subjects' applicability to phenomena.

[Anonymous No.13905791]

>>13905779
To be or not to be retard

[Anonymous No.13905804]

>>13905751
>What lead to the decline of the study of the humanities?
Choice. No one is interested and it's not profitable.

[Anonymous No.13905947]

Education's purpose went from "inculcate virtue" to "vocational training", to teach people to make money. And now the new thing in education seems to be "to create people who can make society more progressive".

[Anonymous No.13905955]

>>13905751
>What lead to the decline of the study of the humanities?
Universities became professional training institution for the middle class. There are still some old style universities left, they get you people like Trump and Boris Johnson

[Anonymous No.13905965]

>>13905751
Wasn't Shakespeare the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster movie then?

[Anonymous No.13905976]

>>13905965
Shakespeare's works were already 300 years old in that era.

[Anonymous No.13906033]

>>13905791
That and phrases like be-all-end-all, not all that glitters is gold, as luck would have it, etc. are common parlance except for maybe amongst the working class. It’s also not uncommon for people studying and teaching humanities to quote Shakespeare in more detail. As for your other point, it’s perfectly possible to get a good humanities education without knowing dead languages like Ancient Greek or Latin. Of course knowing these languages might give you more familiarity with some important texts, but not so much that you would stand out beyond any diligent learner who’s reading them in translation.

[Anonymous No.13906052]

Brown pepil bad

[Anonymous No.13906057]

>>13906033
>it’s perfectly possible to get a good humanities education without knowing dead languages like Ancient Greek or Latin
There are centuries of scholars who disagree with this and only one century's worth that agree. Not exactly the best century for the humanities either.

[Anonymous No.13906078]

>>13905765
Hope you’re enjoying penicillin and the Apollo program

[Anonymous No.13906114]

People were more intelligent a hundred years ago. Blame welfare.

[Anonymous No.13906132]

>>13905751
>students needed to know Greek and Latin to get into top universities 100 years ago
They also teached both of those subjects during school and one had to be at least somewhat proficient in them to pass the exams. Now they barely even teach latin in schools and one could know jack shit about it and still pass the exams.
t.german

[Anonymous No.13906309]

Mass education with a "practical" bent replaced limited upper class education via private tutors and much more rigorous private schools (which were basically finishing schools, so the parents demanded results). As upper class tastes changed, and economics retracted with the world wars etc., these private educations ceased to be the focus of pedagogy, and soon had to compete with technically oriented schools, a process that had been ongoing since the 19th century (with the French Ecole pratique and German equivalents, and their many imitators). The state stepped more and more in to provide education to everybody, and "state education" eventually became "education" as such.

But state education was only ever really basic literacy and STEM skills, with a patina of humanism that lingered for a while but then faded into "social studies." You simply can't apply the same "learn Latin or I'll fucking beat you" levels of rigour like you could get with a private tutor or private school, especially when your parents need to compete with the joneses by having you Latin-literate and attending Oxford or bust. Then of course more and more immigrants and niggers poured into the school system, which in most places in America is now just a prison system designed to barely contain niggers during the day, by allowing them to savagely beat the white and Asian students while screaming and hooting constantly. This is not even a racist statement, this is objective truth.

Also, after the 1960s, entire generations of teachers, who tend to be women, were well-intentioned but feckless and semi-retarded (as women tend to be) leftists and social engineer types on the model of Herbert Marcuse's "march through the institutions." There are good mainstream sociology books on the feminization of education. It started out subtle, but now basically every teacher is a pathetic fat "I wish I were still 20" bitch who takes out her frustrations at being a cool wine aunt by ultra-conforming to the herd status quo, which happens to be SJW/tranny shit right now.

Universities also went from cultural institutions run for maximizing a nation's cultural capital, even at economic expense, to autonomous or effectively autonomous for-profit too-big-to-fail financial enterprises. Many major universities are in fact secondarily universities, and their primary focus is the massive amount of capital they sit on and routinely invest and use to speculate.

The answer is really capitalism. Everything atomized, there was no focus anymore. Nations ceased to govern themselves, or even see themselves as governable, and shifted into a passive "socio-economic" mode politicians are more like functionaries who respond passively to the flow of populations and social demands. You can't just have a Prussian Kultusministerium step in and direct pedagogy anymore, you can only have a nested maze of administrations within administrations staffed by millions of female "Human Resources" people.

[Anonymous No.13906324]

>>13906078
Бaзингa!

[Anonymous No.13906416]

>>13906309
Very insightful post. Could you rec me one of those sociology of the feminization of education books?

[Anonymous No.13906565]

>>13905775
kek

[Anonymous No.13906576]

>>13905775
This and only extremely fucking privileged people lived in this fantasy that you impose on yourself.

[Anonymous No.13906585]

capitalism

[Anonymous No.13906678]

>>13906057
>more = better
Sometimes you conservatists sure are pretty democratist in your line of thinking.

[Anonymous No.13906701]

>>13906678
You can't grasp the difference between longevity and momentary popularity?

[Anonymous No.13906714]

>>13906701
Can you grasp that quantity ≠ quality?

[Anonymous No.13907198]

>>13905751
you need to know Latin to study subjects like history or philosophy in Germany. Sometimes even ancient Greek. They also teach it at school there.

[Anonymous No.13907217]

>>13905765
I think it was the atomic bomb that tipped people off

[Anonymous No.13907282]

>>13906078
Penicilin is useful but it's nothing to worship. But nobody outside burgers cares about the Apollo program.

[Anonymous No.13907338]

>>13905751
>What lead to the decline of the study of the humanities?
allowing everybody in

[Anonymous No.13907344]

>>13905751
I think a big problem is that even if suddenly we were to get people to learn Latin, Greek and get them to read Plato and Epictetus, they would mostly "study to the test" and forget about it as soon as the exam ends. They would mostly study it as some kind of trivia they have to study so that they can get a diploma that would help them make more money.

Due to our culture, it is unlikely that having those requirements would lead to the best benefits of knowing the classics.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » mxvabIoSIE No.13907623]

>>13906678
Conservatives = Republicans = Democracy
Liberals = Democrats = Democracy

Just because one party named themselves something does not mean that they are the only democrats you inbred twat.

[Anonymous No.13907678]

>>13905751
Unironically the civil rights movement.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co..

After you couldn't get a job through intelligence testing because it was "racist" everyone needed to get a university degree for high paying jobs. It as well became more and more a cultural indication of status, and the cultural elites wanted people to go there to get taught the "right thoughts", and universities figured out they could make a lot of money off of it, so the rules were laxed and everyone from the boomers to zoomers have gotten memed into going to college, though the meme is at least starting to die out with zoomers.

[Anonymous No.13907709]

>>13906309
Don't poison valid criticism with disgusting racism

[Anonymous No.13907715]

>>13907623
>Conservatives = Republicans
>Liberals = Democrats
Categorically wrong. Both Reps and Dems are Conservatives.

[Anonymous No.13907813]

>>13907715
Conservatist ideologies are known for trying to preserve the status quo and thus the statutes of a republic. Democratist ideologies on the otherhand would then inherently be more majoritist.

[Anonymous No.13908913]

>>13905751
Whatever people need to do to game the system they will do. If it was required to memorize and recite random bicycle manuals, they'd do it.

[Anonymous No.13909052]

>>13907709
Go back, faggot tourist.

[Anonymous No.13909060]

>>13906309
Good post

[Anonymous No.13909068]

>>13906309
Yeah, basically.

[Anonymous No.13909377]

>>13905751
>>moderately educated people would quote Shakespeare, Horace and other classics by heart in normal every-day conversation
Who the fuck told you this lie?

[Anonymous No.13909379]

>>13905751
>moderately educated people would quote Shakespeare, Horace and other classics by heart in normal every-day conversation
no

[Anonymous No.13909407]

>>13905947
Which kinda circle back to "inculcate virtue", doesn't it? Only the idea of virtue has changed.

[Anonymous No.13909415]

>>13909377
>>13909379
>t. rootless americanos or disgusting ESLs
Do you have any idea how many words and phrases we all use every day come from Shakespeare? How do you think they entered our vocabulary? Fucking retards. Go back.

[Anonymous No.13909420]

>>13906309
You forget the important role of the Church in education, at least in Europe. The Church has basically been replaced by the state in that respect, not that education it offered was always stellar.
You also forget that people who went to highschool in the early 20s could still write entire thesis in Latin. If anything the latin of the traditional republican education was more rigorous and "classical" than church latin.

[Anonymous No.13909433]

>>13906309
Just try to finish your undergrad before dropping out

[Anonymous No.13909437]

>>13906309
nice incel posting, zoomers are eating it without a question

[Anonymous No.13909445]

>>13905751
Why do I need that when there are nice, greasy double cheesburgers to consume and websites to explore?

[Anonymous No.13909486]

>>13909437
/leftypol/ refugee reddit faggot discord tranny tourist go back

[Anonymous No.13909489]

>>13905775
TRUE

[Anonymous No.13909494]

>>13909486
bruh

[Anonymous No.13909501]

>>13909486
So insulting

[Anonymous No.13909502]

>>13909494
good post fellow 4channeller le bruh xD we definitely all say that bruh

[Anonymous No.13909506]

>>13909502
What is air

[Anonymous No.13909510]

>>13909486
The comment is so insulting

[Anonymous No.13909517]

>>13909494
>>13909501
>>13909510
dank maymays comrades xD did you happen to catch the latest chapo podcast bruhs xD

[Anonymous No.13909527]

>>13909517
i m a g i n e projecting so hard

[Anonymous No.13909537]

>>13905751
The myth is everyone needs to go to university but the average person is far to dumb to need tertiary education so quality had to be lowered. Since there is objective facts in STEM they haven't degrades as much as the humanities.

[Anonymous No.13909538]

>>13906309
Cut out the two middle paragraphs and you have a pretty decent premise.

Don't take the divisive b8 m8, think higher than that.

[Anonymous No.13909539]

>>13909538
see >>13909486

[Anonymous No.13909544]

>>13909486
based

[Anonymous No.13909548]

>>13907623
you fucking mutts dont have a true democracy, its a constitutional republic and stop pretending it anything else

[Anonymous No.13909553]

>>13909539
incel posting is peak shitposting, be proud

[Anonymous No.13909555]

>>13909539
fite me incel

[Anonymous No.13909727]

>>13909553
>>13909555
see >>13909486

[Anonymous No.13909751]

>>13906132
>They also teached
>teached
leave

[Anonymous No.13909760]

>>13909727
bruh

[Anonymous No.13909832]

>>13909760
XD

[Anonymous No.13910121]

>>13905751
It was far more exclusive back then and was predominantly white and male. Throw a bunch of women and blacks in and you get the current system.

[Anonymous No.13910145]

Shakespeare sucks though. Its just a meme that people think he is high class because his plays are in archaic English and they had to learn it in high school. Reminder that poor people could and did watch Shakespeare's plays at the Globe

[Anonymous No.13910156]

>>13910145
plebianus maximus

[Anonymous No.13910186]

>>13910145
Yep, even Antarctica has better literature

[Anonymous No.13910299]

>>13906078
Thanks Sargon

[Anonymous No.13910309]

>>13907709
Yes, that true statement is racist.

[Anonymous No.13910394]

>didnt have latin and greek in highschool
spotted the american

[Anonymous No.13911509]

>>13910394
Am american and took Latin all four years, but I was lucky enough to go to a jesuit school. The entire public school system is shit except for the few rich suburbs outside of the major cities. Smartest dude I know though went to one of the rich public schools outside of chicago and he said they only taught french and spanish.

Autodidacticism is really the only way to go if you're stuck in this clown country. I found a nice comfy place where I can work remotely and the library is one of the best I've ever seen. Feelsgoodman

[Anonymous No.13911611]

>>13909437
>>13909486
>>13909494
>>13909501
>>13909502
>>13909506
>>13909510
>>13909517
>>13909527
>>13909539
>>13909544
>>13909553
>>13909555
>>13909727
>>13909760
>>13909832
sneed

[Anonymous No.13912667]

>>13909555
nigger

[Anonymous No.13912715]

>>13905751
Education was reduced to be the political and social tool it is today.

[Anonymous No.13912764]

>>13905751
Companies wanted higher degreed people so they would not have to train their workers. Because of the massive need of degree wielders, schools started being "more" for the common man which is usually poor and numerous.

[Anonymous No.13912852]

cannot believe how quickly this thread turned to shit

[Anonymous No.13912956]

>>13909486
/leftpol/ has nowhere to go back anymore though.

[Anonymous No.13912957]

>>13907217
More accurate than any of us would be comfortable knowing

[Anonymous No.13912978]

>>13905955
Boris and Trump are nothing alike in terms of education. Trump has some business degree, Boris is an Oxford classicist who speaks five languages and has written books about Shakespeare (even if it will never be released) and Ancient Rome. Boris is /lit/

[Anonymous No.13913203]

when virtue got to be redefined by the supposedly-oppressed peoples in whom low-effort exertion and laziness is typical

[Anonymous No.13913372]

Some close to the mark ITT
>>13905776
>>13905947
>>13909420


>>13906309
A lot of sad but real truth in this post, ty anon. It is capitalism in a sense, and largely in the sense you describe: in how as the state instituted mass education, and that education became the de facto standard, and then the state liberalized and ceded standards to markets, we now lack any means of stable, sensible pedagogical directives, and are left with a really pathetic set instructing children.

But none have yet brought up the issue of our technological paradigm having shifted massively with the receding centrality of text as primary means of mass information dissemination, with the rise of kult ov broadcast television etc. My perspective is probably coloured by getting into Heidegger recently, but I think this technical shift is the real crux of the issue of so flagrant intellectual degeneration we're now witnessing. I don't think that average people were really dropping Horace on each other in passing 200 years ago, but where we have sitcoms and HBO dramas, they had serialized Dickens or Dumas or some such; ingesting the next installment of an epic text was a thing that average people did on a Tuesday evening at home, whereas as now the same demographic passively ingests a couple episodes of Game of Thrones and calls it literature. And that plebeian standard trickles up to the supposedly more educated classes, which as has been pointed out above, already over esteems STEM subjects (probably also due to technological circumstances).

As a person raised in the countryside with very little exposure to television, but always an ample supply of books to keep one occupied, moving to the city at 18 (that was over a decade ago now) and only then first being really immersed in the culture of common to sub/urban people, the difference in a typical mind made of broadcast television is really staggering.

[Anonymous No.13913411]

>>13909415
Using phrases of Shakespeare that entered everyday parlance is NOT the same as quoting Shakespeare, and any attempt to deny this is a pathetic cope. Joe Farmer was NEVER going around quoting Lear.

[Anonymous No.13913449]

>>13905751
To be honest, Greek and Latin aren't especially important to know, even if you're interested in literature. Having a good grasp of history and etymology, along with reading many of those works in translation, does the job just fine.

It would be nice if more people were able to quote great fiction or poetry, but that's really just a party trick. People these days are able to quote a lot of songs or films by memory, which is just as good, provided the songs/films are good themselves, or the quotations at least have merit.

>>13905765
No reason you can't learn both. You know the Two Cultures? Snow points out that many physicists or chemists are able to quote Shakespeare, yet scholars of literature rarely know, say, the speed of light. In fact, I doubt most PhDs in any modern language could accurately describe even the basics of orbital mechanics, let alone electromagnetism or thermodynamics.

[Anonymous No.13913459]

>>13907813
Nice job basing your argument purely on etymology. Conservatism as used today is more along the lines of Goldwater than Burke or Oakeshott.

[Anonymous No.13913478]

>>13906309
Go back to your containment board and try to engage a bit more with the historical record rather than ad-hoc theorizing based on a dozen Wikipedia articles.

'[S]tate education was only ever really basic literacy and STEM skills, with a patina of humanism that lingered for a while but then faded into "social studies."'

This demonstrates your ignorance of the subject.

[Anonymous No.13913513]

>>13913449
Nah, I'm reading Latin poetry and the English translations available are just cringe. You definitely need to learn Latin if you plan to get into the Latin poets.

[Anonymous No.13913572]

>>13913513
Hmm... I'm kinda doubtful of this. I read Greek and Hebrew and think that, while not perfect, there are a number of good translations of most major works, even some less common ones like the gnostic gospels. I don't see why the situation would be particularly different for Latin.

[Anonymous No.13913580]

>>13913478
That is correct though, the state immediately and completely overhauled the classical curriculum's humanities program.

[Anonymous No.13913594]

>>13913572
Latin as a language has features which English lacks. I'm reading a dual text edition and the Latin wins everytime.

[Anonymous No.13913603]

>>13905762
It still is, except the rich no longer need to be educated.

[Anonymous No.13913632]

>>13913594
Any language has features which any other given language lacks, that's trivial. I'm not suggesting translations are better than, or even equivalent to, reading the original.

The question is whether or not one needs to read a source in the original in order to appreciate literature which draws from or depends on knowledge of that source. Based on my experience with texts written in Greek and Hebrew, I certainly don't think that's the case. I doubt there's anything special about Latin to make it so in its case.

[Anonymous No.13913695]

>>13913632
>Any language has features which any other given language lacks, that's trivial
It really isn't when it comes to poetry. Even the professional translators in the intros and the translator's note say that it isn't the same and can't be properly replicated so I will believe their opinions rather than your anecdotal opinion.

[Anonymous No.13913719]

>>13913695
I'm saying the fact is trivially true, not that differences between languages can reasonably be wholly ignored (an argument precisely no one would make). This is clear from the rest of my post, which you made no comment on.

[Anonymous No.13913722]

>>13913594
What about languages that are descended from Latin? Like Romance languages

[Anonymous No.13913735]

>>13913722
Not that anon, but reading texts in translation will never match reading them in the original. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it -- not everyone's, even literature students', time is best spent learning another language. Unless you plan on specializing in that language, of course.

[Anonymous No.13913741]

>>13913722
Not that anon either but I know Romanian, French, and Latin and they are all very different.

[Anonymous No.13913762]

>>13913741
I meant to say also that I don't particularly think it's a black and white issue. Certain poetry is easier to translate than others. I was just reading about how Verlaine is easy to translate but Mallarme is a nightmare. Obviously you won't get the exact feel of the original, but frankly unless you have an extremely high degree of fluency in your target language it's questionable whether you'll ever feel it the way it was meant to be felt.

One of the first questions I always asked my Latin and Greek teacher was whether they read "in" Latin, not just in the sense of not needing to translate (which happens fairly quickly and basically automatically), but really truly thinking in Latin free syntax and being totally comfortable with it. And they all said, that basically never happens. You can get approximations of it, but what we read today is a re-constructed version of a high literary language that few people spoke at that level even back in antiquity. It was already vulgarizing by Caesar's day and probably well before.

It's even worse for Greek. Greek was tonal and we can only partially reconstruct and make guesses about that.

[Anonymous No.13913794]

>>13913722
None of the current Romance languages have a case system nor declension nor a neutral gender like Latin has.

[Anonymous No.13913804]

>>13913794
>None of the current Romance languages have a case system nor declension nor a neutral gender like Latin has.

[Anonymous No.13913823]

>>13913804
Meaning what, faggot?

[Anonymous No.13913850]

>>13913823
Romanian (and, I believe, some other Eastern Romance languages) has a noun case system, and French and Spanish mark case on pronouns. I believe Romanian has neuter nouns that behave differently depending on tense.

[Anonymous No.13913856]

>>13913850
Nobody cares about Romanian though and even English has pronoun cases(and the genitive 's)

[Anonymous No.13913866]

>>13913856
Whether or not English has it is irrelevant, since it's not a Romance language.

Linguists, or people interested in the history of languages (such as Latin), obviously care about Romanian.

[Anonymous No.13913870]

>>13905765
Which is hilarious because Einstein saw the point in the humanities, if people wanted to emulate Einstein they would learn both

[Anonymous No.13913877]

>>13913850
Romanian has mixed nouns which is even weirder. Romanian is a fucking mess.

[Anonymous No.13913880]

>>13910394
You're typical American public school will have Spanish and either German, French, or possibly Mandarin Chinese. At my school it was Spanish and German. The German classroom was literally a zoo (People flooding the room with the sink, hiding food in the ceiling tiles, etc.), and the Spanish education consisted of memorizing vocabulary lists. Reading the textbook during class is the only way to learn anything in American public school

[Anonymous No.13913881]

>>13913603
>except the rich no longer need to be educated.
if you live in Zimbabwe, yes

[Anonymous No.13913897]

>>13913870
Problem is it is only possible to independently study the humanities in the modern era, with secondary education and undergrad programs being completely devoid of standards and academia being a circlejerk

[Anonymous No.13914002]

>>13913881
>he thinks rich kids can quote a line from Shakespeare beyond the Yorick speech

[Anonymous No.13914571]

>>13905751
>quote Shakespeare, Horace and other classics by heart
Is it me or is memorizing quotes the most egregious form of fake intellectualism?

[Anonymous No.13914616]

>>13909494
>>13909502
>>13909517
bruh moment