Posted in the dunk tank because I expect to be dunked on.
So I got in a discussion with a friend that someone they knew was hardworking because they were doing a degree in music theory on a PhD track while also juggling multiple jobs. I was impressed with all the jobs this person was doing, but I said that music theory as a degree is absurd and most liberal arts degrees are related to professional bullshitting (re: writing useless essays about a specific quality of something) than they are about something socially useful so I didn't find that aspect impressive at all. In my eyes, the socially useful thing about a music theory degree would be applying this idea to make good music, or to teach others about it. Notably, music theory is not about engineering a stage for good acoustics, nor is it about building instruments. It leads to nothing tangible, but rather is a sort of meta-analysis of music as a whole. Its possible to receive a music theory degree while making bad music. And bad music and good music is wholly subjective, its possible to put on a very musically skillful display and have no one like it, or not be interesting enough that a good swath of people enjoy it.
Compare this to, say, an architecture degree. There can be artistic expression in architecture, but its incredibly important to put people through a degree program for rigor to avoid architectural deficiencies which can kill people. The point here is that any sort of rigor drilled into someone in a music theory PhD pipeline has questionable benefits, and is likely a waste of time and labor. However, it is possible that it would be useful to have music theory certifications that are relatively quick, cheap, and potentially free to get to help teach musicians music theory to improve their art, maximizing social benefits. And I think that is something that can be applied to a lot of liberal art degrees.
Maybe this is colored by the way my grandma taught me about Socialist Czechoslovakia. There were benefits for artists, but people could only get free/subsidized degrees if they went to do something very practical such as architecture, engineering, science, and so on. Which is why so much socialist art is baked into something practical, like housing.
My history professors were crusty old African Marxists and angry Jewish socialists. One of them met Thomas Sankara. There are lots of bad history teachers, but the solution to that is good history teachers, not refusing to learn history. Hell, look at the war in Ukraine. To even begin to understand what is happening and why you need to understand the entire Cold War, and WWII, and the history of Ukrainian Fascism, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a dozen other things. Having a skilled teacher of history makes learning these things much easier than if you were to try to bumble through it on your own with a library card. A professional historian will reveal questions that you would never think to ask, and provide context and depth to events you'd otherwise never have heard of.
The discipline of studying how history is written is called historiography, and one of the first things I learned in historiography is that every single author of history had a bias and an agenda. No one wrote things down "as they were", everyone was trying to achieve something. So you can never just trust that a source is absolutely accurate in what it's saying. You've got to look at other contemporary sources, other documents, archeological evidence, and all sorts of other things. And then you try to piece together something like the truth from all these different sources. For me, this was a complete game changer. History went from being a list of facts in a dry old text book to a series of mysteries that had to be investigated critically. It's entirely the reason I broke out of capitalist propaganda and became a socialist. Learning history, and how to evaluate history, helped me realize that not only were the narratives I was taught in highschool wrong, they were deliberate lies. And studying history gave me the tools to recognize those lies, study where they came from, and read between the lines of those lies to try to tease out the truth.
And I want everyone to have the benefit of that. I think it's really valuable, and I think if we took full advantage of automation and structured the economy on socialist lines everyone would have plenty of time to study whatever topics they found interesting.
Oh, and one more thing; I don't think the current educational model in universities is particularly good. I think teaching professors should be allowed to teach and research professors should be allowed to do research, and that if a professor does want to teach they should have to learn some pedagogy. I don't really like the "Teacher talks students listen" method of teaching, and I find the socialist model of teaching used by communists in rural areas of China or Vietnam really inspiring.
does a phd in history help you teach it, though? seems like it helps you become a good historian but teaching is a different skillset that requires background in the subject, yes, but way more specialized training in pedagogy and effective communication. we devalue teachers by assuming anyone who's really smart in one specific field is qualified to teach it.
I totally agree that teaching professors should be trained in pedagogy, and I think the way we currently do things where professors are not required to have any training at teachers is a huge disservice to students. The best professor I ever had taught kindergarten, grade school, and high school before he became a professor. He didn't have a PhD and he knew how to communicate his teachings better than any of the dozens of other professors I had.
FIVE BIGGEST LIES IN HISTORY
GO
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Remember the Maine
Haymarket Affair
Gulf of Tonkin incident
Dreyfus Affair
Sorry that they're all American or Eurocentric I'm sure there are some great deceptions in Chinese history but I'm just not that familiar with it.
how do they do it?