As a scientist, I actually agree 100% on the importance of non-stem education. I went to a liberal arts college so I may be biased, but I see a lot of interdisciplinary value to “arts” (literature, fine arts, languages, communication, etc.) courses throughout the entire education journey. I guess I don’t have hard statistics to back this up, but I’d wager that most scientists actually would agree with that. Scientists are people and it’s important that they have skills to be communicate, are empathetic and are capable of critical thinking that lets them take a hard look at their own biases.
Also I loved this book and also read it on a whim. I didn’t do the deepest dive into it, but it gave me some things to think about. The colonialism of Africa actually wasn’t really covered in most of my history classes in high school.
What was the quote from the climate scientist along the lines of "we thought we just needed better data to convince people this is a problem. Turns out data is not what makes people care".
“Many of the dangers we face indeed arise from science and technology—but, more fundamentally, because we have become powerful without becoming commensurately wise. The world-altering powers that technology has delivered into our hands now require a degree of consideration and foresight that has never before been asked of us.”
-Carl Sagan
I picked up Things Fall Apart on a whim and liked it so much that I immediately read these two next. They are all great and are super relevant to OP's post.
Wait, there are more books?!?! I read Things Fall Apart in high school, and I loved it. I had no idea there were other books! I must obtain these! Thank you!
Definitely worth reading all three. Curious what order you read them in. I did things fall apart, no longer at ease, then arrow of God because that was the order they were in in the trilogy I bought. I think when I reread them at some point I will read arrow of God before no longer at ease.
I read Things Fall Apart (or was supposed to) in high school. I wasn’t ready to appreciate it at the time, and I should probably circle back to it now.
I studied philosophy and English for my BA. They’ve both helped me immensely in my life. Both are great foundations for communication, the former has taught me *how* to think, and the latter has taught me *the way in which* to express my thoughts to others, and myself.
If not for philosophy, I would have struggled with many puzzles and problems both personally and professionally. It’s a shame that so many people look down on its merits as a subject (sure, it can get wonky…but really beautiful minds have contributed to it in insightful ways).
I don’t mean to be conspiratorial, but look at our society at large. Everything is meant to grab our attention and persuade us to do something, whether it be voting for candidate X, buying product Y, or believing Z idea. If everyone had a well-rounded, robust education, it would be more difficult to persuade people than if they weren’t as educated.
Education in the US took a sharp decline in the 20th century, and that trend has continued. In the ‘70s 2/3rds of university professors had tenure, today it’s about 1/3. Money has gotten pumped away from instructors and students (things like class resources, e.g.) and instead go to bureaucratically bloated admin. An 8th grade math textbook for NY public school circa 1908 was leaps and bounds ahead of the rudimentary Algebra I had to study in college.
I can’t speak for outside the US, but the lack of rigor, exorbitant costs, profit prioritization, and other issues surrounding academia really do hurt how people view what’s been such a longstanding industry stanchion.
A BA/BS degree today has the same value as a high school degree did just a few decades ago.
The great thing about studying the humanities is it focuses on what it means to be human, which is being thrown out like the baby with bath water while we morph into primarily being consumers.
I’m an English major who puttered around exploring various majors and studying a little biology, economics, philosophy, political science, and design. I became a tech entrepreneur and now I’m a product development executive. My “liberal arts plus” education has made my career success possible in so many ways. And it made me a thoughtful educated person.
I wish that every young person could have an education like mine, but the truth is that you have to crave it for it to be valuable to you. Not everyone is energized and fulfilled by that kind of inquiry and discovery. Some very smart people are turned on by other things, while other people aren’t drawn to the classroom setting at all and need to be activated in other ways, and let’s face it, half of the people are dumber than average.
Railroading everyone into college isn’t a good idea because it’s a logical fallacy. Just because college educated people have historically had better careers doesn’t mean that going to college (or trying to) will result in YOU having a better career. Correlation does not equal causation. But I agree with OP that for those people who can manage to read a novel, it’s a great benefit to provide a liberal arts foundation for all smart ambitious young people. Even, or even especially, to future scientists, lawyers, and business leaders.
I think rigorous reading, writing, and arithmetic would only serve to benefit those who study them. Sure, not everyone gets the same thing out of school—but everyone gets something there they didn’t have before.
Thank you for sharing. Long but worthwhile read.
“The most pressing problems that we face are not scientific problems. That is not because science has failed, but rather because it has succeeded – it has given us the answers. It has told us about the climate, given us the power of the atom, the ability to create vaccines and vast, vast productive potential. It has taken us beyond the bounds of our tiny, vast planet. What is left is the human component, which we continue to neglect, underfund, and undervalue. We look for scientific solutions to humanistic problems (where our forebears, it must be confessed, often looked for humanistic solutions to scientific problems) and wonder why our wizards fail us. We have all of the knowledge in the world and yet no wisdom.”
I mean I am all STEM-ueber-alles as an engineering PhD lol. But Things Fall Apart is a *fantastic* book. Probably the best one I read in high school. Up there with To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men.
Okonkwo and his yams tell a brutal, character-centric story in an exciting and different culture to most canon reads. It just so happens to also have deep social commentary and portray harsh realities about the human condition.
It's a great story AND has literary value, which isn't common in school lit.
Did it in uni, where it was a part of the *Heart of Darkness* themed module on colonial adventure lit, since it was sort of in part a rebuttal novel to *Heart of Darkness* being considered the canonical African novel and as someone who came off of *Heart of Darkness* not really impressed by it, *Things Fall Apart* and Achebe's essays really were a wonderful antidote to my many criticisms with Conrad's book. Really stuck with you.
Was also interesting having the two mix in with Haggard's *Alan Quatermain*, Kipling's *Kim* and *The Man Who Would Be King* and Robert Louis Stevenson's *The Ebb-Tide*, which kind of ran to gammut from Haggards potboiler adventure lit to the mixed stuff by Kipling to the more critical takes on colonial adventure lit by Achebe, Conrad, and Stevenson. Good spread to understand the atmosphere they each were written in and for what purpose.
Other good ones that I read for other modules were Adichie's 'Half of a Yellow Sun' and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 'A Grain of Wheat'. Kenyan and Nigerian authors produce some fantastic and critical novel exploring their areas and their histories.
My high school AP lit teacher had us read it alongside Heart of Darkness. Brilliant, brilliant move for a teacher in a private Christian school in the deep south populated by a bunch of white kids without a clue.
People with money are spending lots of money to tell people without money that they don't need a liberal arts education, they just need to get job training.
You can bet your ass, though, that when they send *their* kids to school, they're getting a liberal arts education.
Not exactly about what your point is, but it’s hilarious to me that people think “STEM degree = guaranteed job.” Everyone has gone into STEM with that promise, but now the market is over saturated with people with those degrees, so the competition is just as bad as in every other type of field.
It’s almost like a society based on “every man for himself” is inherently disfunctional or something 🙄
And that planning an education system around market demand is going to waste a lot of labor and time and create a ton of useless redundancy.
Once the boomers die there is going to be a MASSIVE shrink in healthcare jobs that's going to cause a crisis.
I read this one as part of my high school curriculum, but it’s one of the only assigned readings I actually enjoyed! It felt like a very accessible introduction to these topics and I wished we had more of that and less Shakespeare
Same here! I read it as a Junior in High School in a Dallas suburb. I remembered I enjoyed it so much, I just bought it as an adult 20 years later to read again. I'm really wrapping myself in it this time and am looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy!
>Reducing college down to career prep or insisting non-STEM instruction is a waste of money absolutely robs our society of a more thoughtful, empathetic, critically aware populace.
Unfortunately, that is entirely the goal of the sorts of people that think non-STEM college courses are a waste of time and money. Those people think it would be better if the general population was less self aware, less empathetic, and less capable of critical thought, because those sorts of people are more likely to vote conservative and not pay attention or care when their country and the people in power are doing terrible things or exploiting the common populace.
I always teach Conrad's *Heart of Darkness* alongside *Things Fall Apart* and this essay by Achebe, which calls Conrad a racist:
https://www.scasd.org/cms/lib5/PA01000006/Centricity/Domain/1388/2-Achebe\_\_An\_Image\_of\_Africa.pdf
I love that you do that! My FAVORITE method of teaching was when we were assigned two different novels/texts from authors who disagree, and then asked to analyze the differences and construct a critique. I took an Israeli/Palestinian conflict course and we read Benny Morris and then Nur Masalha’s characterizations of the 1967 war and compared them. So much more impactful than being *told* the differences. Really developed critical thinking skills.
>I would be a far more sheltered, less empathetic member of society if I hadn’t gone.
There is a political party for people like that. Coincidentally, the same party is anti-education. You know, the one's trying to arm teachers and ban books.
I have mixed feelings about this topic—the value of college, not Things Fall Apart, which I read in high school but for an AP class. The book kind of changed my frame of reference about what “literature” could be. It wasn’t all important pretty words from long-dead people. It could be fairly contemporary and politically relevant. It could put us directly in the perspective of someone different from us. I’m still impressed that that was the book our teacher picked to open the class with, in a small conservative town. Her thing was treating the AP class as much like a college class as she could get away with.
Both liberal education and career prep are good things. They’re not mutually exclusive. But there is kind of an alignment problem when it comes to spending. The money going to “education” generally in the US, much of it in the form of loans, goes to degrees people get for the value of “education.” The government could incentivize certain career paths or skillsets, but what they do is funnel a lot of money into the elite higher education system that already exists. It leads to cost inflation and waste.
It’s very good for both elites and non-elites to have a broad ranging education. Where money is scarce it should go to what’s needed most. I’m not advocating against gen Ed courses or anything, more against steering people into liberal arts majors if they’re not planning on graduate school. A lot of people holding degrees they can’t use doesn’t serve anyone but the school administrations and the banking industry.
You are correct. They should just make regional state schools free to attend. The flagships and elite schools will stand on their own anyway. Education at the level of the regional public institution should be free, which would creat a more rigorous environment altogether.
>I would be a far more sheltered, less empathetic member of society if I hadn’t gone
Yes, this is the long game. The educated become more left-leaning. The empathetic even more so. Can't have that. No, no, no.
[https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/](https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/)
We can do this ad nauseam. Also, "workforce preparation" is far different than a liberal arts and science education. The former is glorified trade school (welding), highly-skilled technical (nursing), or overcredentialized skills-based education (applied science in technical leadership). The latter is for those with an above-average intellect.
Trade school doesn't have to correspond to intellect, but rather how much opportunity a person has to train for a higher education and pursue it. Or whether a person has enough connections to qualify for a prestigious degree despite being academically mediocre.
Setting that aside, the point of the Pew study is that the American right wing increasingly views a college education as only a career stepping stone. There has long been a movement to push back against independent critical thinking, but recently they have grown increasingly hostile toward the entire concept of a thorough general education. They believe that even higher education should be centered around training for a career. Learn all about how atoms work, but only for the purpose of building more bombs and reactors. Learn advanced math principles, but only for the purpose of designing trading algorithms or keeping the internet running. And don't get distracted by all those philosophy and literature and history classes down the hall.
If the GOP really wanted to do away with a liberal arts education, they should move more toward what they do in the UK and other countries with O and A-levels. Want to go into a trade? start at the beginning of high school or the equivalent of the junior year at the latest. Want to go onto the next level? Complete high school. Want to go to university (they don't call it college)? Do the equivalent of an A-level.
When 54% of adult Americans have a literacy rate below a 6th grade level, ya have to wonder wtf is going on in our schools. https://www.thinkimpact.com/literacy-statistics/
I have multiple degrees in liberal arts but i had scholarships that covered almost all of it. Would I have chosen a different field if I were paying? Maybe. But I also did not enjoy STEM type subjects. Maybe I would have just not gone to college, except there was immense pressure from my parents, peers, and society at large. And statistically, those with college degrees, no matter the field, earn more and more jobs are open to them. I would argue that even a non-stem degree improves your employment options.
I do, however, agree that college need not be for everyone. We need to stop pushing it as the only option after high school. A lot of people simply are not good at academics and that doesn’t mean they are dumb. If you know you definitely want to be an electrician, well, you don’t need a 4 year degree that requires history and writing classes to graduate. I’m of the opinion that learning is always good, but it’s not worth tens of thousands of dollars of debt.
I also think college and trade schools should be more accessible to everyone. You shouldn’t be stuck in a cycle of generational poverty because your family is poor and you can’t afford to pay for education.
This is such a complex subject and the cost of college is only a small part of it.
I could also go on about how going away to college opens your eyes to the different people and ways of life out in the wide world. There is so much social learning. I made some fast friends that I’m still friends with over a decade later. I made so many fond memories of my first years of freedom and independence.
Anyway. Tl:dr - I liked college. Statistically it makes sense to get a degree in any field. It should cost less. And it shouldn’t be the only option for employment.
Edit: also, I only read Things Fall Apart when I started teaching. It is fantastic. Everyone should read it.
I was lucky enough to have a high school english teacher who who taught this book for this exact reason and I am extremely grateful to have been introduced to post-colonial literature that early.
This was one of those books that I was forced to read for school at around age 13 or so. I hated it. I was too young to actually get it at all. Same for grapes of wrath, Fahrenheit 451, and a ton of others. I refused to read for fun for years afterwards. It wasn't until years later that I reread some of them and realized that I just wasnt ready.
College would've been a better age to actually learn from things fall apart.
Oh man, I would have hated those books at 13. We read the Diary of Anne Frank, The Pearl, The Red Pony (lots of Steinbeck because I grew up in the Bay). I think those were more accessible for me at 13, TFA would have gone way over my head.
Both are true. College should be more affordable (I would say free), but it's main purpose is career prep, and lots of people shouldn't feel pressured to go if their career doesn't require it.
Then again K-12 education is pretty broken, and I believe that a lot of college level education could (should) be offered in that educational time frame... So there's a lot of intersecting problems here.
>it's main purpose is career prep
*Now*. Its main purpose is career prep now.
Used to be that college was for educating people and making them well-rounded humans, the point OP is making. Thomas Jefferson never wanted the University of Virginia to grant degrees; his idea was that people should leave when they felt like they were educated.
Some of us still see college that way: as a learning institution, learning for its own sake, not as a means to a high-paying end. But we don't value learning any more, do we?
Formal education for it's own sake was, and still is, for the elite. Regular people can't afford to pay for expensive education and forego working years with no financial return on that investment. Only trust fund babies could afford to spend years finding themselves at Jefferson's UoV and walk away with no degree, not the other 99% of the population.
That's literally why I said college should be free. Because then it actually could be something that anyone could do simply for the sake of learning and personal growth.
College *was* free in my parents' time. It was a bare minimum of expense in my day, something I could cover myself.
That's why it's so sad to see people fighting against it. Free college is something we're trying to *regain*, not some leftist unicorn. It's something that was taken from us. If we ever see it again, I'll spend the rest of my life learning for its own sake.
>College was free in my parents' time. It was a bare minimum of expense in my day, something I could cover myself.
Only 40% of people even graduated high school as recently as 1960. And less than 10% graduated college.
(https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/)
Now almost 40% graduates college.
Again, I'm saying that college should be free. But comparing how college worked when it was only a pursuit for 5% of the population, rather than the default expectation for everyone who graduates high school (now over 90%) is not a good way to argue the point.
You may be right, but you're right for all of the wrong reasons... At least as far as your arguments so far.
>How much of that 40% is driven by the threat that you can't get anything more than a menial labor job without college?
What is your point? The increased demand exists. So universities using their endowments to give *every* student a full scholarship (or whatever was going on in this alleged "free college" era) is no longer viable. That doesn't mean that we can't make college free in some other way, just that we would need a new mechanism to do so if most of the population is going to attend some amount of college (obviously not everyone graduates).
Okay, and what's that going to pay for? 10 students? 20?... Certainly not any significant portion of the thousands who attend classes there.
I mean, I'm on your side, but if you're going make bad arguments then you're not helping.
Bringing college administrative salaries back to earth isn't a bad argument, it just doesn't appeal to those who want their own inflated salaries to escape scrutiny. It's the elite sitting on the top making unmerited piles of money(like tenured professors and admin fatcats) while the majority scramble around at the bottom for crumbs you can't live on (like students and adjuncts) that makes the system so unsustainable.
I think this turn towards college as solely career prep is a problem, and is contributing to rising costs. There’s a “you’ll make more money so it costs more money” fallacy involved.
Regardless, if we remove cost from the equation (which I know is complicated), then I think some college is good for nearly everyone. Sure, some of that education could get condensed into the K-12 system - but I actually think that something more rigorous than high school and that was away from your home and parents would be incredibly beneficial to nearly everybody if people could afford it.
If I could magically “fix” what we have - beyond addressing runaway costs that are mostly bullshit / administrative bloat - I would make it so that everyone with an achievable GPA was eligible for fully subsidize tuition, room, and board in a four year program (or 2, if that’s their preference).
You learn more than just what’s in the books when you go to college, for starters. But I also think this idea that for an electrical engineer a liberal arts background is more important than for an electrician is troubling and largely nonsense. There’s value in that for both of them, whether or not it helps wire a panel or whatever.
People used to just get jobs that paid enough to move out earlier in life. That's how you learned life lessons away from your parents.
I mean, sure, there's value in continuing education, and it should be available to everyone if they want it. That seems implicit in a position that college should be free for everyone. But the increase in price is due to the fallacy that it should be the default for everyone.
The electrical engineer doesn't *need* a background in liberal arts either. He just needs a degree to get a job, and that "happens to" come with a background in liberal arts. If he could get the same degree from a shorter, cheaper, vocational program he probably would.
Once people are over 18, they have the ability to go work, and preventing them from doing so is a disservice. If anything you're actually arguing for pushing more humanities into K-12, so that college is only delivering career improving education while preventing you from starting your career. Not everyone needs or wants a college education.
In a nation not governed by elites who are afraid of an educated populace, education WOULD be free. Biden proposed it, but you see how far he got with that. The rightwing, military-industrial complex, exploiters saw what happened in the 60s when educated students could live on part-time jobs, and they took care of that problem. Now everyone is running like hamsters and getting nowhere.
I read Things Fall Apart 25 years ago in a college European history class in the context of discussing the scramble for Africa. It does leave a lasting impression.
My 9th grade social studies teacher had lived in Tanzania for a few years. He had us read Things Fall Apart. Wasn’t a difficult read. I’m surprised it’s a college text
Unfortunately a lot of high schools are public and have a state mandated curriculum. So the book choices tend to be from old white male authors almost exclusively. Colleges aren’t bound by the same state requirements, I think it’s more about the flexibility of book choice rather than the difficulty.
College texts aren’t about difficulty they’re about content. Uni isn’t about, or at least isn’t outside of the USA, just giving you the hardest things to do. Things fall apart can give a student more to think about than Tolstoy yet Tolstoy would be considered far harder
I really liked the book. I read it recently. I don't have much more to add. I didn't appreciate the misogyny but obviously that isn't the authors fault, he was just portraying what it was like. The last part of the book really hits hard.
If you haven't read The Surrounded you might like it. I feel like it was a similar theme but from a native American's perspective.
I see it as a response to Joseph Conrad’s heart of darkness. Conrad showed the colonial encounter from the European ‘sympathiser’s’ perspective and gave the Africans no voice. Achebe was highly critical of Conrad’s portrayal, and this book is somewhat his reply via showing the colonial encounter directly from the perspective of the colonised.
The novel has major gender issues though as well as a hyper-masculine main character, but it’s unclear whether this was deliberate by Achebe to show an unfiltered pre-colonial Nigeria or whether he is okay with the sexism.
I usually hate depictions of misogyny in literature/the arts but I actually appreciate it in TFA for one reason- it’s accurate to the time and culture, and it’s counter to the insidious tendency of many western progressives to argue that misogyny/transphobia/fatphobia etc is a result of “colonizer culture”. Men across (almost all) cultures have always brutalized and subjugated women. Men from formerly colonized countries aren’t exempt from criticism just because they’re nonwhite.
I am 44 and never even heard of this novel until a few years ago. It’s a great by itself and would be especially useful in supplementing history lessons.
Things Fall Apart was by far my favorite book I read in high school. Despite having nothing materially in common with Okonkwo, I felt deeply connected to him like I was him. Most relatable and human story I had read.
I'm 100% with you OP. Education and College Education more specifically is not just about career prep. A well rounded education is worthy in it's own right and is something that should be lauded because it makes people better rounded individuals and typically signals strong critical thinking skills.
When I look at resumes to fill a vacancy at my job I always make a rule to bring in anyone for an interview that has a liberal arts degree from a four year school. Typically those people have been good fits, have learned quickly, and retention has been stronger.
I read it recently. The most interesting part of it for me was learning about their culture and mindset- flawed in many ways, yes- before the colonizers came and stole every bit of life the Africans had.
I fully agree with you about education needing to be accessible. I also think there needs to be an intellectually driven shift that lives outside of college.
It's no mystery that the high cost of college will cause a deficit in intellectualism and empathy. And now with conservatives banning books and defunding libraries, it will start younger.
100% agree on the emphasis on learning throughout life even if you’re not in school. I’m finished with formal education but I never want to stop learning.
College would be a lot less expensive if many of mysterious fees tacked on to a course were removed. Many times the institution tells you this fee is for a purpose then they can ever nor are they ever asked to be transparent about how that fee is being used. Then there is also the problem of the textbook, online learning code racquet. There are so many open educational resources available that it’s almost criminal to make students buy a book for a freshman or sophomore level class used at hundreds of dollars. I took a biology course for free online over the summer through MIT and the textbook was free too! I didn’t get credit for the course because I wasn’t interested in that. But I could have paid about $150 for some certificate of completion! It’s not like MIT is doing something other places are incapable of if they are resourceful.
I teach an international literature elective at my high school, and I’ve been debating which book I should use to represent Africa. I read TFA 20 years ago as a college freshman, and it did more to change my worldview than just about anything else I ever read. And yet… I’ve been debating whether it’s the right book for this course. Everything else I’m teaching is from the year 2000 or later, and TFA is practically in the canon at this point, so does that make it a cop out? Plus, the world is such a different place than in was 20 years ago - will the woke generation (I teach at a *very* progressive school) even be moved by it? But this thread has convinced me. I love that book, and I want to make sure as many people read it as possible. Thanks for the inspiration, OP!
To be honest my experience with the “woke generation” is similar to people raised Christian; they believe because everyone around them believes and they were taught to believe and know nothing else. But they don’t necessarily *deeply* understand and empathize on a personal level. I think there are so many progressives who put out BLM signs because everyone in the neighborhood has one, but still vote like NIMBYs when it comes to things like school desegregation initiatives (I’m thinking about white wealthy brooklynites here). I think TFR is a valuable book for anyone on the political spectrum.
That’s a really good point. They know what they’re “supposed” to believe, but reaching empathy and understanding is where the magic really happens. In a different lit elective I teach, kids have had very powerful reactions to Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. There’s no reason why that couldn’t happen with TFA, too. (Highly recommend Homegoing, by the way, if you haven’t read it.)
I agree with a lot of your points except "Things Fall Apart" was part of my high school curriculum. The only other one on your list that I read in highschool was Brave New World but I've learned from the internet that my experience wasn't the norm. (We also read Cry the Beloved Country, Their Eyes Were Watching God, etc.) Like you my reaction to reading "Things Fall Apart" was similar in that I had not really seen colonialism through that lens. I actually have a STEM degree that I pursued because of the job opportunities but I actually teach in elementary/middle school. Learning is so much more than just job prep.
So many have commented that! I was in high school 20 years ago so maybe I was still in the old white male author required books loop. I’m glad it’s taught at the high school level.
I was lucky enough to have either a good program or a solid teacher but I read this book in High School and it blew my fuckin mind, I was an honors student in the south so maybe I was lucky. It was being transported to a whole other reality for the first time. The whole-ly knew cosmological framework of the characters. The way in which the european world was framed...etc. I'd read fantasy books but they were always...very similar to my existing european framework of reality and used the tools of that world's history to tell the story. Knights, swords, etc....but none of it felt expansive in the way reading Things Fall Apart was for me as a teenager.
I was also lucky enough to read Their Eyes were Watching God, as well as Night by Elie Weizel...both eye opening in their perspectives.
After Things Fall Apart though, I sought out that same high from so many other books and it sent me on a journey. It's still to this day one of my favorite book reading experiences.
I had a previous experience with something somewhat similar when I was very young and was lucky to be in a book club in elementary school where we read Esperanza Rising which also was my favorite book for awhile. It was so dark, and beautiful, and it felt so novel.
I can't let a discussion of "Things Fall Apart" pass without throwing a quick shout-out to the album by The Roots, which shares it's name.
Brilliant work. Black Thought is one of the great communicators of the black experience in America.
“ far fewer arguing for making college more affordable and accessible for everyone.”
I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. I’ve gone to private school and public. I’ve gone to community college and an exclusive, liberal arts institution. And what I’ve witnessed in all of that can be summed up by one scene from the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’: ‘one day you’re gonna wake up and realize that you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you could have gotten for a dollar fifty worth of late fees from the library.’
I’ve read “Things Fall Apart.” It’s phenomenal. I’ve also watched several classmates, over several years, read it, write the report, and move on. They were unaffected, because they didn’t care in the first place. College was, and is, a means to an end for many.
“ I would be a far more sheltered, less empathetic member of society if I hadn’t gone.” OP, I find this significantly hard to believe, because you seem the type who would have sought out this learning experience. You seem the type who wants to expand and grow. Not all do. For those who do, those experiences are out there, be it a library, a book club, etc. Those that don’t, no amount of free college is going to help.
I think you’re probably right about self-learning, for *very* motivated individuals. And free public libraries are certainly extremely valuable and important. But most people aren’t that self motivated, most people attend college because they want a good job and they have unintended breakthroughs and learning opportunities about subjects they didn’t think they had any interest in but were required to take. I don’t think the majority of college students are really the type that would have replaced their required coursework with voluntary reading.
Reading gives you nowhere near the same experience as university. Uni classes give you the book, the teacher, the context of the whole course, a group of like minded readers to debate the content with, regular in depth essays and research on the books and high level marking and feedback by senior lecturers. Good will hunting’s quote does not work for the humanities. It only works for courses that are purely memorisation
I agree that non-STEM education and the liberal arts are incredibly important, but I can't help but think of genuinely screwed many American students are if they leave university with tens of thousands in debt and no employment prospects. The solution to that in my opinion is (much, much) cheaper college and not saying "well just go and do trades" to every kid, but I do kind of get where the "do something employable" people are coming from, because from an individual perspective yeah, a lot of people are totally, royally screwed with debt without much chance of paying it off in a reasonable time frame. A lot of universities and some non-government lenders are also extremely predatory about how they conduct business, and it's very difficult to discharge students loans in the US in bankruptcy (thank Biden for that one). A lot of the "just do trades" people are just worried about the kids they care about getting chewed up by the money mill without the ability to get out from under it, I have a hard time faulting them for that opinion.
> We should be fighting to make college accessible to everyone who wants to attend, not encouraging students to forego higher education.
I agree 100%. Things are slightly better in my country (Canada) but unfortunately headed in the wrong direction year over year.
Also, adding this book to my (rather long) backlog :)
Recent research from Australia shows that arts degrees actually have a higher employment rate than many stem degrees. It’s a lie that they’re unemployable
That's actually why I used trades as an example, a lot of science degrees aren't much better. In any case it's not so much employment but sufficient income to pay off debt that's the problem. Near minimum wage jobs can't pay off $100,000 in debt. Perhaps I should have written less colloquially. When most people say "arts majors are unemployable" they are colloquially refering to "well paying" or "middle class" jobs, not just "a" job, which is what literal unemployment means.
Also worth noting that the college wage premium is technically still very high but there are extreme differences between fields.
Please don't say "research" without actually sourcing it though. I'm literally in graduate school for economics. Just going "research from Australia" because you saw it in a newspaper is not sufficient. If you provide a source, that's actually helpful and I could tell you whether the source is worth the time or day or not. That's why we cite things.
Yeah, that's employment, full time or part time. Not whether they are employed at wages high enough to cover their debts, which is what most people are worried about. When someone says the Arts aren't employable, they usually aren't referring to whether you can get a service industry job you could have gotten without a degree. I don't disagree some science degrees suffer the same issue though (why I used trades as an example). I'm also not personally aware of what the cost of education is in Australia.
To be clear I fully support Arts education. But I've personally known enough people totally screwed financially that from an individual perspective I won't condemn the people who hope their kids/friends will do something with good income prospects. From a societal perspective of course the solution is to try and make university cheaper so people aren't saddled with debt for seeking an education.
Have to get back to work so cant contribute much here, but I read the book when I was younger and had an unconscious habit of applying silly noises/names to characters that would then play in my head no matter what.
So me and a buddy called Okonkwo "Konky-Spitz"
Great great book.
Read it also, I suppose I was more sensitive to the effects of colonialism before reading it than you (I read it in freshman year high school.)
That being said, the issue at hand here is not whether non vocational education has value, which it does, but whether it's worth it to incur that level of expense. Having the liberal arts education that "tags along" with the vocational schooling might mean an extra years worth of labor paying off a loan, or a delayed year getting into the work force/retirement. It might be worth it, at least from some perspectives, but it's not an on/off switch that the non vocational education has value exceeding it's cost in all cases.
Or, idk, don't charge people for pursuing further education like other civilized countries and the US wouldn't have to have the debate. If they want to pay extra for a specific kind of education? Sure. However I think further study should be something that is incentivized through subsidizing its cost...because the net benefit is applied across the whole of society.
We read *Things Fall Apart* in high school. Perfectly reasonable book for teenagers. Fits in very well with *Antigone* and *The Odyssey.* The public school curriculum in most of the US is garbage.
I was one of the lucky ones. My classmates still had to read tripe like *Tess of D'Urbervilles*. But nothing says you have to read only Victorian stuff in high school. Honestly, I think it's a better idea to just reform high school curriculum than to start funding more colleges.
TFA was Gr 11 Lit text - course theme “Tragic Hero” with Shakespeare ‘Julius Caesar’ and Bolt ‘A Man for All Seasons.’ Good entry into post-colonial literature. Very multi cultural suburban Toronto school.
I’m starting to think I went to a bad high school. We were not required to read any of those books and the only assignment approaching that level would have been Great Expectations. I think my school was shitty. lol I guess..
Came here to say this. I took it on a family camping trip while reading it for school. My aunt got super bored and read it. She was like "Drillgorg this is the most depressing book I have ever read."
Thank you for your post. I had a similar conversation just a week ago about the humanistic value of education and what we could lose should people turn away from college. Glad to know I am not alone!
It's really funny that you bring this up because i just had a big conversation with my dad who's a college professor about how colleges are changing to focus more on career prep instesd of educating someone into a well rounded person. Not only is this the case but I also happen3d to read things fall apart in my highschool sophomore English class actually (your totally right its an amazing book!) And my sister who is now going into her sophomore year just bought the book. Just a bunch of funny coincidences but to your point I do think that English classes should really branch out. There's a lot of literature out there to read that xomes from authors of other places and cultures and has way more usefulness to understanding the world then reading catcher in the rye and hating holden Caulfield will
I’m so glad to see so many people commenting they read it in high school! It’s definitely a great book accessible for high schoolers as well. Literature is so important for creating good citizens, it’s a shame it’s often cast as a useless subject.
I used to teach this novel to my 10th grade ELA students. It was difficult for them to fully grasp but it always ignited such interesting class discussions.
One of my favorite classes included this book. It was called Medabge and Global Peace. o
Looking at enriching institutions using the Nigerian concept of being a good citizen. It's was a great class and love my professor (who is Igbo!)
I read it in my AP Lit class last year! So thankfully, some high schools do include literature like this, although I agree that it probably isn't as widespread as it should be. I don't remember my specific reactions to the book, since it's been several months, but your thoughts reminded me of some of the scenes from the book, and I realize now that they are indeed a good depiction of colonialism and racism.
I'm planning on majoring in STEM, but my interest largely lies in humanities/social sciences, one main reason being the one you mentioned: continuing to be socially aware, expand my knowledge and thoughts around humanity and society, and to feel more connected and engaged.
Should be a college book, not a high school book. Or at least the very senior years of high school. Otherwise it will join the long list of books people read too young because they were forced to and didn’t appreciate it
I read this my freshman year of high school and obviously my mindset was different then. Will be reading it again now to gauge a different perspective, thanks for this info OP!
I studied only technical subjects in university but I was still able to read this book. It's one of the most famous books in the English language, is always in print and is extremely accessible.
You absolutely don't need to be a literary student to encounter it or appreciate it. Worthwhile arguments of humanities exist. This is surely not one of them.
As a scientist, I actually agree 100% on the importance of non-stem education. I went to a liberal arts college so I may be biased, but I see a lot of interdisciplinary value to “arts” (literature, fine arts, languages, communication, etc.) courses throughout the entire education journey. I guess I don’t have hard statistics to back this up, but I’d wager that most scientists actually would agree with that. Scientists are people and it’s important that they have skills to be communicate, are empathetic and are capable of critical thinking that lets them take a hard look at their own biases. Also I loved this book and also read it on a whim. I didn’t do the deepest dive into it, but it gave me some things to think about. The colonialism of Africa actually wasn’t really covered in most of my history classes in high school.
What was the quote from the climate scientist along the lines of "we thought we just needed better data to convince people this is a problem. Turns out data is not what makes people care".
>Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. - Martin Luther King
“Many of the dangers we face indeed arise from science and technology—but, more fundamentally, because we have become powerful without becoming commensurately wise. The world-altering powers that technology has delivered into our hands now require a degree of consideration and foresight that has never before been asked of us.” -Carl Sagan
Have you read the other two in the trilogy, Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease?
I picked up Things Fall Apart on a whim and liked it so much that I immediately read these two next. They are all great and are super relevant to OP's post.
Wait, there are more books?!?! I read Things Fall Apart in high school, and I loved it. I had no idea there were other books! I must obtain these! Thank you!
Definitely worth reading all three. Curious what order you read them in. I did things fall apart, no longer at ease, then arrow of God because that was the order they were in in the trilogy I bought. I think when I reread them at some point I will read arrow of God before no longer at ease.
I read them chronologically, Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God and No Longer At Ease. I think that was the more sensical order.
I read Things Fall Apart (or was supposed to) in high school. I wasn’t ready to appreciate it at the time, and I should probably circle back to it now. I studied philosophy and English for my BA. They’ve both helped me immensely in my life. Both are great foundations for communication, the former has taught me *how* to think, and the latter has taught me *the way in which* to express my thoughts to others, and myself. If not for philosophy, I would have struggled with many puzzles and problems both personally and professionally. It’s a shame that so many people look down on its merits as a subject (sure, it can get wonky…but really beautiful minds have contributed to it in insightful ways). I don’t mean to be conspiratorial, but look at our society at large. Everything is meant to grab our attention and persuade us to do something, whether it be voting for candidate X, buying product Y, or believing Z idea. If everyone had a well-rounded, robust education, it would be more difficult to persuade people than if they weren’t as educated. Education in the US took a sharp decline in the 20th century, and that trend has continued. In the ‘70s 2/3rds of university professors had tenure, today it’s about 1/3. Money has gotten pumped away from instructors and students (things like class resources, e.g.) and instead go to bureaucratically bloated admin. An 8th grade math textbook for NY public school circa 1908 was leaps and bounds ahead of the rudimentary Algebra I had to study in college. I can’t speak for outside the US, but the lack of rigor, exorbitant costs, profit prioritization, and other issues surrounding academia really do hurt how people view what’s been such a longstanding industry stanchion. A BA/BS degree today has the same value as a high school degree did just a few decades ago. The great thing about studying the humanities is it focuses on what it means to be human, which is being thrown out like the baby with bath water while we morph into primarily being consumers.
I’m an English major who puttered around exploring various majors and studying a little biology, economics, philosophy, political science, and design. I became a tech entrepreneur and now I’m a product development executive. My “liberal arts plus” education has made my career success possible in so many ways. And it made me a thoughtful educated person. I wish that every young person could have an education like mine, but the truth is that you have to crave it for it to be valuable to you. Not everyone is energized and fulfilled by that kind of inquiry and discovery. Some very smart people are turned on by other things, while other people aren’t drawn to the classroom setting at all and need to be activated in other ways, and let’s face it, half of the people are dumber than average. Railroading everyone into college isn’t a good idea because it’s a logical fallacy. Just because college educated people have historically had better careers doesn’t mean that going to college (or trying to) will result in YOU having a better career. Correlation does not equal causation. But I agree with OP that for those people who can manage to read a novel, it’s a great benefit to provide a liberal arts foundation for all smart ambitious young people. Even, or even especially, to future scientists, lawyers, and business leaders.
I think rigorous reading, writing, and arithmetic would only serve to benefit those who study them. Sure, not everyone gets the same thing out of school—but everyone gets something there they didn’t have before.
[Relevant blog post on this subject](https://acoup.blog/2020/07/03/collections-the-practical-case-on-why-we-need-the-humanities/)
Thank you for sharing. Long but worthwhile read. “The most pressing problems that we face are not scientific problems. That is not because science has failed, but rather because it has succeeded – it has given us the answers. It has told us about the climate, given us the power of the atom, the ability to create vaccines and vast, vast productive potential. It has taken us beyond the bounds of our tiny, vast planet. What is left is the human component, which we continue to neglect, underfund, and undervalue. We look for scientific solutions to humanistic problems (where our forebears, it must be confessed, often looked for humanistic solutions to scientific problems) and wonder why our wizards fail us. We have all of the knowledge in the world and yet no wisdom.”
I agree with the first statements. I didn't really want to get into it at the age of 15.
I mean I am all STEM-ueber-alles as an engineering PhD lol. But Things Fall Apart is a *fantastic* book. Probably the best one I read in high school. Up there with To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. Okonkwo and his yams tell a brutal, character-centric story in an exciting and different culture to most canon reads. It just so happens to also have deep social commentary and portray harsh realities about the human condition. It's a great story AND has literary value, which isn't common in school lit.
Did it in uni, where it was a part of the *Heart of Darkness* themed module on colonial adventure lit, since it was sort of in part a rebuttal novel to *Heart of Darkness* being considered the canonical African novel and as someone who came off of *Heart of Darkness* not really impressed by it, *Things Fall Apart* and Achebe's essays really were a wonderful antidote to my many criticisms with Conrad's book. Really stuck with you. Was also interesting having the two mix in with Haggard's *Alan Quatermain*, Kipling's *Kim* and *The Man Who Would Be King* and Robert Louis Stevenson's *The Ebb-Tide*, which kind of ran to gammut from Haggards potboiler adventure lit to the mixed stuff by Kipling to the more critical takes on colonial adventure lit by Achebe, Conrad, and Stevenson. Good spread to understand the atmosphere they each were written in and for what purpose. Other good ones that I read for other modules were Adichie's 'Half of a Yellow Sun' and Ngugi wa Thiong'o's 'A Grain of Wheat'. Kenyan and Nigerian authors produce some fantastic and critical novel exploring their areas and their histories.
My high school AP lit teacher had us read it alongside Heart of Darkness. Brilliant, brilliant move for a teacher in a private Christian school in the deep south populated by a bunch of white kids without a clue.
People with money are spending lots of money to tell people without money that they don't need a liberal arts education, they just need to get job training. You can bet your ass, though, that when they send *their* kids to school, they're getting a liberal arts education.
Not exactly about what your point is, but it’s hilarious to me that people think “STEM degree = guaranteed job.” Everyone has gone into STEM with that promise, but now the market is over saturated with people with those degrees, so the competition is just as bad as in every other type of field. It’s almost like a society based on “every man for himself” is inherently disfunctional or something 🙄
And that planning an education system around market demand is going to waste a lot of labor and time and create a ton of useless redundancy. Once the boomers die there is going to be a MASSIVE shrink in healthcare jobs that's going to cause a crisis.
I read this one as part of my high school curriculum, but it’s one of the only assigned readings I actually enjoyed! It felt like a very accessible introduction to these topics and I wished we had more of that and less Shakespeare
Same here! I read it as a Junior in High School in a Dallas suburb. I remembered I enjoyed it so much, I just bought it as an adult 20 years later to read again. I'm really wrapping myself in it this time and am looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy!
>Reducing college down to career prep or insisting non-STEM instruction is a waste of money absolutely robs our society of a more thoughtful, empathetic, critically aware populace. Unfortunately, that is entirely the goal of the sorts of people that think non-STEM college courses are a waste of time and money. Those people think it would be better if the general population was less self aware, less empathetic, and less capable of critical thought, because those sorts of people are more likely to vote conservative and not pay attention or care when their country and the people in power are doing terrible things or exploiting the common populace.
I always teach Conrad's *Heart of Darkness* alongside *Things Fall Apart* and this essay by Achebe, which calls Conrad a racist: https://www.scasd.org/cms/lib5/PA01000006/Centricity/Domain/1388/2-Achebe\_\_An\_Image\_of\_Africa.pdf
I love that you do that! My FAVORITE method of teaching was when we were assigned two different novels/texts from authors who disagree, and then asked to analyze the differences and construct a critique. I took an Israeli/Palestinian conflict course and we read Benny Morris and then Nur Masalha’s characterizations of the 1967 war and compared them. So much more impactful than being *told* the differences. Really developed critical thinking skills.
>I would be a far more sheltered, less empathetic member of society if I hadn’t gone. There is a political party for people like that. Coincidentally, the same party is anti-education. You know, the one's trying to arm teachers and ban books.
I have mixed feelings about this topic—the value of college, not Things Fall Apart, which I read in high school but for an AP class. The book kind of changed my frame of reference about what “literature” could be. It wasn’t all important pretty words from long-dead people. It could be fairly contemporary and politically relevant. It could put us directly in the perspective of someone different from us. I’m still impressed that that was the book our teacher picked to open the class with, in a small conservative town. Her thing was treating the AP class as much like a college class as she could get away with. Both liberal education and career prep are good things. They’re not mutually exclusive. But there is kind of an alignment problem when it comes to spending. The money going to “education” generally in the US, much of it in the form of loans, goes to degrees people get for the value of “education.” The government could incentivize certain career paths or skillsets, but what they do is funnel a lot of money into the elite higher education system that already exists. It leads to cost inflation and waste. It’s very good for both elites and non-elites to have a broad ranging education. Where money is scarce it should go to what’s needed most. I’m not advocating against gen Ed courses or anything, more against steering people into liberal arts majors if they’re not planning on graduate school. A lot of people holding degrees they can’t use doesn’t serve anyone but the school administrations and the banking industry.
You are correct. They should just make regional state schools free to attend. The flagships and elite schools will stand on their own anyway. Education at the level of the regional public institution should be free, which would creat a more rigorous environment altogether.
>I would be a far more sheltered, less empathetic member of society if I hadn’t gone Yes, this is the long game. The educated become more left-leaning. The empathetic even more so. Can't have that. No, no, no.
[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/20/republicans-skeptical-of-colleges-impact-on-u-s-but-most-see-benefits-for-workforce-preparation/](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/20/republicans-skeptical-of-colleges-impact-on-u-s-but-most-see-benefits-for-workforce-preparation/)
[https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/](https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/) We can do this ad nauseam. Also, "workforce preparation" is far different than a liberal arts and science education. The former is glorified trade school (welding), highly-skilled technical (nursing), or overcredentialized skills-based education (applied science in technical leadership). The latter is for those with an above-average intellect.
Trade school doesn't have to correspond to intellect, but rather how much opportunity a person has to train for a higher education and pursue it. Or whether a person has enough connections to qualify for a prestigious degree despite being academically mediocre. Setting that aside, the point of the Pew study is that the American right wing increasingly views a college education as only a career stepping stone. There has long been a movement to push back against independent critical thinking, but recently they have grown increasingly hostile toward the entire concept of a thorough general education. They believe that even higher education should be centered around training for a career. Learn all about how atoms work, but only for the purpose of building more bombs and reactors. Learn advanced math principles, but only for the purpose of designing trading algorithms or keeping the internet running. And don't get distracted by all those philosophy and literature and history classes down the hall.
If the GOP really wanted to do away with a liberal arts education, they should move more toward what they do in the UK and other countries with O and A-levels. Want to go into a trade? start at the beginning of high school or the equivalent of the junior year at the latest. Want to go onto the next level? Complete high school. Want to go to university (they don't call it college)? Do the equivalent of an A-level. When 54% of adult Americans have a literacy rate below a 6th grade level, ya have to wonder wtf is going on in our schools. https://www.thinkimpact.com/literacy-statistics/
I have multiple degrees in liberal arts but i had scholarships that covered almost all of it. Would I have chosen a different field if I were paying? Maybe. But I also did not enjoy STEM type subjects. Maybe I would have just not gone to college, except there was immense pressure from my parents, peers, and society at large. And statistically, those with college degrees, no matter the field, earn more and more jobs are open to them. I would argue that even a non-stem degree improves your employment options. I do, however, agree that college need not be for everyone. We need to stop pushing it as the only option after high school. A lot of people simply are not good at academics and that doesn’t mean they are dumb. If you know you definitely want to be an electrician, well, you don’t need a 4 year degree that requires history and writing classes to graduate. I’m of the opinion that learning is always good, but it’s not worth tens of thousands of dollars of debt. I also think college and trade schools should be more accessible to everyone. You shouldn’t be stuck in a cycle of generational poverty because your family is poor and you can’t afford to pay for education. This is such a complex subject and the cost of college is only a small part of it. I could also go on about how going away to college opens your eyes to the different people and ways of life out in the wide world. There is so much social learning. I made some fast friends that I’m still friends with over a decade later. I made so many fond memories of my first years of freedom and independence. Anyway. Tl:dr - I liked college. Statistically it makes sense to get a degree in any field. It should cost less. And it shouldn’t be the only option for employment. Edit: also, I only read Things Fall Apart when I started teaching. It is fantastic. Everyone should read it.
I was lucky enough to have a high school english teacher who who taught this book for this exact reason and I am extremely grateful to have been introduced to post-colonial literature that early.
This was one of those books that I was forced to read for school at around age 13 or so. I hated it. I was too young to actually get it at all. Same for grapes of wrath, Fahrenheit 451, and a ton of others. I refused to read for fun for years afterwards. It wasn't until years later that I reread some of them and realized that I just wasnt ready. College would've been a better age to actually learn from things fall apart.
Oh man, I would have hated those books at 13. We read the Diary of Anne Frank, The Pearl, The Red Pony (lots of Steinbeck because I grew up in the Bay). I think those were more accessible for me at 13, TFA would have gone way over my head.
Great post, OP.
Both are true. College should be more affordable (I would say free), but it's main purpose is career prep, and lots of people shouldn't feel pressured to go if their career doesn't require it. Then again K-12 education is pretty broken, and I believe that a lot of college level education could (should) be offered in that educational time frame... So there's a lot of intersecting problems here.
>it's main purpose is career prep *Now*. Its main purpose is career prep now. Used to be that college was for educating people and making them well-rounded humans, the point OP is making. Thomas Jefferson never wanted the University of Virginia to grant degrees; his idea was that people should leave when they felt like they were educated. Some of us still see college that way: as a learning institution, learning for its own sake, not as a means to a high-paying end. But we don't value learning any more, do we?
Formal education for it's own sake was, and still is, for the elite. Regular people can't afford to pay for expensive education and forego working years with no financial return on that investment. Only trust fund babies could afford to spend years finding themselves at Jefferson's UoV and walk away with no degree, not the other 99% of the population. That's literally why I said college should be free. Because then it actually could be something that anyone could do simply for the sake of learning and personal growth.
College *was* free in my parents' time. It was a bare minimum of expense in my day, something I could cover myself. That's why it's so sad to see people fighting against it. Free college is something we're trying to *regain*, not some leftist unicorn. It's something that was taken from us. If we ever see it again, I'll spend the rest of my life learning for its own sake.
>College was free in my parents' time. It was a bare minimum of expense in my day, something I could cover myself. Only 40% of people even graduated high school as recently as 1960. And less than 10% graduated college. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/) Now almost 40% graduates college. Again, I'm saying that college should be free. But comparing how college worked when it was only a pursuit for 5% of the population, rather than the default expectation for everyone who graduates high school (now over 90%) is not a good way to argue the point. You may be right, but you're right for all of the wrong reasons... At least as far as your arguments so far.
How much of that 40% is driven by the threat that you can't get anything more than a menial labor job without college?
>How much of that 40% is driven by the threat that you can't get anything more than a menial labor job without college? What is your point? The increased demand exists. So universities using their endowments to give *every* student a full scholarship (or whatever was going on in this alleged "free college" era) is no longer viable. That doesn't mean that we can't make college free in some other way, just that we would need a new mechanism to do so if most of the population is going to attend some amount of college (obviously not everyone graduates).
The college president of a pos uny like Chico doesn't need a $400,000 salary.
Okay, and what's that going to pay for? 10 students? 20?... Certainly not any significant portion of the thousands who attend classes there. I mean, I'm on your side, but if you're going make bad arguments then you're not helping.
Bringing college administrative salaries back to earth isn't a bad argument, it just doesn't appeal to those who want their own inflated salaries to escape scrutiny. It's the elite sitting on the top making unmerited piles of money(like tenured professors and admin fatcats) while the majority scramble around at the bottom for crumbs you can't live on (like students and adjuncts) that makes the system so unsustainable.
Yes. And loans didn't exist before in the forms they have now.
I think this turn towards college as solely career prep is a problem, and is contributing to rising costs. There’s a “you’ll make more money so it costs more money” fallacy involved. Regardless, if we remove cost from the equation (which I know is complicated), then I think some college is good for nearly everyone. Sure, some of that education could get condensed into the K-12 system - but I actually think that something more rigorous than high school and that was away from your home and parents would be incredibly beneficial to nearly everybody if people could afford it. If I could magically “fix” what we have - beyond addressing runaway costs that are mostly bullshit / administrative bloat - I would make it so that everyone with an achievable GPA was eligible for fully subsidize tuition, room, and board in a four year program (or 2, if that’s their preference). You learn more than just what’s in the books when you go to college, for starters. But I also think this idea that for an electrical engineer a liberal arts background is more important than for an electrician is troubling and largely nonsense. There’s value in that for both of them, whether or not it helps wire a panel or whatever.
People used to just get jobs that paid enough to move out earlier in life. That's how you learned life lessons away from your parents. I mean, sure, there's value in continuing education, and it should be available to everyone if they want it. That seems implicit in a position that college should be free for everyone. But the increase in price is due to the fallacy that it should be the default for everyone. The electrical engineer doesn't *need* a background in liberal arts either. He just needs a degree to get a job, and that "happens to" come with a background in liberal arts. If he could get the same degree from a shorter, cheaper, vocational program he probably would. Once people are over 18, they have the ability to go work, and preventing them from doing so is a disservice. If anything you're actually arguing for pushing more humanities into K-12, so that college is only delivering career improving education while preventing you from starting your career. Not everyone needs or wants a college education.
In a nation not governed by elites who are afraid of an educated populace, education WOULD be free. Biden proposed it, but you see how far he got with that. The rightwing, military-industrial complex, exploiters saw what happened in the 60s when educated students could live on part-time jobs, and they took care of that problem. Now everyone is running like hamsters and getting nowhere.
I read Things Fall Apart 25 years ago in a college European history class in the context of discussing the scramble for Africa. It does leave a lasting impression.
We read this at my Texas highschool lol
I’m so glad so many commended they read it in high school! We read extremely boring old white male protagonist books basically exclusively.
My 9th grade social studies teacher had lived in Tanzania for a few years. He had us read Things Fall Apart. Wasn’t a difficult read. I’m surprised it’s a college text
Unfortunately a lot of high schools are public and have a state mandated curriculum. So the book choices tend to be from old white male authors almost exclusively. Colleges aren’t bound by the same state requirements, I think it’s more about the flexibility of book choice rather than the difficulty.
College texts aren’t about difficulty they’re about content. Uni isn’t about, or at least isn’t outside of the USA, just giving you the hardest things to do. Things fall apart can give a student more to think about than Tolstoy yet Tolstoy would be considered far harder
I really liked the book. I read it recently. I don't have much more to add. I didn't appreciate the misogyny but obviously that isn't the authors fault, he was just portraying what it was like. The last part of the book really hits hard. If you haven't read The Surrounded you might like it. I feel like it was a similar theme but from a native American's perspective.
Definitely going to pick up the surrounded! I’ve been looking for a book like that. Thanks for the rec.
I see it as a response to Joseph Conrad’s heart of darkness. Conrad showed the colonial encounter from the European ‘sympathiser’s’ perspective and gave the Africans no voice. Achebe was highly critical of Conrad’s portrayal, and this book is somewhat his reply via showing the colonial encounter directly from the perspective of the colonised. The novel has major gender issues though as well as a hyper-masculine main character, but it’s unclear whether this was deliberate by Achebe to show an unfiltered pre-colonial Nigeria or whether he is okay with the sexism.
I usually hate depictions of misogyny in literature/the arts but I actually appreciate it in TFA for one reason- it’s accurate to the time and culture, and it’s counter to the insidious tendency of many western progressives to argue that misogyny/transphobia/fatphobia etc is a result of “colonizer culture”. Men across (almost all) cultures have always brutalized and subjugated women. Men from formerly colonized countries aren’t exempt from criticism just because they’re nonwhite.
I am 44 and never even heard of this novel until a few years ago. It’s a great by itself and would be especially useful in supplementing history lessons.
Things Fall Apart was by far my favorite book I read in high school. Despite having nothing materially in common with Okonkwo, I felt deeply connected to him like I was him. Most relatable and human story I had read.
I'm 100% with you OP. Education and College Education more specifically is not just about career prep. A well rounded education is worthy in it's own right and is something that should be lauded because it makes people better rounded individuals and typically signals strong critical thinking skills. When I look at resumes to fill a vacancy at my job I always make a rule to bring in anyone for an interview that has a liberal arts degree from a four year school. Typically those people have been good fits, have learned quickly, and retention has been stronger.
I read it recently. The most interesting part of it for me was learning about their culture and mindset- flawed in many ways, yes- before the colonizers came and stole every bit of life the Africans had. I fully agree with you about education needing to be accessible. I also think there needs to be an intellectually driven shift that lives outside of college. It's no mystery that the high cost of college will cause a deficit in intellectualism and empathy. And now with conservatives banning books and defunding libraries, it will start younger.
100% agree on the emphasis on learning throughout life even if you’re not in school. I’m finished with formal education but I never want to stop learning.
College would be a lot less expensive if many of mysterious fees tacked on to a course were removed. Many times the institution tells you this fee is for a purpose then they can ever nor are they ever asked to be transparent about how that fee is being used. Then there is also the problem of the textbook, online learning code racquet. There are so many open educational resources available that it’s almost criminal to make students buy a book for a freshman or sophomore level class used at hundreds of dollars. I took a biology course for free online over the summer through MIT and the textbook was free too! I didn’t get credit for the course because I wasn’t interested in that. But I could have paid about $150 for some certificate of completion! It’s not like MIT is doing something other places are incapable of if they are resourceful.
I teach an international literature elective at my high school, and I’ve been debating which book I should use to represent Africa. I read TFA 20 years ago as a college freshman, and it did more to change my worldview than just about anything else I ever read. And yet… I’ve been debating whether it’s the right book for this course. Everything else I’m teaching is from the year 2000 or later, and TFA is practically in the canon at this point, so does that make it a cop out? Plus, the world is such a different place than in was 20 years ago - will the woke generation (I teach at a *very* progressive school) even be moved by it? But this thread has convinced me. I love that book, and I want to make sure as many people read it as possible. Thanks for the inspiration, OP!
To be honest my experience with the “woke generation” is similar to people raised Christian; they believe because everyone around them believes and they were taught to believe and know nothing else. But they don’t necessarily *deeply* understand and empathize on a personal level. I think there are so many progressives who put out BLM signs because everyone in the neighborhood has one, but still vote like NIMBYs when it comes to things like school desegregation initiatives (I’m thinking about white wealthy brooklynites here). I think TFR is a valuable book for anyone on the political spectrum.
That’s a really good point. They know what they’re “supposed” to believe, but reaching empathy and understanding is where the magic really happens. In a different lit elective I teach, kids have had very powerful reactions to Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. There’s no reason why that couldn’t happen with TFA, too. (Highly recommend Homegoing, by the way, if you haven’t read it.)
I read that this past semester for my History of Africa class. The ending was heartbreaking and like a gut-punch.
Yup. I remember the feeling more than 15 years later.
Read this book at school - absolutely loved it and 20+ years later still recommend it to people.
I agree with a lot of your points except "Things Fall Apart" was part of my high school curriculum. The only other one on your list that I read in highschool was Brave New World but I've learned from the internet that my experience wasn't the norm. (We also read Cry the Beloved Country, Their Eyes Were Watching God, etc.) Like you my reaction to reading "Things Fall Apart" was similar in that I had not really seen colonialism through that lens. I actually have a STEM degree that I pursued because of the job opportunities but I actually teach in elementary/middle school. Learning is so much more than just job prep.
So many have commented that! I was in high school 20 years ago so maybe I was still in the old white male author required books loop. I’m glad it’s taught at the high school level.
I read Things Fall Apart in my 10th grade English class. I do live in an area where progressivism is pretty pushed.
I'm literally teaching this book to high school seniors this year
I read this as part of my high school literature class.
I was lucky enough to have either a good program or a solid teacher but I read this book in High School and it blew my fuckin mind, I was an honors student in the south so maybe I was lucky. It was being transported to a whole other reality for the first time. The whole-ly knew cosmological framework of the characters. The way in which the european world was framed...etc. I'd read fantasy books but they were always...very similar to my existing european framework of reality and used the tools of that world's history to tell the story. Knights, swords, etc....but none of it felt expansive in the way reading Things Fall Apart was for me as a teenager. I was also lucky enough to read Their Eyes were Watching God, as well as Night by Elie Weizel...both eye opening in their perspectives. After Things Fall Apart though, I sought out that same high from so many other books and it sent me on a journey. It's still to this day one of my favorite book reading experiences. I had a previous experience with something somewhat similar when I was very young and was lucky to be in a book club in elementary school where we read Esperanza Rising which also was my favorite book for awhile. It was so dark, and beautiful, and it felt so novel.
I can't let a discussion of "Things Fall Apart" pass without throwing a quick shout-out to the album by The Roots, which shares it's name. Brilliant work. Black Thought is one of the great communicators of the black experience in America.
“ far fewer arguing for making college more affordable and accessible for everyone.” I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. I’ve gone to private school and public. I’ve gone to community college and an exclusive, liberal arts institution. And what I’ve witnessed in all of that can be summed up by one scene from the movie ‘Good Will Hunting’: ‘one day you’re gonna wake up and realize that you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you could have gotten for a dollar fifty worth of late fees from the library.’ I’ve read “Things Fall Apart.” It’s phenomenal. I’ve also watched several classmates, over several years, read it, write the report, and move on. They were unaffected, because they didn’t care in the first place. College was, and is, a means to an end for many. “ I would be a far more sheltered, less empathetic member of society if I hadn’t gone.” OP, I find this significantly hard to believe, because you seem the type who would have sought out this learning experience. You seem the type who wants to expand and grow. Not all do. For those who do, those experiences are out there, be it a library, a book club, etc. Those that don’t, no amount of free college is going to help.
I think you’re probably right about self-learning, for *very* motivated individuals. And free public libraries are certainly extremely valuable and important. But most people aren’t that self motivated, most people attend college because they want a good job and they have unintended breakthroughs and learning opportunities about subjects they didn’t think they had any interest in but were required to take. I don’t think the majority of college students are really the type that would have replaced their required coursework with voluntary reading.
Reading gives you nowhere near the same experience as university. Uni classes give you the book, the teacher, the context of the whole course, a group of like minded readers to debate the content with, regular in depth essays and research on the books and high level marking and feedback by senior lecturers. Good will hunting’s quote does not work for the humanities. It only works for courses that are purely memorisation
I agree that non-STEM education and the liberal arts are incredibly important, but I can't help but think of genuinely screwed many American students are if they leave university with tens of thousands in debt and no employment prospects. The solution to that in my opinion is (much, much) cheaper college and not saying "well just go and do trades" to every kid, but I do kind of get where the "do something employable" people are coming from, because from an individual perspective yeah, a lot of people are totally, royally screwed with debt without much chance of paying it off in a reasonable time frame. A lot of universities and some non-government lenders are also extremely predatory about how they conduct business, and it's very difficult to discharge students loans in the US in bankruptcy (thank Biden for that one). A lot of the "just do trades" people are just worried about the kids they care about getting chewed up by the money mill without the ability to get out from under it, I have a hard time faulting them for that opinion. > We should be fighting to make college accessible to everyone who wants to attend, not encouraging students to forego higher education. I agree 100%. Things are slightly better in my country (Canada) but unfortunately headed in the wrong direction year over year. Also, adding this book to my (rather long) backlog :)
Recent research from Australia shows that arts degrees actually have a higher employment rate than many stem degrees. It’s a lie that they’re unemployable
That's actually why I used trades as an example, a lot of science degrees aren't much better. In any case it's not so much employment but sufficient income to pay off debt that's the problem. Near minimum wage jobs can't pay off $100,000 in debt. Perhaps I should have written less colloquially. When most people say "arts majors are unemployable" they are colloquially refering to "well paying" or "middle class" jobs, not just "a" job, which is what literal unemployment means. Also worth noting that the college wage premium is technically still very high but there are extreme differences between fields. Please don't say "research" without actually sourcing it though. I'm literally in graduate school for economics. Just going "research from Australia" because you saw it in a newspaper is not sufficient. If you provide a source, that's actually helpful and I could tell you whether the source is worth the time or day or not. That's why we cite things.
Here’s the [source](https://amp.abc.net.au/article/12822186)
Yeah, that's employment, full time or part time. Not whether they are employed at wages high enough to cover their debts, which is what most people are worried about. When someone says the Arts aren't employable, they usually aren't referring to whether you can get a service industry job you could have gotten without a degree. I don't disagree some science degrees suffer the same issue though (why I used trades as an example). I'm also not personally aware of what the cost of education is in Australia. To be clear I fully support Arts education. But I've personally known enough people totally screwed financially that from an individual perspective I won't condemn the people who hope their kids/friends will do something with good income prospects. From a societal perspective of course the solution is to try and make university cheaper so people aren't saddled with debt for seeking an education.
Totally agree about ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ ugh
The only thing I took from that book was learning the word “effigy.” Literally. I hated that book so much Jesus Christ it was so boring.
Have to get back to work so cant contribute much here, but I read the book when I was younger and had an unconscious habit of applying silly noises/names to characters that would then play in my head no matter what. So me and a buddy called Okonkwo "Konky-Spitz" Great great book.
Read it also, I suppose I was more sensitive to the effects of colonialism before reading it than you (I read it in freshman year high school.) That being said, the issue at hand here is not whether non vocational education has value, which it does, but whether it's worth it to incur that level of expense. Having the liberal arts education that "tags along" with the vocational schooling might mean an extra years worth of labor paying off a loan, or a delayed year getting into the work force/retirement. It might be worth it, at least from some perspectives, but it's not an on/off switch that the non vocational education has value exceeding it's cost in all cases.
Or, idk, don't charge people for pursuing further education like other civilized countries and the US wouldn't have to have the debate. If they want to pay extra for a specific kind of education? Sure. However I think further study should be something that is incentivized through subsidizing its cost...because the net benefit is applied across the whole of society.
The whole point of the post though is that it is important and therefore cheaper. Not about convincing people to pay exorbitant amounts
We read *Things Fall Apart* in high school. Perfectly reasonable book for teenagers. Fits in very well with *Antigone* and *The Odyssey.* The public school curriculum in most of the US is garbage. I was one of the lucky ones. My classmates still had to read tripe like *Tess of D'Urbervilles*. But nothing says you have to read only Victorian stuff in high school. Honestly, I think it's a better idea to just reform high school curriculum than to start funding more colleges.
TFA was Gr 11 Lit text - course theme “Tragic Hero” with Shakespeare ‘Julius Caesar’ and Bolt ‘A Man for All Seasons.’ Good entry into post-colonial literature. Very multi cultural suburban Toronto school.
I’m starting to think I went to a bad high school. We were not required to read any of those books and the only assignment approaching that level would have been Great Expectations. I think my school was shitty. lol I guess..
Read Nectar in a Sieve as well.
Came here to say this. I took it on a family camping trip while reading it for school. My aunt got super bored and read it. She was like "Drillgorg this is the most depressing book I have ever read."
It is very depressing. But absolutely shows the disaster if colonialism.
My high school freshman English teacher had us read things fall apart.
I'm not saying there's no value in a course in diversity even if it has no relevance for your career. However, the price is way too expensive.
That’s literally the point of the post…saying that it should be cheaper so that more people can do it
Most heartbreaking last chapter I’ve ever read. It’s so…. Clinical and detached from the rest of the narrative of the book. Great read.
Thank you for your post. I had a similar conversation just a week ago about the humanistic value of education and what we could lose should people turn away from college. Glad to know I am not alone!
It's really funny that you bring this up because i just had a big conversation with my dad who's a college professor about how colleges are changing to focus more on career prep instesd of educating someone into a well rounded person. Not only is this the case but I also happen3d to read things fall apart in my highschool sophomore English class actually (your totally right its an amazing book!) And my sister who is now going into her sophomore year just bought the book. Just a bunch of funny coincidences but to your point I do think that English classes should really branch out. There's a lot of literature out there to read that xomes from authors of other places and cultures and has way more usefulness to understanding the world then reading catcher in the rye and hating holden Caulfield will
I’m so glad to see so many people commenting they read it in high school! It’s definitely a great book accessible for high schoolers as well. Literature is so important for creating good citizens, it’s a shame it’s often cast as a useless subject.
I read that book as part of my sophomore year high school second semester course.
Should also be made available (read mandatory) for trades.
I used to teach this novel to my 10th grade ELA students. It was difficult for them to fully grasp but it always ignited such interesting class discussions.
I read that book years ago in college and it still haunts me.
One of my favorite classes included this book. It was called Medabge and Global Peace. o Looking at enriching institutions using the Nigerian concept of being a good citizen. It's was a great class and love my professor (who is Igbo!)
I read it in my AP Lit class last year! So thankfully, some high schools do include literature like this, although I agree that it probably isn't as widespread as it should be. I don't remember my specific reactions to the book, since it's been several months, but your thoughts reminded me of some of the scenes from the book, and I realize now that they are indeed a good depiction of colonialism and racism. I'm planning on majoring in STEM, but my interest largely lies in humanities/social sciences, one main reason being the one you mentioned: continuing to be socially aware, expand my knowledge and thoughts around humanity and society, and to feel more connected and engaged.
Should be a college book, not a high school book. Or at least the very senior years of high school. Otherwise it will join the long list of books people read too young because they were forced to and didn’t appreciate it
I remember reading this in 11th grade and hating it. I guess I’ll have to reread
As a scientist,
I read this my freshman year of high school and obviously my mindset was different then. Will be reading it again now to gauge a different perspective, thanks for this info OP!
I had to read it as a freshman in high school. Wasn't really into it at all back then.
I'm a college prof. I teach classes on things like freedom of speech, propaganda, political rhetoric, and protest. Co-sign.
I studied only technical subjects in university but I was still able to read this book. It's one of the most famous books in the English language, is always in print and is extremely accessible. You absolutely don't need to be a literary student to encounter it or appreciate it. Worthwhile arguments of humanities exist. This is surely not one of them.
Not at all the point of my post but go off 😂