Holding a bachelor's degree used to be meaningful. It is no longer and that's why holding that degree is also worth so little, and I'm saying "little" in practical terms, not in terms of income.
I entered UCLA at the age of 21 in 1974. As a lover of learning and an avid pursuer of knowledge, I was eagerly looking forward to any and all the classes I could take from such a huge place with fifty thousand students and a catalogue several hundred pages thick, full of classes.
At that university, I found students who were terribly dulled and jaded, just as those in my high school classes had been. Information was to be acquired only for the sake of passing the final exam. The classes meant nothing. Learning interfered with the events of real life, like partying and having fun. And the real goal of taking classes was to get training in a very narrow field, the one you had chosen as your major. Thus, whatever would make you useful as a chem lab tech, those were the only classes you wanted. Or engineering classes or librarian classes. Taking a foreign language was foolish, learning math if you were going to be an English teacher was such a waste of time. Who needed to know history? only the fools who took those useless classes, and on and on.
I took a class I thought would be really exciting, "The history of science." When I arrived in the lecture on the first day, I saw that almost every single student was an Asian male, and was to learn that just about every one of them was a computer major. There was no attempt to teach anything historic about the history of science; rather he wrote formulae on the board. This was a history class and satisfied the breadth requirements for "social sciences" but never did the prof try to tie in any history, thus guaranteeing that these poor ignorant students got NO information outside their majors.
It seemed that eighty percent of the school population was that way. "Just teach me what I have to know for my profession, and then I'm out of here." The liberal arts students were somewhat less restricted in their outlook, but only because they were interested in the liberal arts, which covers a larger range of subjects and fields.
Dorothy Sayers in 1948 delivered a monograph on this problem, titled "The Lost Tools of Learning?" in which she describes how students do not and will not understand how all knowledge is interconnected and why a chemistry major just might be interested in art, an idea which apparently in her day was just as lost as it was in my day, and indeed I believe it still is today, forty years later.
It has to do with critical thinking. But my generation did away with every vestige of respect that Americans had for critical thinking. We told our teachers we didn't want them to tell us what to think, but how to think. And yet our idea of "how to think" was mere leftist propaganda. We bashed American society and the American economic system. We bashed everything that the "old thinkers", like our parents or their parents, had ever believed. We "questioned authority", which invariably meant anything any authority had to say, we dismissed as evil before we ever bothered questioning it. We taught our children that learning history was stupid because it was "past" and "irrelevant to today". We encouraged each other to understand that rules were bad, breaking them was much smarter; that discipline was just a phantom of the old regime (that would be everything America respected that came before rock 'n roll) trying to keep everyone down.
Get Sayers' essay, I have been recommending it to friends for thirty years.
or this version which includes several of her essays:
Creed or Chaos? Including the Lost Tools of Learning
This book, a follow-up to Sayers's theme, has made a big hit among the classical-education advocates:
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