Thanks for relating your college education and critiquing another insightful writer on Substack, Ari Stein . I had a similar college experience in the sense that I was not the best student and only when I was in graduate school that I became a relatively good student. I think people should be encouraged to take time off before going to college straight out of high school , I feel like some of them would benefit by being more mature and focused just by being a few years older . But another thing that bothers me about progressives in academia is that everyone is talking about neoliberalism as if it was this pervasive negative force that infests society. It really is an economic philosophy that was started by Fredrick Hayek and perfected by people like Milton Friedman and put into practice by politicians like Reagan and Thatcher in the 80s . It denies a role of government in the economy and values the market as the best way to achieve economic and social outcomes is for government to have a hands off approach. And it also stresses free trade and movement of capital and workers . And it is defined by practitioners like Friedman and people like Joseph Stieglitz who use the term in their writings to be a relatively narrow definition. What do you think ? I am disappointed that many people are talking about a much more expansive and hard to debate idea.
Having been in both of these spaces (pro-neolib, neolib critical), unfortunately academics define neoliberalism as "privatizing everything, putting markets into everything, destabilizing foreign governments to make them more market friendly." Like, no joke that's only barely oversimplifying. These professors were in college in the 80s and 90s and really haven't upgraded their terms, given new political and economic realities.
Thanks for the clarification! Yes I can see why people are putting it into all these courses where it seems to make no sense from an economic perspective. I guess I would call it cultural neoliberalism because it is a lot more inclusive than the economic neoliberalism that people like Friedman advocates.
So, I'm sandbagging a little bit. I am/was smart enough to where I could do both well, grasp concepts, etc. I just wasn't an excellent student. I rarely studied, often had to balance readings by just not doing some of them, etc. Philosophy classes were probably harder because there was a right or wrong answer to an essay question, but I think English cared more about you putting on different perspectives, which was easier, at least for me.
> What’s more, there are functional reasons why there’s critical theory gobbligook6 in these classes. He inquires why they have to learn about neoliberalism in a Portuguese class. <...> It helps to understand what’s going on in these books if you understand the social history that informs them.
I would normally agree with this take, but as another commenter correctly pointed out, do you really need this in _elementary_ Portuguese? My elementary German included greetings, "my name is", "where are you from?", numbers, prononciation, sentence structure, ordering from restaurant and similar simple and fundamental stuff.
Thanks for relating your college education and critiquing another insightful writer on Substack, Ari Stein . I had a similar college experience in the sense that I was not the best student and only when I was in graduate school that I became a relatively good student. I think people should be encouraged to take time off before going to college straight out of high school , I feel like some of them would benefit by being more mature and focused just by being a few years older . But another thing that bothers me about progressives in academia is that everyone is talking about neoliberalism as if it was this pervasive negative force that infests society. It really is an economic philosophy that was started by Fredrick Hayek and perfected by people like Milton Friedman and put into practice by politicians like Reagan and Thatcher in the 80s . It denies a role of government in the economy and values the market as the best way to achieve economic and social outcomes is for government to have a hands off approach. And it also stresses free trade and movement of capital and workers . And it is defined by practitioners like Friedman and people like Joseph Stieglitz who use the term in their writings to be a relatively narrow definition. What do you think ? I am disappointed that many people are talking about a much more expansive and hard to debate idea.
Having been in both of these spaces (pro-neolib, neolib critical), unfortunately academics define neoliberalism as "privatizing everything, putting markets into everything, destabilizing foreign governments to make them more market friendly." Like, no joke that's only barely oversimplifying. These professors were in college in the 80s and 90s and really haven't upgraded their terms, given new political and economic realities.
Thanks for the clarification! Yes I can see why people are putting it into all these courses where it seems to make no sense from an economic perspective. I guess I would call it cultural neoliberalism because it is a lot more inclusive than the economic neoliberalism that people like Friedman advocates.
How different were philosophy classes to english both teaching and grading wise?
So, I'm sandbagging a little bit. I am/was smart enough to where I could do both well, grasp concepts, etc. I just wasn't an excellent student. I rarely studied, often had to balance readings by just not doing some of them, etc. Philosophy classes were probably harder because there was a right or wrong answer to an essay question, but I think English cared more about you putting on different perspectives, which was easier, at least for me.
> What’s more, there are functional reasons why there’s critical theory gobbligook6 in these classes. He inquires why they have to learn about neoliberalism in a Portuguese class. <...> It helps to understand what’s going on in these books if you understand the social history that informs them.
I would normally agree with this take, but as another commenter correctly pointed out, do you really need this in _elementary_ Portuguese? My elementary German included greetings, "my name is", "where are you from?", numbers, prononciation, sentence structure, ordering from restaurant and similar simple and fundamental stuff.