Daniel Lemire's blog

, 1 min read

Does your university think that “Jobs are for the little people”?

Tall, Dark, and Mysterious is a Math. professor somewhere in Canada, possibly in British Columbia. She graduated from a big school and now teaches at a smaller (lesser?) school. Well, is it a lesser school? That’s where her tale becomes interesting. Myself, I attended UofT. I don’t know if the rule is true, probably not, but it seem that the larger the school, the more it suffers from the jobs-are-for-little-people syndrome as documented in a post by Tall, Dark, and Mysterious. Here is an insightful quote:

University isn’t job training, because universities are adamant about university not being job training. And it’s not because they’re too busy enriching students’ lives and fostering a love of learning. Underneath all of the cheap idealism – trumpeted by gainfully employed people, many of whom haven’t learned how to play a musical insturment, how to speak a foreign language, or how to play a new sport because none of those things are related to their jobs and because they’re too old to be doing that sort of thing – about learning for the sake of learning is a willful inability to confront the fact that students are not at universities to learn for the sake of learning.