You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–] FridayJones ago 

I take it that "Communications" today is what we used to call "Composition" and "Speech" back in the olden days of yore. But without any of the essential basics because computers will do all your spelling and grammar work and will cup your balls when you're lonely. Sort of like today's "Math," where they don't know how to Factor because they've never memorized the multiplication table.

[–] ArmourFou ago 

Communication definitely includes public speaking, but also includes marketing, divorce mediation, consulting, negotiation, etc.

[–] FridayJones ago 

What, no Jedi Mind Trick? Seriously though, this is typical of higher education in the 20th Century: The availability of computers allows us to automate many small but essential and integral tasks within each general area of expertise. This leads to abandoning instruction in performing those smaller tasks manually, leading to a lack of fundamental understanding of underlying physical and systemic principles involved in that area of expertise. And since they have all that free time now due to that automation of small "mundane" tasks, the student (or worker) gets more and wider responsibilities piled upon them. Suddenly a general area of expertise become so impossibly wide that it contains disparate elements that appear ludicrous when juxtaposed in a list together.

For example, wouldn't Divorce Mediation be more appropriately covered, depending on context, in Arbitration/Mediation, or in Psychological Counseling, or in Social Work, than it would be covered in the same major that radio jocks take?