Margaret Wente’s articles are almost always inane. The other week she wrote about the Quebec student strike.
“The truth is, the education they’re getting is overpriced at any cost. The protesters do not include accounting, science and engineering students, who have better things to do than hurl projectiles at police. They’re the sociology, anthropology, philosophy, arts, and victim-studies students, whose degrees are increasingly worthless in a world that increasingly demands hard skills. The world will not be kind to them. They’re the baristas of tomorrow and they don’t even know it, because the adults in their lives have sheltered them and encouraged their mass flight from reality.” (From here, but don’t click as it just gives her attention)
(As Mike Spry has pointed out Wente’s degree is A BA and a MA in English, so it seems like she hates those who are studying exactly what she did)
Many people are aware of the most famous results from the Milgram Obedience Experiments (that many research subjects were willing to shock learners to death when instructed to do so by an authority figure), but a lesser known result of these experiments might be relevant here: “many subjects harshly devalue the victim as a consequence of acting against him” (Obedience to Authority 1974, pg 10).
Rob Carrick argues, in the article “Young Adults have a Right to be Up in Arms,” that much of the reason that today’s students are suffering and having difficulties finding jobs is related to the numerous benefits that baby boomers, like Wente, experienced in the past and continue to experience in the present.
Is Wente’s continued disparagement of students (especially those in Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences) a result of her own complicity in making their lives difficult for her own benefit?
Bakka's River 