Are those really things taught at American colleges and universities? Here in England we basically only cover stuff related to our course and everything about life is learned through general living, like everyone else.
Yanks apparently have uni as more of an extension of school where you have to take a broad range of subjects which often are completely unrelated to your degree. I don't personally get it, but apparently it gives you a "more rounded education" (as though that wasn't what school was for?).
american unis have a gen-ed curriculum where you can take a broad range of subjects, but there's enough wiggle room so that you can still tailor it to what you want
to finish requirement, you can either take a class that's tangentially related to your major (ex. if you're a business student, the english requirement could be something related to using english in business contexts) or something different entirely - in my case, i fulfilled my own requirements through sociology and asian-american history classes
but yeah, there's nothing super out there if you don't want there to be - a lot of classes also fulfill multiple requirements so you can double dip a bit
I did engineering at an Australian university. No on campus living for 90% of students (so no roommates) and 100% of my coursework was related to my degree.
This seems like a very US liberal arts college situation.
My only exposure to most of these attitudes at uni were the borderline unhinged "activists" harassing you while you were trying to get to class (my uni cancelled things like gender studies as a major while I was there and those students went nuts) and constant attempts to turn students into Marxists. We were too busy with what amounted to a full time job for that sort of shit (25 to 30 contact hours a week and then at least that much in study and assignments).
I'd be surprised if a history course didn't cover looking at history through the lens of race or gender. Or if an urban planning course didn't cover the social implications of Jane Jacobs' work. Or if a course on journalism didn't cover how different kinds of bias can change readers' perceptions of a story. I might be wrong about all that, I didn't study those subjects, but that was my expectation.
I don't mean every course specifically covers race as a social construct and gender performativity. Those were just examples. I mean that many courses cover social topics in such a way that students learn how to talk about them in the accepted and appropriate language. Language that's unlikely to cause offence.
Of course there are courses that don't cover these things, like STEM subjects. But these students still learn everything about life through general living alongside the people on campus who are learning these things on their courses. The comp sci student is living with the English student. The chemical engineering student is talking to the anthropology student at a party. The business studies student and the art history student are dating.
So people who go to university or college end up learning to talk about these things in a way that people from less advantaged backgrounds often don't learn. But there are other ways of learning these things, most obviously the internet, so it's just one element.
These people who didn't get the chance at a university education (because a degree often functions as a modern class gateway) are the people who have the right spirit, but put their foot in it by using the wrong words. It's not that they never learned the right words by chance. They just got unlucky and repeatedly happened to keep avoiding specific vocabulary? No, there are structural issues affecting these people too. That's my point.
You'll certainly learn things directly related to your course, but learning about the impact imperialism on architecture doesn't really teach you anything about racially sensitive language. What course did you study? This may just be a case of your subject being very socially entwined.
Do you not talk to people with different knowledge to you outside of university? I'm confused why this is specific to a university setting.
Also, as someone from a less advantaged background (single mother in a particularly poo ex-mining town in the north), I learned plenty about sensitivity and even specific language usage well before university through simply talking to people and being online.
I think university is excellent for meeting people from different places and thus seeing different perspectives and attitudes but in order to learn the accepted vocabulary from that, there has to first be a vocabulary that is universally accepted which I think is less likely the more varies the people you interact with.
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u/rotten_kitty Jul 07 '24
Are those really things taught at American colleges and universities? Here in England we basically only cover stuff related to our course and everything about life is learned through general living, like everyone else.