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Comment by schimmy_changa | Hacker News Reader

That may be true (but is arguable) if you see college as nothing but a vocational school, training you to be the best worker which society could ask for.

A truly liberal (in the John Stuart Mill / Enlightenment sense of the word) education gives you the tools you need to engage with the world. How can you ever change society if you are only able to see the world in what makes money, and are never given the time and resources to think beyond what is today towards what could be?

It is true that some people can learn some of these things on their own, but having 4 years to think surrounded by an environment where everyone else is focused on that same goal can really make a difference.

If a pragmatic man like Bloomberg believes in the value of a liberal education (again the old sense of the word), you can bet it's not total hooey.

(although see my other comment for what I believe is behind at least the timing of this announcement)

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I agree that the Liberal Arts are crucial, but this sentiment seems to be gone in favor of a more vocational approach.

While it still exists, good LA programs are rare, and largely dismissed by society as not worth it.

See all the parents and friends asking... "How are you possibly going to make a living with a Liberal Arts degree?!"

I wonder what American society would look like if this were flipped on its head? Make liberal arts the central piece of a college education, and leave vocational training largely to employers.

I'm not sure if it's realistic to think that'd ever happen, but I wonder what it would look like if it did?

> A truly liberal (in the John Stuart Mill / Enlightenment sense of the word) education gives you the tools you need to engage with the world.

But the current education system doesn't give you either.

You don't get tools to be useful - IE STEM related, engineering, math, etc.

You also don't get the tools to "engage" with the world. Blocking traffic, needing safe places and being triggered by anything you disagree with isn't "engaging" the world.

>You also don't get the tools to "engage" with the world. Blocking traffic, needing safe places and being triggered by anything you disagree with isn't "engaging" the world.

Are you of the opinion that this is the primary topic studied at American universities nowadays? I’m having a hard time squaring away your obviously propagandized portrayal with reality.

At that you absolutely don't need a special expensive institution to teach you how to behave. A century ago it might have made sense - formal conduct was rigid and failure to adhere could displace you out of aristocracy. You needed to know your proper dinner routines and manners perfectly. You needed to know the retinue of history and contemporary science topics popular in the era to not be left looking ignorant of a conversation.

Of course that later circumstance was only applicable in an era when major scientific advancements were slow and costly to disseminate. Thats why it required the infrastructure of a university to supply it. I feel like that might not be quite as much of a barrier today, and nobody is expected to stay current on all news - there is simply too much, too fast, even of the purely scholarly variety.

While I don't think your average 18 year old is of "mature" character or often fit to participate in normative adult culture it also isn't a danger to them to have to learn how in the moment. The worst that happens is they lose a job or two and rebound - it isn't a lifelong disgrace in an insular society anymore.

Your view of college seems to be very media influenced. Just like 99.9% of Arabic people aren't terrorists, 99.9% of college students aren't 'safe space triggered social justice warriors'. Maybe you should grab a statistics class at a nearby college. ;).

The media has really painted college students in a bad light. There's such a wide variety of students and personalities. It's a great place to share ideas and form networks.

As the spouse of someone who suffers from depression and suicidal thinking the outrage against “trigger warnings” really pisses me off.

Trigger warnings are just that. Warnings.

We watched A Star is Born, and having my spouse go back on almost a years worth of progress and treatment when a single “trigger warning” could have avoided that is beyond enraging.

And what’s most hypocritical is the people who are complaining about trigger warnings are people who are complaining that a little paragraph of text describing certain known triggers may be contained in the text or movie before. So people who suffer from a variety of potentially harmful diseases such as depression and PTSD are pussies because they need a trigger warning to help them avoid media that may be harmful to them, but you’re a strong reasonable and logical person to protest the inclusion of a minor warning that you are under no obligation to read and can easily skip.

The underlying fact is that everything is subjective and trying to enumerate every possible situation that someone may react to is impossible. Why is it not the responsibility of the individual to learn more about the movie by checking the ratings and synopsis?

Can you explain what exactly a trigger warning would even contain that somehow helps here? It seems that if a single movie can unwind a "years worth of progress" then the situation is rather critical and movies are the least of your concerns. How do you label everyday life with such warnings?

I have zero issues with trigger warnings. If it helps someone so be it. No skin off my back.

Just alot of this country views them with disdain which is unfortunate. It's been branded as weak to have a mental disorder. Meanwhile beliveing in Q-Anon is perfectly ok to them.

I completely understand and agree with your frustration. The blame is not only the people who deride the value of trigger warnings, but also on the Left, which has this horrible tendency to take good ideas and apply them to every situation imaginable watering them down to the point of uselessness. I say this as someone very much on the Left. The evolution of trigger warnings into content warnings took them from a real way of protecting people into a self-parodying attempt at shielding people from topics they don't like.

Doesn't really seem like the movie's place to create its own trigger warnings. There could be hundreds of warnings per movie. I've even seen tumblr fan fiction warnings that a story only contains CIS relationships. Not to mention, how do you identify and quantify triggers in a medium? It's not like it's some solved science and the patriarchy is just avoiding it. These are open ended questions without one size fits all solutions.

For example, if your wife has over a year of progress on the line, and there isn't a culture of mainstream trigger warnings, why did you play it so loose by wandering blindly into a movie?

And then you lash out at the world for when your gamble doesn't pay off?

I think this is what people roll their eyes at when they think of trigger warnings: the abolition of personal responsibility and effort, that you have any number of personal issues yet expect the world to read your mind instead of, say, watching a movie before your mentally diseased (your words) wife watches it to ensure her safety.

> Just like 99.9% of Arabic people aren't terrorists

Yeah, sure, one in a thousand Arabic person is a terrorist...

Assuming there's 1 billion Arabic people on the planet...all you need is 100,000 members of what the U.S. classifies as terrorist groups to have 1 in 1000.

ISIS already fills up 35,000 of that 100,000. You still have Hamas, al Queda, and many more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_g...

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