S. Worthen | Weblog

My gut feeling is that things were somewhat different -- the GI Bill changed things dramatically in the States, and I think that the big changes in opening up university education to a far greater number of people (theoretically) happened across Western Europe at about the same time. Truthfully, it's still much more stratified and class-based than it seems -- university education in Europe might be open to all qualified applicants, but those who will or won't qualify tend to be pared down fairly early. For me, that's not a problem, in that I don't think everybody needs a university education, but my experience is that much of the paring happens along class and race lines, and that's very problematic.

Back to the US, one of the funny things is that, at least in History, there are a lot of SLACs (like the one that hired me, did I mention I have a JOB!!!! --sorry) that are known to produce good future PhDs, and are feeders to the big name Uni's. One of the things that encourages me is that there has been a big push to strengthen the teaching of History and to remind people that it is an academic discipline with its own ways of thinking and writing (again going back to a couple of things on the Mediev-L list and some of the stuff that comes out on H-Teach). I'm reading Sam Wineburg's latest at the moment, and it's really good. It seems that, in having to justify the existence of the field, good teaching is starting to receive more credit. At least, i hope so!