In Defense of Studying “Basket Weaving” At College
Cultural subjects mocked for being frivolous are often profound and useful
Last week, Nathan Heller published a long reported piece in the New Yorker that explored the dramatic decline in students studying the humanities at college.
The reasons for the decline are manifold, but one big driver is the economy: College in the US is brutally expensive, so students (and their parents) understandably want assurance that the degree will help in building a well-paying career path. The humanities seem, to many of these folks, to be worryingly nontechnical.
Or worse: Frivolous! As one student put it …
“My parents, who were low-income and immigrants, instilled in me the very great importance of finding a concentration that would get me a job — ‘You don’t go to Harvard for basket weaving’ was one of the things they would say,” she told me.
Basket weaving!
It’s an age-old joke. Whenever people are casting about for an example of a particularly useless subject matter, “basket weaving” is Exhibit A. Google News is clotted with examples just from the last few weeks: Recently, Kimberly Guilfoyle criticized “people [who] want to have some bizarre basket weaving degree, and they want all of us to…
