Some thoughts on class, education, and critical thinking

This, from Feministe's Barnacle Strumpet, could have been the impetus for a larger discussion about class, privilege, but I think too many people are confusing education with enlightenment. Here's the original comment.

I find it problematic, the idea that a person requires a college education, specifically in a liberal arts degree like Women’s Studies, to have critical analytic skills, or to have ” a deeper understanding of oppression that transcends divisions of race, gender, class, and sexuality. ” 

It implies that people without such studies must lack those things. And if it doesn’t make that implication, and people without such studies have those things, then what is the value of paying thousands of dollars to get such things when you can get them elsewhere for less cost? 

I’m not even an oppenent of Women’s Studies programs. They certainly have as much right to stand as history or art programs, or a lot of other ones. If people want them to exist, want to study them, then they have value simply from that, and should exist.

I agree with this, and it's why I rarely comment on feminist blogs these days. You shouldn't have to build a case for Women's Studies programs to exist, but the justification that they're necessary because there is no other way to acquire critical thinking skills is ludicrous.

I think what bothers me about feminism as academic pursuit isn't that it's less organic, but that's academia must always exist in the classroom. Another commenter correctly pointed out that academics write books and, provided you're blessed with a good public library system, anyone can read those books. but the consensus is "classroom is always better. always." Or when I read, as I did a few years ago, about a woman who was a women's studies scholar, but had never heard of Alice Walker, I tend to doubt the classroom is always best.