Tim Dowling’s article on the new syllabus is OK, but it includes quite a few errors. For instance in the section Philosophy for Fun and Profit he inserts the question “How am I going to pay this loan Back?” He surely doesn’t imagine that anyone needing something as vulgar as a loan would be admitted, does he? Like they say, if you have to take out the loan, you can’t afford it. Also, I thought economics *was* monetised philosophy?
Similarly, when he puts into the syllabus “Too many humanities graduates leave university with little or no understanding of mathematics”, how does he think you develop a complex global derivative system in the first place? Imagine what a paradise of equality we’d all live in if bankers and business MAs were actually taught that mathematics was a symbolic language used to describe sets of relationships in the independent context, not a colouring-in exercise for the semantically-challenged.
Where would you find the people necessary to produce complex networks of statistical manipulation, if politicians not only understood maths but promised to use it properly? And as for the bit on ‘Social Darwinism: evolution, education and you’, where Tim puts in "survival of the fittest" he obviously meant “survival of the fat-catest” (and that bit on UK Tax Law for Poets is obviously a rip-off of Billy Bragg’s sublime LP Talking with the Taxman about Poetry).
They shoulda got one of them Oxbridge graduates that make up 90% of the Guardian’s journalists to write it…
Cheers,
Dr Jon Cloke
Lecturer in Human Geography
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Leicestershire LE11 3TU
Room JJ 0.14
Phone 44 (0)1509 228193
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