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Notes -
Shamus Khan wrote a book - Privilege - exploring his education (both his own and the one he bestowed when he returned as a teacher) and he touches on the utility provided by such absurdly broad courses as "Western History"
His argument is that it's not so much teaching information as teaching ease: an ability to navigate a bunch of different cultural spheres and their products. Nobody ever really learns much about Western Civ in a high school class. But they learn how to navigate material and to not feel absolutely overwhelmed (or, less charitably: they learn how to bullshit according to the system's expectations)
We can apply the same logic to even more challenging endeavors like learning the classics or ancient Greek.
Of course, I think this misses a more obvious take: the "ease" being learned is about learning to fluently speak language of your fellow elites and civilization (hence the Iliad and not the Upanishads, which I don't doubt have meaningful human stories) but part of the book is about the changing character of the upper class so I guess it's not a bug.
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