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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

While I would never have called YC the new grad school myself, I think you have a mistakenly utopian view of the origins of western higher education. The "traditional" idea of a liberal education you're describing is largely a creation of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Originally higher education was about training priests, lawyers, and doctors.

As learning became more prestigious, rich kids started going to universities as well. They were not there for vocational training. But they were the newcomers. The original model of university student was the one Westfall described in his excellent biography of Newton: "a plodding group, narrowly vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical preferment as the means to advancement."

If anyone wants to learn more about the origins of universities, I'd recommend Haskins's Rise of the Universities.

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Off-topic, but how do you always know the best books for each historical topic? I've tried looking for books on specific topics but there seems to be no good way of finding the gems (amazon and other recommendation sites of its ilk have not yielded any successes for me).

Also, how do I know which books are most accurate? Looking at current political or biographical books, I see how slanted almost all books are because I have many other sources to go on and the relevant context to judge a book's accuracy. But all of this context is missing for historical books so I have no way of judging how biased or inaccurate they are.

What if I were learning history from the equivalent of a Glenn Beck?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say he probably knows what to recommend because he spends time reading. When you read something it's good to read up on the beliefs of the author on a variety of topics and get a sense of where their biases might trend. Normally this isn't very hard once you know what to look for.

The key is usually to identify the larger debate going on and make sure you know the different sides. For instance if you're going to read a book by Milton Friedman it's helpful to read up on the various schools of economics to see where he fits into that debate. I believe the term that applies here is erudition. You want that.

It's somewhat of an illusion. I only know the best books about subjects I understand fairly well, and I also try only to comment about subjects I understand.

Interesting question how to tell whether you're reading a biased account. It would take an essay to answer that. After you know some history, you can tell because biases causes their owners to make mistakes. But there's probably also internal evidence too. Never seeming surprised would be a bad sign, for example.

"After you know some history, you can tell because biases causes their owners to make mistakes."

The catch--

"History is a set of lies agreed upon" - Napoleon Bonaparte

The whole "after you know some history" demands a framework of a macrocosm to which one must depend entirely upon second-hand, at best, accounts. The glue that holds it all together is so tied to so many handles for bias both at the hands of the proxy observers as well as within the very bonding agents in the mind of the aggregator that the whole enterprise is rife with corruptive feedback potential that the anomalies that can be conclusively nailed as bona fide mistakes tend to be, for the most part, minimally useful for bias detection that tells you something you didn't already have a rather high certainty of.

The glue that holds it all together is so tied to so many handles for bias both at the hands of the proxy observers as well as within the very bonding agents in the mind of the aggregator that the whole enterprise is rife with corruptive feedback potential that the anomalies that can be conclusively nailed as bona fide mistakes tend to be, for the most part, minimally useful for bias detection that tells you something you didn't already have a rather high certainty of.

wat.

Seriously, it took me something like 4 minutes to understand what you wrote there. Maybe I'm just tired.

You're not tired.

No. I was tired. Hence my failure to properly punctuate and clearly enunciate.

My apologies, to all.

"a plodding group, narrowly vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical preferment as the means to advancement"

The irony is that today's anti-university movement is largely composed of people of this personality; just replace "ecclesiastical" with "technological", and you've captured the essence of the popular arguments for dropping out.

I agree the utopian views are mistaken, but I think a purely dystopian one is mistaken as well. There were certainly plenty of kids just trying to get a job, but the universities also were the source of much of the intellectual development that led to early modern science/math. I recently read a biography of Copernicus, for example, which emphasized the impact on his thinking made by his four years studying at the University of Krakow. Other products of that era's universities included Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Leibniz.

Fair points, but I think the essence of the parent's comment was whether higher education's mission is/should be to transform the student's ability to think, such that they can contribute truly new knowledge to society. and whether training for a job can/should be part of that.

I personally do believe in this higher goal of education.

Mistaken views of the origin? Maybe. However the current economic state of the western society affords us to indulge in intellectual enrichment purely for the sake of it. In the pre 18th century era the difference between having and not having vocational training translated to the difference between starving and freezing to death or not. Now, even earning minimum wage or something close to it can afford us food and shelter, thus making the risk of going to school for "your passion" rather than "find work" much less life-threatening. Excluding a few exceptions, the economic gap has shrunken between the rich and poor. Given this comparative cushioned state, it is absolutely reasonable for universities to be expected to provide intellectual fulfillment and feed curiosities.

"a plodding group, narrowly vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical preferment as the means to advancement."

Undergraduate education has broadened, but with all due respect to my peers, that sounds rather like an apt description of present-day grad students. (s/ecclesiastical/academic)

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