Portal On the Booklist At Wabash College

jamie passes along this quote from a post by Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer: "This year, for the first time, a video game will appear on the syllabus of a course required for all students at Wabash College, where I teach. For me — and for a traditional liberal arts college founded in 1832 — this is a big deal. Alongside Gilgamesh, Aristotle's Politics, John Donne's poetry, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the Tao Te Ching, freshmen at Wabash will also encounter a video game called Portal. "

Comments

now i miss college even more

[scapermoya]

Please note that we have added a consequence for failure. Any contact with the chamber floor will result in an unsatisfactory mark on your official testing record, followed by death.

Sounds Easy

[sokoban]

I bet that course is a total piece of cake

Re:Sounds Easy

[xMilkmanDanx]

I bet that course is a total piece of cake

That's a lie

Ooh, change...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Oxford: AD1610:

"In addition to ye Greeke and Latin Classics and learned tomes of divinity and medicine, freshmen shall this year encounter Hamlet the work of a vulgar modern playwrite..."

Re:Ooh, change...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I wasn't actually making a comparative artistic judgement at all, just noting that "The Canon of Serious Culture" has been evolving for approximately as long as it existed.

At the time Shakespeare was writing, he was basically a commercial hacking ripping off such classical plots as seemed bloody enough to fill the house(and thus his theatre company's stomachs), adding some sex jokes, and running the play until he came up with something else. The only college students "studying" Shakespeare would have been the rowdy ones hanging out on the wrong side of the river with the theatres, the bear-pits, and the whores.

Because, as it happens, Shakespeare was so much better than his peers among the commercial hacks it is hardly even fair(Elizabethan revenge tragedies, for instance, are typically utter dreck) he has earned a place among Real Serious Literature.

My point was just that the canon of stuff considered worth studying changes all the time(even if you don't hang out with the too-cool-for-dead-white-guys culture critic types) and that the idea of adding a video game to the curriculum is really no more radical than adding a popular play, which has happened repeatedly(even the hardcore classicists who were sneering at Shakespeare were probably reading Aristophanes, who had higher cultural value pretty much because his fart jokes were in classical greek...)

ITT Technical Institute or University of Phoenix?

[jeko]

We aren't interested in philosophical debates about if information wants to be free, we are interested in teaching the tools companies want to help students get jobs.

Yeah, Education for the Future!

Actually, real colleges are EXACTLY the place where you want to have philosophical debates about EVERYTHING so you don't become one of those idiots who think the University system exists to service Industry instead of building developed minds capable of critical thinking...