As a long-time addict of the Great Courses CD and DVD lectures (it was formerly called The Teaching Comany; and my addiction has been so long-time that several of my courses are on cassette tape), I very much enjoyed Heather Mac Donald’s article on the firm in City Journal.
Heather contrasts the market-oriented and -tested offerings from Great Courses with the po-mo moonbattery of our college curriculums:
So totalitarian is the contemporary university that professors have written to [Great Courses founder Tom] Rollins complaining that his courses are too canonical in content and do not include enough of the requisite “silenced” voices. It is not enough, apparently, that identity politics dominate college humanities departments; they must also rule outside the academy. Of course, outside the academy, theory encounters a little something called the marketplace, where it turns out that courses like “Queering the Alamo,” say, can’t compete with “Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition.”
What accounts for the difference, though? Aren’t colleges operating in a competitive market too?
The biggest question raised by the Great Courses’ success is: Does the curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike adults, actually demand postcolonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Every indication suggests that the answer is no. “If you say to kids, ‘We’re doing the regendering of medieval Europe,’ they’ll say, ‘No, let’s do medieval kings and queens,’” asserts [history lecturer Patrick] Allitt. “Most kids want classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the American Civil War.”
Probably most of the difference is just the age groups being served. College is primarily a credentialing rite, a prolonged and fantastically expensive mental bris. The content is secondary. Great Courses sells to an older crowd who actually want to learn stuff.
A professor who teaches the Civil War as the “greatest slave uprising in history” to his undergraduates because that is what is expected of him, says University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors, will know perfectly well how to teach a more intellectually honest course for paying adults.
There’s also that regrettable business of us getting wiser as we get older:
A few professors suggest that the company has pegged the audience as leaning conservative.
(“Conservative” of course being a synonym for “wise.”)
Heather acknowledges some soft squishy spots in Great Courses offerings:
Do the Great Courses’ professors live up to their billing? Not always. A few ramble in their presentations or oversimplify (even sugarcoat) their material—making Nietzsche, for example, sound almost like a self-help guru.
Yeah, I did that Nietzsche course. They should have billed him as “Ralph Waldo Nietzsche.” (Though I did the course on Transcendentalists, too, which wasn’t bad. Well, actually it was boring as hell; but that’s because — as I had previously suspected, and the Great Courses lectures amply confirmed — Emerson & Co. are intrinsically boring. So you could say the course is … faithful to its material.)
All in all, though, Heather thinks, as I do, that Great Courses is a Good Thing. Tom Rollins has got stinking rich from it, and jolly good luck to him. There aren’t many kinds of entrepreneurship as honorable and socially useful as selling Western Civ. to those of us who think we don’t have enough of it.
While the Great Courses, then, is only an ambiguous marker of the academic scene, the meaning of the audience’s response is far clearer: there is a fervent demand in the real world for knowledge about history and the high points of human creation.
I concur with Heather, though, that the low-budget backgrounds and cheesy visuals on the DVD courses need serious work. Neither Ben Schumacher on Quantum Mechanics nor Sam Wang on Neuroscience squeezes out much value-added from a visual format. The small number of pictures (and in Ben’s case, experimental setups) they offer could have been put in the accompanying printed material. The main thing I learned from their being on DVD was in fact how very, very hard it apparently is for an academic to know which camera he should be looking at.
(Aha--the Derb has survived Irene's clutches. That is great news as we feared he was "Doomed" as the eye headed for his home.) He and Heather are correct in their analysis of "Great Courses." If you haven't looked through their catalog and picked a course now and then, you are missing a fantastic learning resource.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse> the low-budget backgrounds and cheesy visuals on the DVD courses need serious work. Neither Ben Schumacher on Quantum Mechanics
I love all the hard-science DVD courses, and had no problem with them whatever. Shumacher's class on QM is the best introduction I have ever found. His Physics of Impossiblity is magnificent. If he were to do a class on the physics of toilet paper, I would purchase it.
I have no problem with the "low-budget backgrounds and cheesy visuals," which I actually appreciate. Forgive me, but I am there to learn not be entertained.
I do wish the economics courses were more inclusive: it wouldn't kill them to do a course on the Austrian School of Economics. And the audio course on C. S. Lewis had an instructor who, shall we say, was rather too enthusiastic. But of the courses I have taken, I have never found sufficient reason to complain to the company.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abusehere's an article on CNN concerning weird classes being offered on campus
External Link
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Intellectual crack" - agreed. It's been a while since I found anything to match the intellectual entertainment of Bob Brier's Ancient Egypt courses.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFor some amazing, free, online classes on mostly math and the sciences, try External Link
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGood link, Joy...I have enjoyed a bunch of these no-nonsense Youtubes from this guy.
In general, I think the presentations on TC courses do not measure up to the best Youtubes and podcasts that can be found if you really, really work at it.
Teaching Company is like McDonalds: You just drive up to the window and they serve it right up to you, all neatly packaged and reliably mediocre. I don't deny that it is a valuable service; it is a really jungle trying to find the really good free stuff online.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThose more economically-minded folks among us don't have to help Tom Rollins get *too* rich. My library has an ample selection of his courses on loan for free, and so probably does yours.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Derbyshire,
I have not seen any data, but I wonder if homeschooling families purchase a significant proportion of Great Courses lectures. My wife and I homeschool, and we have probably purchased 20 or so Teaching Company courses in the last six years. A good number of our friends do so as well. I am a scientist (biophysics), so I appreciate their content quality in the sciences. Although I could teach pretty much any science or math at the secondary level, I don't have time (other than for physics), and these courses fill gaps in our high school curriculum.
My wife is a writer and English teacher and feels the same, and as she does almost all of the hands-on teaching, these courses have been a boon to her. We also agree that the material seems to be moonbat-averse, which we appreciate.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe've used several of the courses for our homeschooling, both as refresher courses for me and as in depth exposure for our kids.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe history courses (especially ancient and middle ages) have been huge hits.
One of he highlights of a road trip is listening to one or two of the courses on my to do list.
As a family, we've loved listening to Robert Greenberg's music lectures in the car, and we find them as enjoyable as anything on the radio. He knows his stuff, is funny, and he recognizes Christianity's role in Western music.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe have used them in our homeschool for a number of years. And yes, I have some on cassette tape.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI have only bought one course from The Teaching Company - "Our Night Sky" - and I love it already. I can't wait to buy more courses for my own children's enrichment, even if I don't homeschool them... yet. (My elder one just begun Pre-K, so there's plenty of time to plan.)
I received a catalog a few days ago and speculated to my husband, "Imagine if more students were to take these DVD lectures, write an essay every week/day from each lecture and primary source reading, and then take an exam for college credit at the end of the semester. It would definitely bring the cost of tuition down significantly for them, and many cost-conscious universities would take notice." Thus, an effort to bring down the cost of obtaining a college degree would receive considerable support if there were enough students taking the Great Courses route for credit.
(Rick Perry, are you listening? You want to bring down the cost of a bachelor's degree. Here's your chance!)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseLove the Teaching Co. My favorites are the Arts and Science Lectures . Huge courses on Western Art? Really! And, of course, they require lots of visuals as does the immense astronomy course (beautiful!).
For a quick view of what's needed in literature there's nobody better and more entertaining than Prof. Rufus Fears. His lecture on books that teach a moral lesson or "The History of Liberty" or "Greek and Roman Heroes" are a must!
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"a prolonged and fantastically expensive mental bris"
Perfect
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"A prolonged and fantastically expensive mental bris" - with the intellectual equivalent of a dull and rusty knife.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI’ve listened to about 20 of The Great Courses and they’re all good. The Ancient Egypt (Mentioned below), various Roman history courses, the Western Civ I&2, various courses on the early Christian church and various aspects of Judaism (especially the “Between Cross and Crescent” course on Medieval Jewish history), and the current course I’m listening to on the Tudors and Stuarts are particularly good (The same professor did a Henry VIII course that was a lot of fun too). I would not say that the courses are BETTER than my undergraduate classes were, but they’re roughly equivalent to the 100 level classes I took, and not quite as good as upper level classes, simply because of the lack of class participation. Still, it’s impossible to recommend The Teaching Company enough – intellectual crack indeed!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseEvery time I see that ad for "The Great Courses" I think it's about golf. I guess I'm just dumb that way!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI have a ton of these things, and I have actually slogged through a few of them.
My opinion: Great concept and beautiful execution by Teaching Company except for one great flaw: They have rarely actually located any professors who bring their material to life. My conclusion is that I have distorted my memory of college with a curtain of nostalgic mist...this is pretty much as good as it gets. Lots and lots of droning.
It may be the NOVA effect: Pretty hard to keep them awake in the back row when they have been dazzled by so much high production stuff like NOVA.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI just purchased my very first course from those guys... A History of Hitler's Empire. I love WWII and pre-war history, and they had it on sale. Glad I bought it. Lots of insight and well worth the money.
Also, I bought the DVD's, but I just rip them to MP3 so I can listen elsewhere if I like, but can still go back and watch them. You get the coursebook if you buy the DVD's, and in my case, the price was the same. Ain't technology great?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFreshman year of college I had to fight to stay awake during Western Civ lectures that were taught by a droning nasal-y grad student, right after lunch in the hissing-steam-radiator-lined attic of an old classroom building.
Lately I wished I had paid better attention, and had a real desire to know about the roots of Western Civilization. We ordered the course from the [then] "Teaching Company." Boring beyond words. Fought to stay awake through three lectures, then sent it all back.
There are writers who can bring history alive; surely there are teachers who can do the same. I would have expected this company to have found those men and women. Very disappointing.
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