As someone who actually teaches the young'uns at university, this is pretty amazingly wrong in a concise yet comprehensive way.
I teach in Information Science (go Team Interdisciplinarity!) so I get a pretty wide range of majors, from Informatics to English, and a wide range of competencies. I'd estimate around half my students are bilingual or multilingual, for one.
There's no pretending that teaching during this pandemic is extremely hard and somewhat degraded. But prior, when I was in front of a classroom, I was so thrilled to be able to step my students through ancient Western and Eastern philosophy.
In explaining the relevance of such texts I'd always quote the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky that these words were "Alive, and I speak to those living." This, however, was preamble. The point was to use this as a foundation for understanding contemporary theory.
To prepare them to chase the horizon of human knowledge. I teach what Aristotle was on about not as a means of promoting religious reverence, but to provide a way of understanding everything that happened since. How virtue ethics speaks to us now via, say, @ShannonVallor.
If I spent all day teaching formal logic, it'd never go anywhere. And while my students run the gamut from uninterested to hyper-engaged, that's true of all classrooms. Most, I think, walk away having learned quite a lot that was tangible and useful.
Because it's a hell of a trip to lead my students from Kant to, say, a @cecianasta investigative report, but that sort of thing *is* the purpose of education in the humanities. Connecting past to present to build a future worth having.
If all I teach them is a reverence for ancient Athens, I'll have failed miserably.
But yeah, my students are amazing. They all have different skills--some are really damn good at maths or programming, others are extremely well read, some are both. The point is teaching them what they can do *together* in their various specialisations.
