Thank you for the laugh. You could not have given a more radically wrong description of my background and education if you have taken my CV and written the opposite.
I grew up in Israel and did both my undergraduate and my MSc at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. In Biology and Environmental Biology. Since I had no gen-ed requirements, I didn’t even take Hebrew Lit, much less English Lit.
My PhD was in Ecology at UIUC, not an “Elite” expensive private college, like, say, The University of Chicago.
I grew up without the notion of class in the way that you envision class, since when I was growing up in Israel, it was a socialist country.
Anybody who has studied in Israel would laugh helplessly at your assumptions of how education looks there. Anybody who has done a PhD in my field would laugh at your assumptions regarding how my field is taught.
Repeat after me:
Israeli Universities are Not American Universities
Ecology is not English
None of the views that I have expressed here have come from any class that I have taken because I didn’t take the classes you seem to assume that I have taken.
Well, not exactly. While I have not taken a single class in English Lit. I took a class in the Philosophy of Science with the late Great Dr Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and has some great discussions/arguments with him. Look him up.
I did take a whole bunch of courses in natural science and stuff like that, but they were focused on getting a handle on reality, not on Good Versus Evil, or Beauty Versus Ugliness. That is how natural and life science work. We have our ideas of Good and Evil, but usually don’t look to what we study to inform them. There are exceptions, though.
There is nothing like the Natural Sciences to teach how insignificant humans are, how little we actually understand, how different reality is from what we see, and, consequently, how ridiculous it is for us to believe that concepts like “good” and “bad” have any reality outside of human society.