> “There are certainly reasons to believe that the current crisis of the humanities owes partly to the poor job they do of explaining and justifying themselves.”

Especially when they accept that the argument must exclusively be about a discipline’s alleged usefulness to the economy. Last week the Belgian vice-president said Latin should be replaced as a high school subject with programming classes, because they are more useful. It’s been picked up, even by prominent intellectuals: http://woutersoudan.be/20150405/

Latin is pretty useless, though. Useless things better be more enjoyable than their useful competitors and there are living languages to learn.

A girl I met recently is encouraging me to learn Latin. She is fluent, even competes in Latin poetry competitions (this actually happened). I think... all I can think of is that scene in Life of Brian! Although I am sure there is some benefit to reading Virgil in the original Latin.

I should say that it makes quite a few languages easier to learn: the Romance languages and even the Germanic languages.

Yeah, but so does Italian.

Interesting blog.

I missed that in the french newspaper's headlines (which were focused on the `religion` classes mandatory status).

"Up until 1999, a thesis of original research was required of every student pursuing the Italian equivalent of a bachelor’s degree." Outstanding.

Also note that there was no PhD program in Italy until 1984.

That's why a bachelor is historically called a doctor in Italy and also why the standards where so high on something that was at the time the highest degree attainable.

Another interesting effect is that while most of the _laurea_ were 4-5 years long (in terms of coursework), sometimes the thesis could take over one year to complete on top of that.

Up to 1999, most Italian Bachelor's were 4 years long (plus 5 years of high school). They were similar to current day US Master's degrees (17 years of total instruction).

The current Italian model (adopted in 1999 with the Bologna process) splits the old 4-year degree in a 3+2 years, which is more similar to the US Bachelor's+Master's degree path.

I graduated after these changes went into effect so I might be wrong, but it is my understanding that before 1999 degrees were at least 5 year long, so the requirement made a little more sense. I'm actually suprised that old-style Italian degrees were equivalent to a bachelor degree.

In Denmark all bachelor students have to write a bachelor thesis. It usually counts as half a semesters work, and needs to be original research.

How else would you finish?

This might be technicality, but at a university I studied in Czech Republic, it was sufficient if the bachelors thesis contained no original research, and was more or less just an overview of current developments in a subfield of what you study.

I think the reasoning was, that 2 semesters that it took to write is too little time to conduct any original research, and that showcasing ability to write a comprehensive scientific text and process current scientific papers is enough to varrant a bachelors thesis.

Master thesis had to have original research.

Maybe there are more differences between Denmark and Czech higher education.

For example, do you have just a thesis defense, or do you need to pass some sort of state examination as well?

I remember, that a fried of mine was contrasting mostly four week blocks of intense study on single topic in Denmark with for Czech more standard semester with 5-10 classes, each 1-5 hours a week.

In America, the trend has been towards industry sponsored 'Capstone Projects'. A company comes in with a problem that may or may not need to be solved, students are put into teams to 'simulate the real world' and are given a semester or two to solve the problem for the client.

I see that as fitting the same bill. You can't expect bachelor students to produce publisheable quality work, but solving a problem (if it includes gathering data and choosing theory to apply) is research within a very limited scope.

> needs to be original research.

Please post a source for this. Maybe your DK bachelor thesis had original research in it, mine surely did not, and I do not believe it is a requirement.

You could get away with a literature review?

I did a 4 year undergrad in Ireland, and was required (as was everyone in my year) to write a thesis. It was supposed to be novel, and a few people just made apps, but the majority of people actually did try something novel.

When I was attending uni, we were expected to do some original research each year. What's outstanding about it?

A couple things I got out of it:

> ...at a time when anything that takes more than a few minutes to skim is called a “longread”

Very true with the and the advent of buzzfeed style lists.

> "[A theses is] about committing oneself to a task that seems big and impossible."

Kind of along the same lines as the short attention span comment above, but it does seem tough to organize your thoughts and produce a non-trivial document. Or in the case of a lot of people here, the seemingly big and impossible task of starting a company.