I attended Berklee College of Music in Boston and received a bachelor's degree with a concentration in Music Education there. While I was there and periodically after graduating, she would ask questions like "What kind of liberal arts classes are offered there?". My answer was always the same: "Well, just like at any other conservatory, in order to make room for all the music classes, it's essentially a regular liberal arts degree with 1/3 of the liberal arts content carved out of it. The rest is music". So that meant a year-long class in Western Civilization, English (which I tested out of, thank goodness), a bit of foreign language, some applied math (a very tough course in acoustics, taught by a speaker designer from Bose...I almost didn't survive that one), and, um, zero science requirements! This was the same for anyone seeking a Bachelor's, any major.
Then the Music Education major requirements themselves (it's a five-year program): an amazing year-long course in Art History, taught by a curator at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and spent largely in its private collections, behind the scenes; another in Music History; basic psychology and child psychology; a few electives; and then all the music courses (theory, harmony, sight reading/ear training, counterpoint, arranging, ensembles, etc., etc.) and classroom methods courses, culminating in a semester spent student teaching at a local public school (in my case, middle school and high school levels), under the supervision of the teachers at the public schools assigned to me and a professor from the college.
Trying to make her understand that "there ain't nothing in life ain't a tradeoff" on this issue, or any other, was futile. Understanding that a conservatory degree is a conservatory degree and just leaving it at that was never good enough: "Well, at Columbia, we studied the classics, as well as foreign language and math and science and English, in addition to my major, which was in Renaissance and Reformation History". (yes, mom...I know). Actually she took a class in statistics for her math requirement because she didn't think she could handle the tougher stuff; she took an Earth Science class instead of chemistry ot physics for the same reason. But it was all Ivy League --- that's the important part. By contrast, the fact that Berklee is, hands down, the most prominent conservatory of contemporary music in the world seemed to never make a dent in her consciousness.
"And then there was that affair I had with that professor of Greek and Latin..." (Yes, she was his student at the time. Yes, she got a great grade. Yes, mom, I know. I've heard it; I could recite it myself).
So basically, the following steps were always observed:
a) ask me about my conservatory degree, as if she didn't already know the answer
b) slam my conservatory degree in comparison with her Highly Superior degree in a Highly Superior major from a Highly Superior Ivy League school
c) launch into a riff about her 1950s-era romantic exploits with a man twice her age
This actually qualifies as some of the more civil discourse we'd "enjoy".
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