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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> Is that bad?

It depends on your point of view. Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons?

I found my philosophy classes quite enlightening. They were required for my degree in CogSci.

If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes.

Also, there are some majors that lead to professional school. English/Rhetoric are often majors of people going into law school for example.

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> Should college be a trade school or should it stick to it's roots of broadening one's horizons?

The term "liberal arts" means "free arts". The root of this term is that Athenian society was composed of a small class of free families and everyone else was a slave owned by those families. The free families were wealthy enough to afford a liberal education for their free sons.

Everyone else had to work.

Those are the roots of the liberal arts.

We have robots instead of slaves now. We, as a society, can afford to provide a liberal arts education to everyone. In fact, we already do, for grades 1-12. I think the main issue is that that education fails people who could progress through it faster (and those who need more time in certain areas).

The problem is that universities are neither trade schools nor a place to broaden your horizons. It is a way to get a credential that you can use to signal your worth on the job market.

If testing your skills was done outside of school GRE-style, would all these people who pay many thousands of dollars to get a diploma pay so much? I really doubt it.

>It is a way to get a credential that you can use to signal your worth on the job market.

What a sad state of affairs we find ourselves in that this attitude is common.

It brings up the old joke about being a philosophy major: "Two things to do with a Phd in Philosophy: 1. Teach. 2. Pose the question: ‘But do you know why you want fries with that?’"

College is an investment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. When you invest that much money, you should expect a ROI. If you can't even put roof over your head or eat with that investment, then it is really hard to say it was a good idea.

As a Philosophy major who has succeeded in tech, I think tech would be better off with more humanities people involved. Writing code isn't the hard part, when you are solving big problems.

You certainly add a useful perspective, I am sure. However, by working in tech you aren't doing philosophy, you are doing tech.

Philsophy majors are a common target for ridicule, but the fact of the matter is that corporations go out of their way to hire Philosophy majors to be problem-solvers of various types because they essentially have a degree in critical thinking.

They'd be better off hiring people with engineering degrees (non-software). That's applied critical thinking and creative problem solving all in one.

I really don't know why there's this insistence that humanities has a monopoly on teaching critical thinking.

What's wrong with software engineers? Surely there's a fair bit of critical thinking involved there, too?

I meant that if employers were looking for people who were adept at critical thinking and software developers didn't fit the bill (the original posters implication) that there was a category of people who would be even more adept at it than philosophers. Sorry if I was unclear.

You realize that there are different kinds of applied critical thinking, yes?

Someone that's good at critically analyzing software doesn't make them good at being able to understand why users might be drawn to a product. Nor does it make them able to design UI that won't frustrate the average user.

Humanities doesn't have a monopoly on critical thinking, but you'd be a fool to believe that it doesn't aid critical thinking. The best software engineers I've worked with were those that came from other professions whom could apply other ways of approaching a problem compared to others.

To put it bluntly, if you hire a bunch of engineers they will design a lightbulb that no one can figure out how to screw in.

"I'm a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed."

-- Bruce Lee

> If my school didn't have a philosophy major, it wouldn't have a philosophy department, and I would never have had those classes.

I went to an engineering school, the only majors were X Engineering, Business, and Nursing. Somehow, we had professors for the humanities classes, so I don't think a major is a requirement.

Philosophy is great, but it's not something you need to go into debt for. Did you learn anything in those classes that you couldn't have learned on your own via books and free lectures on YouTube, etc?

I think you're missing the point of college.

Anything you learn in college can be learned from a book or YouTube. The value of college is the curation the professor provides and the people you are doing it with.

>>Anything you learn in college can be learned from a book or YouTube.

That which can be learned by one-way communication from a book or video are not all that can be learned. Through dialogue and practice one may learn techniques of proofs in math classes, lab techniques in science classes, how to write and edit papers in humanities classes. All the practice that drama, art, or music majors do amplifies what they learn from their books. And so on.

The NFL wouldn't hire college football players who got all their learning from books or YouTube.

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