Too many people today consider universities to be employment training grounds (in addition to 4-year resorts, of course), but I'm still of the belief that a university education should open your mind, broaden the scope of your thoughts:
The ideas you encounter, consider, and adopt shape the kind of person you become. Liberal education is not about helping you sound impressive at snooty parties. It’s about you becoming a particular kind of person: reflective, analytical, and capable of sound evaluation and sound judgment. To this end, college means a few years marinating in the best that has ever been thought and written by the greatest minds our species has produced...
As Russell Roberts points out in his excellent book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life, the story’s endurance suggests that it addresses transcendent questions about what it means to live well. That we’re still reading it suggests we don’t have a perfect answer. Furthermore, reading the classics helps us see how our original questions, new insights, and unique issues … aren’t. The existential questions that seem so unique to our day and age are questions people have wrestled with for millennia. There is nothing new under the sun...
It is said that you are the average of the five people with whom you spend the most time, so we need to choose wisely. In the English Standard Version, 1 Corinthians 15:33 says, “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company ruins good morals.’” The New International Version says, “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character.’” The King James Version puts it this way: “Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.” You’re reading Plutarch, Dostoevsky, Eliot, and Shakespeare not because they will teach you specific technical skills useful for the job someday, but because they’re good company—the kind of company that will come to your aid and offer wise counsel every time you have an important decision to make.
It's not just the reading, either, although in required classes at West Point we read Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Kant, Mill, and even Marx.
It was a lot of work, up to 21 units per semester, but I'm very grateful for the broad education I received at West Point. Not just math, history, and literature, but engineering, philosophy, sociology, and sciences. Our education was designed to give us a wide view so that we would better be able to adapt to different environments. I have found it useful more times than I can remember.
2 comments:
Interesting post. Don't know if I told you, just finished Admiral Hyman Rickover: Engineer of Power. I knew of his influence, hell basically founding of the nuclear navy, but I didn't know was his influence of the navy in large. Rickover was very forceful in moving the USNA from a broader liberal arts college to more of a focused science/engineering curriculum. Don't know how much as survived in the decades since (he died in 86).
No question, even with a MS in engineering or science, you need to be well rounded to be effective. Bask in the mid-80s (87 as I recall) I remember reading an article that hard science degrees get you more money in the short term, long term liberal arts degree holders made more money. I can only assume they may not be in the tech track, but they will go into the management track, and be more able to work with people.
As far as having to read Marx, excellent. It's wise to study the thinking of your enemies.
That's what Sun Tzu said.
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