George Henry Lewes Quote
First answer. I don’t know.
College isn’t for everyone. It can be an insurmountable burden from which you may not recoup your investment. A technical trade or an apprenticeship may afford a person with the opportunity to mature and achieve some degree of financial responsibility. It would give them a chance to find mentors in areas of interest. Just as a general education will give one good overall view of the world past and present.
College is not the place to go to find yourself. To a large extent you must know yourself prior to going into the unknown.
Just like a cook does prep work before preparing a dinner or a builder makes plans, drafts blueprints subcontracts with his subs before he digs his footings.
Children need a good foundation, direction and redirecting.
Letting a student find himself in college like pre 1970 may have worked then. I am not sure it works now.
I liked the following article.
I enjoyed my liberal arts studies particularly history and political science. But I think my best education was high school. However mentoring was lacking there.
In college I found mentors in physics and cytology as well as french. By that I mean teachers of whom I asked help.
Tell you children to ask questions and seek mentors who are more successful and experienced. Don’t be intimidated by another’s success.
” Throughout history it has been common for people to study subjects with no immediate relationship to their intended professions. In antiquity, education was intended to enrich students’ lives. Pragmatic benefits such as rhetorical ability, logical reasoning and business skills were welcome byproducts of a good education. The phrase “liberal arts” comes from the Latin word liberalis, meaning “worthy of a free person.” A liberal-arts education gives someone the freedom to participate fully in civic life.
We should update the liberal arts to take into consideration the realities of the modern world. Software permeates nearly everything. All students, no matter their major, should develop a basic familiarity with coding tool sets such as true-false statements, also called “Booleans,” and if-then or conditional statements.
But coders gain, too, from studying the liberal arts. “The value of an education in a liberal arts college,” said Albert Einstein, “is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” Constructing arguments based on historical evidence or studying rhetoric to improve one’s ability to persuade an audience has obvious ap-plications. Interdisciplinary approaches to solving problems are crucial to addressing modern challenges such as cultivating relationships in an increasingly digital world and creatively integrating new technologies into different sectors of the economy.
So when parents ask themselves “What course of study will help my child get a job?” they shouldn’t think only about how the work-force operates today but how it will operate 10 or 20 years down the road. Though no one knows for sure exactly what the landscape will look like, we can be certain that critical thinking will still have value. And in that world, so will a liberal-arts degree. “
Excerpted from:
If You Want Your Child to Succeed, Don’t Sell Liberal Arts Short