“The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.”

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