If you plan to major in philosophy, the American government will stop at nothing to prevent you.
“Become an engineer. Study science or math,” politicos of every rank and label say. “Don’t bother with the mushy humanities.”
In almost all places, they’ll try to convince to put down Proust and pick up an engineering textbook; in some states, they’ll incentivize you monetarily.
Now there are some issues here.
First, very few are competent to become engineers. You do not train engineers, they are educated. The effort is considerable and the time spent often exhausting. Harvard does not have an Engineering school, they call it something like Applied Technology. A small center hidden between the Law School and the main campus. Engineering is hard, just as hard as science. You just do not change from English or Fine Arts and get a degree i Chemical Engineering or Pure Math.
Second, the engineer always studies some amount of liberal arts; I did philosophy, history, psychology, logic etc. Thus the statement that the engineer or scientists is devoid of the arts is nonsense.
Third, to be successful I needed to understand the language and history of each country I worked in. That I learned prior to entry into the market. I understood Czech and Russian history, I understood the Greeks, I spoke Greek and Russian, but it was necessary to effect a good business relationship, and having an engineering degree I readily had the tools to learn what was needed.
They continue:
John Dewey, the United States’ most enduring educational scholar, saw the virtue of vocational education. But unlike today’s policymakers he also saw the necessity of the liberal arts. “The world in which most of us live is a world in which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do,” he wrote in his 1900 book, The School and Society. “But the great thing … is that [through a broad curriculum] each shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human significance.” A welder should be taught not just to weld, nor a tailor just to sow, nor a computer scientist just to type code. Each should be taught to appreciate his or her profession, appreciate why it is vital to the world around them. An education should satisfy and demystify, not just teach a single task that may be quite menial and, by itself, unsatisfactory.
First, Dewey was a socialist, and at times a Communist, after all he defended Trotsky, and his educational views were the antithesis of the Individualism that made America. He was the inventor of Group Think, the education of the masses to act as a mass. Dewey was an advocate of Trade Schools, training students in a collective manner to be "citizens", namely automatons in a collectivist society. One need just read Dewey, painful as it may be.
Second, somehow we have abandoned Trade School education, focusing on that goal of a liberally educated person. There was a time that one could be trained to be an electrician, a plumber, a carpenter. Then the Unions took over, drove the education and training out of the schools and embedded it in their collective and closed groups for self aggrandizement.
The Harvard student may most likely obtain employment due to connections, not necessarily due top an ability to be productive. I have found High School grads often more capable than most Liberal Arts grads. Perhaps the change in the current economy may make a shift to an education that leads to a productive and profitable "job". It really is not a bad idea.
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