“Working knowledge” here doesn’t mean a major in philosophy: it means a few credits. As for the cost of college being out of control, absolutely agreed; but this has complex causes, including slashes in state funding and predatory student loan practices.
We should fix these issues before we start complaining that it’s unrealistic to provide a well-rounded education for students.
I’m proposing that we put more of our society’s resources into education, in order to have a better body politic. The clusterfuck we’re in right now is due in no small part to a body politic that sucks at critical thinking and communication.
Engineers having no electives in their course load leads to engineers that lack a well-rounded education. That’s gotta get fixed.
Unfortunately, the biggest contributing factor is not the schools, it’s the parenting. When I was growing up, I was taught how to think, analyze, and communicate by my parents and brother first and foremost. Many of our students couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag, and that’s because their parents aren’t much (if any) better.
If we’re gonna break the cycle, it’s gonna be through public education. “It is easier to build strong children,” Frederick Douglass said, “than to repair broken men.” We got a world full of broken grownups who aren’t going to interrupt the cycle through their parenting. I don’t know another way to intervene.
And that starts in elementary school, not college. I would go so far as to argue that if the typical 18-year old has not developed an interest in literature, art, or music, forcing them into freshman level courses is not going to spark them into becoming well-rounded citizens.
Fixing K-12 education is an entirely different topic, and I won’t hijack this thread with my opinions on it.
Anecdotal, but for the past two weeks I have been trying to find a framer to build 2X4 interior walls in my pole barn. Have contacted six local contractors. Four didn’t respond, presumably too busy with their current workload. One said he’s booked for the next six months. The other said he would stop by sometime to take a look at it, but am doubtful that will happen. (I am seriously considering doing the job myself, but I have never done framing before. Time to watch a bunch of YT videos.)
I’ve done some framing and sheetrock. Framing wasn’t too bad, sheetrock sucks and I never got the hang of taping it. It looks like an amateur did it at best.
Note for self: and this isn’t really on topic. So anything further should be spun-off to a new thread.
How to Reply as a linked Topic
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
There’s a lot of hostility in this thread centred around making people pay for an education that won’t bring them money. This post is going to two extremes: a “good job” (by which I presume you mean well-paying rather than merely satisfying or useful to the community). The other is a “wooden shack” (but hey, homeownership). You’ve basically said here that poor people aren’t going to have a “happy and meaningful life,” which is classist bullshit. You can have a perfectly happy, meaningful, and fulfilling life if you’re poor. I don’t wish poverty on anyone, but the idea that your life is not as good if you’re poor is really offensive. Please talk to actual poor people sometime.
But look around you. We are in the political situation we’re in because people don’t value education, and don’t have critical thinking skills. This means they’re less able to see through propaganda and manipulative rhetoric. Would we be here if our educational system was better? Aren’t there reasons BESIDES their individual careers where you want your fellow citizens to have an education?
Mind you, a lot of that could (and should) be happening in high schools. I do agree that college isn’t for everyone, and that people shouldn’t be pushed into it, or pushed to stay, if it’s not the right path for them.
This is also happening with pharmacists. About 20 years ago there were endless stories about how there is a pharmacist shortage coming since all the pharmacists are retiring, and with all the baby boomers getting older we will need more pharmacists. But then several things happened at once:
The US roughly doubled the number of pharmacy schools and the number of graduates doubled
People started shifting to online pharmacies, which require less pharmacist labor
States started changing the ratios of pharmacists to pharmacy technicians, allowing the technicians to do more of the labor. Maybe instead of 2 technicians per pharmacist, now they allow 4 technicians per pharmacist
Labor saving devices came along
Etc. So now there are a lot of pharmacists who can only find temp jobs with poor benefits and job security.
The US has endless wealth, it just chooses not to invest it as well as it could or should.
We spend about 1.6 trillion on education each year in this country in between public and private investments. The trades are facing a shortage of maybe 2 million workers next decade, so putting a bit more money into apprenticeship programs would be wise, maybe more tax credits, subsidies and grants for these programs. But its not going to break the bank. Even if the company has to pay 50k a year in wages and benefits to an apprentice worker, that person also provides a lot of labor during their education.
I feel like you’ve set an artificial cap of how much the US can spend on education, and there is no artificial cap. We spend 1.6 trillion. That could easily be 1.4 trillion or 1.8 trillion if needed. The idea that we need to pull money out of traditional college to pay for the trades isn’t something we are required to do, we can do both. And even if a lot of the people with college degrees don’t actually use them, people with college degrees are still more well rounded citizens than people without them.
I guess my point is, I don’t have an estimate for how much it would cost to train the extra 2 million tradespeople we need, considering the apprenticeship programs may pay for themselves with all the labor the students provide while they are getting educated. But if we overtrain and train 3-4 million, that just floods the market and creates unemployment. But we could easily keep spending what we do on college, and provide grants and tax credits to expand apprenticeship programs.
The modern economy is so dynamic that job security and middle class stability are vanishing for large numbers of people. And I don’t know the answer.
The question of whether/why philosophy is important is, itself, a philosophical question.
Do you really not see the value in learning to think things through, to question things, to come up with rational arguments for positions? For thinking about how we should act, and why (ethics)? For thinking about what’s the best way to govern people and structure society (political philosophy)? Or the various other subjects philosophy explores?
Back when I was interning at a nonprofit and considering making a career of it, I lost track of how many older relatives and family friends made the inevitable joke “So you want to be poor!” Which always left me puzzled, seeing as my colleagues weren’t walking around in tattered clothes and scavenging in dumpsters.
I have and, in general, they’re stressed and unhappy that they are constantly living hand to mouth and on the verge of being homeless. Your quoted statement seems to imply that you are an expert on this subject. So, am I correct in assuming that you yourself are poor?
One of the biggest things I learned in my few philosophy courses (or, rather, in the philosophy woven into a few courses) is that very intelligent people can be thoughtful and rigorous and still arrive at irreconcilably different conclusions. Imagine if everyone grappled with that idea.
I don’t either, but I think this, all by itself, is why the emphasis on education-as-career-prep is misplaced. Education for an ever-shifting world means producing young people who are good at learning new things, adapting to new ideas, understanding different points of view, and handling complexity and uncertainty. Also, young people who have at least spent some time thinking about their own values and moral commitments, and what living well means to them. For example, “Is it better to have a well-paid job, or one that does a lot of good for society, or one that allows me to be creative and pursue my passions?” seems to be one of the main points of contention in this thread, but that’s because there isn’t a definitive right answer; it’s the kind of question that each student needs to think through and answer for themselves. IMO, to do that kind of thinking, it helps to be exposed to a lot of different stuff, art and books and ideas from the past as well as the present, as well as human beings with different perspectives and lifestyles.
But, of course, I’m a humanities professor so I would say all of that
The idea that there’s no room for electives in engineering majors got me curious (see! liberal arts education makes you curious!), so I went looking for sources.
Being a liberal arts major, I know how to evaluate sources, and Reddit’s not a great one; but being a liberal arts major, I know that qualitative data can be illustrative if not comprehensive. So let’s look at what such luminaries as Titsmuhgeeee has to say on Reddit:
Other engineers agree: the specific courses taken in their program were less important than learning how to think. I’m not seeing that bridges would crumble and the Internet would jam if engineers’ courseloads were leavened with a little bit of history, art, anthropology, and so on.
This notion that tradesmen and academics are separate probably stems from some of the snootiness that went into higher education in the first place. As far as I know, colleges started out as places for medieval noblemen to educate their offspring. They wouldn’t want to sully themselves with manual labor! And that snobbery has continued into the modern day.
They started out as places to educate clergy. As such, encouraging unworldliness, deep contemplation, and skepticism about a value system that prioritizes social status and the acquisition of wealth is baked in to the idea of a university. Many of those clergy were, in practice, younger sons of the nobility, because they were the ones who could afford to support a child who spent several years studying, and it was a good way of making sure your land didn’t have to be parceled out among multiple heirs. That being the case, there’s undoubtedly a certain amount of class snobbery baked in as well. But medieval universities were open to talented boys from the lower classes as well, and scholarships were available. It would have taken luck and connections – among other things, you would need to learn your letters first – but if, for example, you were the son of a laborer whose parish priest noticed you were bright and was willing to tutor you, it did happen.
No, I am not. I have spent a long time in places where money was very tight, and income security very low, but I have never been what I would describe as poor. My experience with real poverty is second-hand, and I must admit it’s entirely with people whose poverty was rural or in small villages, and who were embedded in a large family network. I have known few American urban poor people, one of whom has a PhD from the same place I got mine.
As I said, I wouldn’t wish poverty on anyone. I wasn’t saying that poverty was fun, nice, or easy, but that poor people’s lives were potentially happy and definitely meaningful.
