I’m trying to help a friend get something like a university education. That is, we are not expecting a certificate from it or anything else that would directly aid in employment opportunities, and obviously it would be missing much of the classroom setting experience (debating with other students, etc.). But, as I explained it, the goal of a liberal arts program (like your average university) is really just to get your mind thinking in terms of asking questions, coming up with ideas/thesises/hypotheses, doing research, and presenting findings and/or backing up your idea. And that the use of history, economics, literature, etc. are all just material upon which one could perform those activities, besides perhaps allowing you to find interest in some particular topic and expanding your general knowledge.
So I’m looking for books, TED talks, documentaries, etc. that offer information on a variety of topics that are both interesting to know and that are likely to stimulate one into further, creative thought. The emphasis should be on books, since those are better for building courses around.
Feel free to recommend books that you think are “must-read”, but which assume that one has certain background knowledge going into it. Just please make a note to that effect and, if you can, recommend books that might be a good introduction to the subject, so that we can go through those first.
And feel free to recommend works which are controversial. I don’t have a review board over me, so I don’t have to constrain myself to text books which have been approved by the State of Texas.
You could check out MOOCs offered by Cousera and/or Edx. There a lot of undergraduate level courses and some on the Master’s level. Wide variety of topics available.
Pick one topic. Then go online and find a school that offers degrees in that topic. You can go to the course catalog online and look at the course descriptions and often, find out the names of the textbooks. Then you can get those exact textbooks online at like, half.com (I guess).
I wanted to chef school. But I couldn’t afford to drop out of my life and go back to school full time and the local college offered a course, but it was full-time daytime only. It was not a program set up for returning students intending to work their way through. So I thought about it a bit more and decided that what I really wanted was to improve my knifing skills and learn how to make a really great crab bisque. So I studied chefs demoing knifing skills on YouTube and then I went to the Culinary Institute’s website and found their list of required textbooks. I didn’t need the most recent edition – just something to study. I ordered an older edition for pennies on the dollar and learned about a lot more other than just bisque.
I did the same thing with art history because I found myself interested in the topic but I am not inclined to go back to school or seek another degree. But I want to do more in depth research other than reading a Wikipedia page.
So narrow down the topics. Come up with a list of authors that are known experts in those fields. Buy their books used online.
ETA: I would also recommend that anyone who hasn’t should take a course in logic, which is usually presented in universities as a philosophy class. Critical thinking skills, IMO, hinge upon an understanding of logic and logical fallacies. You might even put in a call to a local university philosophy department and ask for recommendations of beginner-level logic texts.
My plan was to go through each of the fallacies, ideally using the original studies that demonstrated the existence of them to illustrate each. I was also going to, eventually, have her register and participate in some GD threads. (Personally, I think I probably have gotten more of a University education out of the SDMB and GD in particular, than I did in university.)
We’ll be looking into actual courses, either online or available locally, but for the purposes of this thread I had really been looking for works which are informative and thought-provoking. Much of education has much of the former but little of the latter, hence my looking for individual recommendations of particular works.
Very good advice. Narrowing your field of study is an effective approach for self learning. You will attain a degree of proficiency in a single subject faster than a shotgun approach and from that point you will be in a better position to approach new subjects. Exposure to a narrow field offers just as many opportunities to do “thinking in terms of asking questions, coming up with ideas/thesises/hypotheses, doing research, and presenting findings and/or backing up your idea.”
A similar book I’m currently reading that might also be of interest to the OP’s friend is How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg. This one isn’t so much about logical fallacies as it is about how a poor understanding of math can lead one astray. There’s also some (brief, not too technical, and IMHO interesting) information about the history of math and the types of problems mathematicians tackle in their work.