Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I dunno. The philosophy major might be a fine conversationalist as he prepares your light roast java for you.
My kids were shocked growing up when they learned that I was a lawyer rather than an historian. I told them that I was an historian who liked my family to eat on a regular basis.
Liberal education is just that. Unless you have a vocation to teaching or research, it is education for your leisure time. Liberal arts and mechanical arts. Both have value.
One problem we have in this country is half-assed efforts at liberal education forced on people for whom the marginal benefit is nil (or negative due to opportunity costs), often taught by people without apposite subject training. You need to teach the young to read, write, and sum and teach those you can the fundamentals of American history, geography, and civics.
IMO, in adolescence (14-18), about 40% of the manpower in education should be devoted to academic subjects, 40% to vocational subjects, and 20% to basic and remedial education, with most students employed p/t. Some students might be cross-enrolled, devoting (say) 75% of their time to academics and 25% to vocations, but most would be in high schools which did one or the other.
Tertiary schooling (ages 18 and above) should be occupational and professional schooling, for the most part, and 48 credit degrees one might wager would suffice for most occupations. Exceptions might be engineering, medicine and peri-medical occupations, veterinary medicine, the senior grades of clinical and school psychology, and the most intricate subdisciplines in law. Some occupational and professional schools might require preparatory certificates in academic subjects of varying length (anywhere from 3 credits to 60 credits), with some also requiring some training in business or technology. What you absolutely do not need is the bloated and haphazardly assembled baccalaureate degree.
As recently as 1962, only about 4% of each cohort in Britain received a university degree (three years of study of a discrete subject). As recently as 1969 in this country (and after decades of expansion in higher education), the share of each cohort receiving a baccalaureate degree in an academic subject was about 12% (when majors amounted to a minimum of 42 credits in a discrete subject, if I’m not mistake). Imagine we had a situation where 12% of each cohort had some tertiary education in academic subjects, studied just one subject, spent an average of two academic years so devoted, and received a degree for each academic year they completed (with only 4% staying for a full three years). I don’t think the labor market or public discussion would be in worse shape than is the case today.
Maybe Tito Edwards can figure out why most of my posts start out with massive boldface lettering. It’s not anything I do.
My daughters went to school for a REAL purpose. CPA,MD, and graphic designer. My son went into the Marines to improve himself. Our family learned to EARN first and use the talents given to them by GOD. Other interests are fine but are to be referred to as HOBBIES.
As we all know, man is a composite being of body and soul.
Practical knowledge is essential or the body’s needs are unmet or enters into servitude to meet them.
Spiritual and other “impractical” knowledge is essential to nourish the soul (it’s well being is more crucial). A malnourished soul leads to evil and perdition.
Neglect either of these types of knowledge at your peril.
That said, avoid as many formal and expensive certifications as possible. So many are not worth the paper in which they are printed!
Jordan Peterson made a good point about why young people (particular those from a privileged backgrounds) get a Liberal Arts degree. Basically it teaches them to argue and communicate well. To win people to their side. It equips them with the ability to talk as though they appear to be the smartest person in the room, which makes others perceive them as such. It has nothing to do with the ability to provide, earn a living or be contributing members of society. Those people then pay the skilled to work for them. It’s deliberate by design.
Ezabelle:
Socrates had that out with the sophists of his day and paid with his life for it. For him: these arts were for seeking the truth and living a noble life. One strain of the liberal arts led through the schools of rhetoric in the Late Roman Empire, but another became the foundation of the Catholic universities of the Middle Ages: to seek the truth “that will make you free”. Unfortunately (and missing this was a flaw with the old Platonists), no amount of learning, even about the truth, can inoculate you against Original Sin, and power (even of the intellect) tends to corrupt.