When asked whether young people today should go to school to gain specific job skills, a high-level educator at a prestigious university said, “They should enroll in a liberal arts college so they can learn how to think.”<\/p>\n
This is the myth of the liberal arts education: that liberal arts teach you to think, but technical disciplines don’t.<\/p>\n
Well, as a B.S. chemical engineer, I can tell you that the assumption that a specialized or technical education does not teach you to think is wrong.<\/p>\n
Engineers, in particular, master problem solving skills that serve them in virtually every area of work and life.<\/p>\n
What a liberal arts education DOES do that a technical education doesn’t is make you better read and more well rounded.<\/p>\n
When I went to college in the 1970s, most majors required you to take only 8 or 9 courses in that subject out of a total of 32 courses required for an undergraduate degree.<\/p>\n
But as chemical engineers, 25 out of our 32 courses had to be math, science, and engineering … so yes, we were less well-rounded than the liberal arts majors.<\/p>\n
But you don’t need to go to college to become well read and well educated.<\/p>\n
You can do that by visiting your local library and becoming a voracious reader … for free … and save yourself $100,000 in tuition.<\/p>\n
Dear Reader, what kind of education do YOU have — technical or liberal arts?<\/p>\n
Which do you think serves a person better in today’s world, and why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When asked whether young people today should go to school to gain specific job skills, a high-level educator at a prestigious university said, “They should enroll in a liberal arts college so they can learn how to think.” This is the myth of the liberal arts education: that liberal arts teach you to think, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bly.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}