Sunday, May 25, 2014

The Real Value of a Liberal Arts Education

The real value is it actually teaches you to think and to make critical decisions and it teaches you to write. And writing forces you to make choices unless you want to sound like a blithering idiot.

Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined

Quote from Fareed Zaharia from today May 25th on CNN:

"When I begin to write, I realize that my "Thoughts" are usually a jumble of half baked incoherent
impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them."

 end quote from today's show.

No matter what you do in life you have to make decisions and to think in order to be successful. So, if a liberal arts degree is your first degree then likely you are going to want your second degree in your specialty when you go for your masters. So, a liberal arts degree is more useful if you also intend to get a master's degree, especially if you are going to work in the business or academic world.

Whatever you do in life your ability to write clearly, cleanly and quickly will often make the difference whether you are going to succeed or fail in whatever endeavor you are involved in in life.

And this is the true value of a liberal arts education in helping attain critical thinking by studying enough about all aspects of life to have something worthwhile to say in the first place.

And once you gain the habit of reaching out and studying something of everything, often you will continue to do this (for fun and survival both economic and personal) to keep you alive the rest of your life to 100 or more years of age.

The first advantage of a liberal education is:

1. Teaches you how to write
2. Teaches you how to speak and to speak your own mind.
3. Teaches you how to learn

Even though most of what you learn isn't that useful what you learn about learning and relearning throughout your life is priceless. Because learning is something you have to always do to actually survive well the rest of your life no matter what you do.

No comments: