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To: Senator_Blutarski
I'm approaching 60 and a little old fashioned, but I don't believe college should be exclusively for "vocational training". I went to college to get a "liberal education" in the classical sense...

Thanks for posting that. Way too many people on FR see college in narrow terms. If the degree doesn't get you a specific job, many think it is worthless.

To them, college is just a high-falutin' trade school.

80 posted on 09/11/2010 3:06:51 PM PDT by OldPossum
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To: OldPossum

Why can’t you do both (learn a useful skill like engineering) while learning to think in the liberal sense? Such thinking should have been going on throughout your schooling. I would put my experiences in high school Honors English and Debate up against anything that I could learn in college from the liberal arts. Granted I am an engineer, and I never took an English class in college. I did take sophomore and junior level Communications classes as a freshman, and I was far from impressed by the Communications and other liberal arts majors.

The engineers at Purdue viewed our liberal arts classes as opportunities to boost our GPA. My hardest liberal arts class by far in college was my engineering ethics class (an optional course) which was taught by a wonderful liberal professor (two of my best professors have been intellectually honest liberals). My ethics professor still makes me think about whether we should have a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty.


110 posted on 09/11/2010 8:44:19 PM PDT by exhaustguy
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