Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: AriOxman
If I am an engineering major, then the University's job is to make me a good engineer, not teach me humanities.

Ari, to make you an engineer is the task of a vocational school, not of a university. The university said that engineering is your major, not the totality of your education; it was honest in its advertising thus. Being an engineer you should know the difference: 60% is a major portion of something but not the whole of it.

67 posted on 10/30/2002 10:08:59 PM PST by TopQuark
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 31 | View Replies ]


To: TopQuark
Your arguements are equally applicable to LA/Humanities majors... How can one accurately practice law, consider legislation for, write against, or asess the enviromental studies of modern technology without a single engineering course?
70 posted on 10/30/2002 10:15:24 PM PST by Krafty123
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 67 | View Replies ]

To: TopQuark
Ari, to make you an engineer is the task of a vocational school, not of a university.

Beautifully put, and true. Nobody gets an education at university anyhow, they only get a start at one, and the tools to pursue one if they're so inclined. The difference is that a liberal arts graduate who enters his job market asserting that he has a mastery of, say, cultural anthropology, will receive a treatment very different from an engineering or science graduate who has the temerity to state the same thing about his or her field. The latter, at the very least, will receive a boot in a rather sensitive area and an admonition to shut up and listen to someone who's actually done it.

There isn't much I really like about W.E.B. DuBois - he was a communist, a racist, and an anti-American emigrant, but as an educator he did get one thing really right, IMHO:

Our purpose is not to turn men into carpenters, it is to turn carpenters into men.

So let me lighten up a little - it is not impossible for anyone to obtain a well-rounded education with enough skull-sweat, but it is much easier for a physics graduate to grasp Aristotle than it is for a sociology graduate to grasp Einstein. Neither is easy.

76 posted on 10/30/2002 10:27:59 PM PST by Billthedrill
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 67 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson