[nickik]

By definition, that stuff is things that you don't use in your job, as otherwise you WOULD have learned it eventually.

And by extension, I assume he means things that he wouldn't have learned just going to a job in the first place. Many people learn how to do laundry in collage, but that they would have to learn for any form of independence.

So what we are left with are random intellectual pursuits that at best have a marginal effect on your job.

I love learning useless stuff. I'm happy to talk about intellectual history of economcis, or mongolian history. However wouldn't I think its a good idea to force 95% of society to learn about the difference between the New and the Old German Historical school just so they learn something new.

We are talking about a system that costs society a significant amount its resource IF the best argument you can come up with to defend that system is "I was forced to learn some random stuff that I wouldn't otherwise have explored and that was fun for me", then we need to seriously question the resource allocation of society. Sound to me more like a Kindergarten for young adults, and most parents wouldn't pay 50k a semester for it.

[jjeaff]

First of all, $50k a sememster would be the top 1% most expensive colleges out there. Probably more like 0.1%.

Secondly, learning things that are not specific to ones job is the definition of well rounded and while some companies may only want socially inept specialists that can do nothing else, society is much better when it is made up of well rounded individuals.

You sound a lot like high schoolers taking math classes. We are -never- going to use this in real life. No, you probably won't, but the point is learning how to learn, organize, study and become more intelligent in general.

[nickik]

> First of all, $50k a sememster would be the top 1% most expensive colleges out there. Probably more like 0.1%.

Fair enough its pretty expensive either way.

> Secondly, learning things that are not specific to ones job is the definition of well rounded and while some companies may only want socially inept specialists that can do nothing else, society is much better when it is made up of well rounded individuals.

First of all that is a total straw-men. Most social education happens in live, not in school. Going to extra classes of Plato will not make you better socially educated, more so then going to play basketball or volunteer at a soup kitchen.

Second of all, if you actually look at the evidence of how people hire you will notice that the idea of 'well rounded' isn't high on the list, no matter how much people like to talk about it.

> You sound a lot like high schoolers taking math classes. We are -never- going to use this in real life. No, you probably won't, but the point is learning how to learn, organize, study and become more intelligent in general.

Maybe the high schooolers in math class have a point. Because this 'learning how to learn theory' that you are making, has been the argument for 100+ years, yet in all that time, people who have studied these question simply can't find any truth to that claim. You actually learn what you learn.

There is a whole chapter in 'The Case against Education' on how every generation of social scientists working on education want to find that effect, but nobody ever does.