" “some kinds of programs promote intellectual growth more than others” And that is clearly your bias. What are they? Psychology is a fine major, but so are many others. I was a sociology major. I enjoyed it. I doubt that would make the cut for you .My kids were engineering majors. There is no way I could have gotten through their “programs.” The whole liberal arts automatically equals superiority in terms of critical thinking, intellectual growth just is a puzzle to me."
It’s a puzzle to you because you want it to be. Nobody is expressing anything in this thread through use of hieroglyphics. You’re making it much harder than need be. W/o even flipping to page 11 of this thread, I’m sure Hanna, or someone, has already written that sociology is just fine. That engineering is just fine. Engineering forces discipline and critical thinking. No doubt about it. Sociology is as much a member of the liberal arts as English. Fine and fine again. Where on earth did your comment about psychology come from. It’s as if you don’t read the posts all the way through.
The point, which seems to elude you for reasons that elude me, is that the closer one gets to job training, the less it tends to be about developing yourself intellectually. The further away you get from ideas and interpreting events and manipulating data and solving complex problems and writing your ideas and reading and understanding the ideas of others, and the closer you get to learning how to complete a specific task, the less ‘liberal’ or intellectually enhancing your education happens to be. Ideally, the undergraduate years ought to be focused more on intellectual growth and less on job training. Hopefully that first job out of college isn’t what you’re going to be for the rest of your life.
In sociology, I’m sure you studied all manner of concepts that stretched your brain. I’m sure you had to take some amount of statistics coursework, which presumes some math behind it, and thus stretched your brain in terms of quantitative thinking. You probably also surveyed a lot of political and socio-economic ideas and histories, as well as a heck of a lot of psychology. How on earth could anyone say you’re not educated?
Really focus in on Hanna’s med school example. It sums up the issue nicely. There are, by turns, intellectually challenging aspects to med school, and then, because doctors “do” stuff, there are vocational aspects to it. You gotta learn to sew skin - gross, but necessary. You practice it on a pig’s leg. It’s a task, and an education of sorts. But it’s not intellectual in the ways I described your sociology work.
Engineering is probably a lot like med. school. A lot of it - most of it - is very intellectually demanding. Maybe there is some practical side to the curriculum - I don’t know. But I know I’ve never met a dumb engineer who isn’t able to think outside of his immediate area of expertise. That is the hallmark of the educated person.
