Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

An American liberal arts education is about way more than acquiring particular technical skills; it's about learning how to analyze a space of competing claims and discovering novel ways of combining them to produce insight. In English courses we would sit around and discuss the various ethnic and historical factors that led to particular narratives. We wouldn't just derive mathematical functions in college, we would derive ideas themselves, and then analyze how we came to derive those. I guarantee that these are the same kinds of conversations that lead to truly revolutionary technological ideas and spawn countless brilliant business decisions.

Sure, one can learn how to solve various technical problems on ones own, but where will one get the skills to actually define problems in the first place? (hint: you can't get it by watching lecture videos, not totally)

Completely agree. Not to belabor the point (this topic comes up on HN very often), but college was such an eye opening experience for me, that I feel like our world would be a better and more enlightened place if everyone had the chance to go. It's not just about learning to program (which you can do on your own and on the job), but about challenging your "beliefs" and opinions (which you might find are simply wrong).

Maybe you can learn all of this outside of class, but being forced to challenge your world view is a powerful thing.

Ignorance is one of the biggest problems in this world.

I'm not sure I understand. In what way did college force you to challenge your worldview that reading a lot of books, magazines and Web sites would not?

By making me read a lot of books, magazines, and web sites!

Seriously, I know I never would have read any of the stuff I read in class, and I can bet most people wouldn't have either.

Now, we certainly aren't arguing that it's too expensive to get this experience. I would completely agree with that.

>> Sure, one can learn how to solve various technical problems on ones own, but where will one get the skills to actually define problems in the first place?

There hasn't always been colleges, some people along the way have obviously developed these skills independently. I don't see why I couldn't do the same if I wanted.

CS and engineering are not LA curriculums.

Traditional CS is a liberal art to many people, just like Mathematics is.

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