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Comment by f4stjack | Hacker News Reader

Let me tell you what I did to get a job with a philosophy (and a sociology m.a.) degree:

- took a programming specialist course (this is how they are calling it over here)

- found a job

- profit

The fancy thing is philosophy is not a technical profession, like medicine or engineering, and I dare say it does not have the aim of making its students to "get a job". You can write books and maybe be another Zizek but more often, you do not do that, or rather cannot do that because life wants you to find a job and get your own life ASAP.

Which sucks, sucks because if I am doing a job which is totally unrelated to the education I have taken, why did I lose all that time and money? To get a piece of paper?

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You think programming is unrelated to philosophy? If it was any good, you hopefully spent a lot of time learning how to break arguments into their constituent parts and follow them to their logical conclusions. You learned how to read closely, and how to write. In other words, you learned how to think.

I don't know why Americans seem so confused about the purpose of education, as if you're a failure if you don't leave school and proceed to do exactly what you were doing in school, except getting paid for it. The purpose of school is to is to turn people into intellectually nimble citizens of a democracy. Whatever you then go on to get paid to do, your education was only useless if it failed at that.

It has to do with the rising costs of a college education. If you or your parents are going to pay the equivalent of a single family home to a school for a four year degree, you had better have something concrete to point to at the end of it. "Intellectually nimble citizen of a democracy" does not cut it.

My point is that subject matter has little to do with preparing you for your career.

Edit: with certain things excepted, of course. I wouldn't want a doctor who didn't have the relevant degrees.

Actually, you haven't established guidelines for what would "cut it." 'Concrete' is extremely vague, so the ball is in your court there.

If you mean 'a degree that will guarantee me a job,' you are SOL there buddy. A dearth of engineers would mean rising unemployment for engineers. (We currently have a glut of unemployed lawyers, for god's sake, no reason that couldn't happen to computer scientists or mechanical engineers if a trend started).

Being able to communicate, reason, and argue better than 99.9% of my peers with traditional CS degrees is in fact a concrete advantage.

> The purpose of school is to is to turn people into intellectually nimble citizens of a democracy.

Nothing has any purpose except that which people use it for. If people want to use education for finding work, but in fact it turns them into nimble citizens but doesn't help with work, it's failing at the purpose people want to use it for.

Also, I think there's a real dearth of evidence that educated people are better citizens than slightly less educated people. I.e., that education causes delta civic-conscientiousness.

The history of philosophy is the history of people building things out of logic and then rushing to fix them when other people discover flaws in their logic. This is depressingly similar to programming and if anything demonstrates that humans are overall really bad at constructing anything out of logic that's large enough to be interesting and useful while simultaneously being sound enough to never break.

higher education -- a period in which someone (you, the university and/or the state) spends a lot of money to enable your education -- is a huge luxury. It's a totally fair question to ask "what are you going to do with your philosophy degree?". If you're deeply passionate about your subject, then I think you can justify pursuing education purely for its own sake. But that simply does not apply to the vast majority of people studying philosophy/history/sociology etc.

I could already write and think before university and I had all the mathematical tools that most people ever use in real life. University taught me how to write an academic essay of adequate quality, but I don't think this is an essential life skill.

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