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Comment by carlob | Hacker News Reader

> We spend a lot of time giving high-school students a general, liberal arts education, but I think there's room in secondary education, at least for highly motivated students, to drill deeply into one particular domain.

I don't know if I agree, I think it's very important to have a well rounded education by the time you come out of high school. I, for one, am very grateful to have been exposed to philosophy, literature (in more than one language), art. All stuff that I probably would not have chosen for myself. You have all of your life to specialize in a domain, what's the rush?

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I haven't chosen a side here, but it seems like one could just as easily ask "You have all of your life to be educated in philosophy, literature, and art, what's the rush?"

I'd grant literature and the arts, but philosophy is something that (to me) seems to be important to learn early on. Both in the sense of knowledge of different schools of philosophy, but also in the sort of thinking required to develop and understand philosophical thoughts in general.

I'll put that in the same camp as history and political science. The importance, in my view, is on understanding the world at large and (direct/indirect democracy-centric) being able to vote based on actual thought out reasoning instead of the sort of fear based and reactionary voting we often see.

Even studying specific schools of philosophy or periods of history in detail can likely be postponed. But a lack of even basic familiarity leaves people sufficiently uninformed and misguided that you end up with folks like my coworker who'd gladly hand all encryption keys to the US gov't in exchange for a (possibly) more secure future.

Why is it important to be well rounded?

Makes it easier to roll.

It isn't that there is intrinsic value in the various other subjects themselves, the value comes from having a shared core of knowledge / experience that can be used when interacting with others. Just two examples from recent conversations -- once I used an example that had a comparison to a canary in a coal mine. Several people in the group never heard of that phrase, so I had to explain what it meant. Another time I used the expression "Tilting at Windmills", and again that was lost on some people.

So yes, it is important to be well rounded, just to have common base for general conversations.

But surely, if the only need is common core of shared knowledge - and since most people forget most of what they learned in school - maybe just teaching a highly condensed form of this knowledge, in a highly memorable fashion would be better ?

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