The Carrot, the Stick, and Contention
(I wrote this on Saturday - )
You know what I'm talking about. You're involved in a conversation, something is said - a thing that pushed a button, unruffled your composure, and unleashed your passion. Later you reflect on the argument, or if you prefer, "heated discussion," and wonder what set you off and why you feel like you were emotional about the whole thing, all the while calming yourself down.
Today it came up that my undergraduate degree was in accounting. This was accompanied by a question of how I felt about it - the trigger which led me 45 minutes later wondering why my education touched the nerve it did.
I recalled a professor in Business Law, pausing in mid-lecture and commenting to us that we were in fact not receiving an education as students of business. We were learning a trade but that a real education would come from the liberal arts: history, philosophy, and art.
The response by the listeners to my memory of that professor was that "liberal arts" didn't really amount to jobs, the assumption being that one could know the particulars on something like the Churchill / Stalin relationship and it wouldn't translate to employment opportunities outside of teaching and scholarship for the sake of scholarship.
I shot back that the purpose of an education was to under gird thinking and that really the whole job world we live in has more to do with demonstrating an aptitude and being willing to learn and gain experience as a professional. An intelligent philosophy student, I said, would make as good a programmer as any. Of course, I continue, such a person may look at a cube farm and decide that they had better leave that employee 298289 status to someone else and spend time considering and reading about a concept like determinism or natural theology.
At which point I'm frustrated. I'm unhappy about how we do politics here. I'm unhappy about entertainment. I'm unhappy about dialogue. It's a reflection of culture and education.
But a step back from that I think it's a sensitive topic because I wonder at my education. I'm past the point of thinking that studying accounting was a waste; point in fact it has come back as much as I've tried to avoid it. However I do wish that instead of just obsessing about how I'd get a job or work at an office, I'd thought to myself: "What is the nature of God? What is the nature of Man? What is the purpose of Government?" and then thought about studying the liberal arts that would give me that life understanding rather than knowing how to calculate annuities or transfer depreciable assets in a corporate merger. In either case I'd probably be where I am now, but each lends a different understanding during the journey.
9:00:19 PM 
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