Hi Ida:
I couldn’t agree more with your post about education. The course for which I did the Nietzsche lecture and post is a year-long, team-taught, interdisciplinary course for first year students that explores literature, history and philosophy. We often read and discuss things that one can’t easily directly link to a specific career, but that are useful for provoking critical thought about difficult and abstract issues. Students go in all sorts of directions after taking that course their first year, because we provide a grounding that is useful for many other pursuits. If you can read carefully, engage in thoughtful and respectful conversation, and write clearly (all the things we emphasize in the course), these are skills you can use in many different areas of your life later. I think these sorts of courses are crucial! But sometimes it’s a hard sell to people who think that education must be only training in specific skills that one can directly link to a particular career path (like business, or engineering, or computer science).