My daughter's education

My daughter has chosen her courses for grade 12, and is looking ahead to what she will take when she gets to University. She is very good at all of the sciences, pure and otherwise, and up until a little while ago she thought she would like to enter the medical profession. However, for various reasons, including her perception that many doctors don't have a social life, and her perception that the medical world is intellectually far too limited in scope, she has decided to follow a different direction.

About 6 months ago, she started asking me questions about a General Bachelor of Arts degree. I have told her that the purpose of such a degree was to introduce the student to a wide range of human knowledge: for one to graduate, a certain number of subjects need to be drawn from the Humanities, Social Sciences, Fine Arts, Sciences, and English. A graduate from a such a program knows much about many things, and is truly 'educated' in a traditional sense. I also told her not to listen to what Mother Culture is currently whispering in her ear. Indeed, a general trend seems to consider education as more of a 'skill', like dentistry, or accountancy, and something into which a student can enter immediately after graduation. However, this idea is a relatively new one in our culture. Historically, an educated person knew much about what it is to be human in a particular society at a particular time. I hold this traditional view, that while pharmacy is critically important to society today, a pharmacist is probably not truly 'educated'. He or she has not had to and probably has not taken courses in Philosophy (in which a person learns how to think critically), Political Science (what it is to be a political animal), Economics (how economies and business works), History (where we have come from, and perhaps where we are going), Art History (the compendium of our culture's art to this point), Sociology (how society functions), Anthropology (what it means to be human from a cultural and physical standpoint), Psychology (how our minds work), Geography (how the earth works), Biology (the study of life), Physics (the study of the physical world), Religious Studies (what religion is all about), and on and on. A General BA requires that one learns the basics of just about every human intellectual endeavor, and by doing so it broadens one's scope, makes one more tolerant, perhaps more humble, and in the end a better citizen in society. If she wants, she can learn a 'skill' after she is done her BA, and with her background, she will pick it up easily, quickly, and will flourish in it.

As it stands at this point, and even though society continually tells her that she would be wasting her time taking general arts courses, nevetheless she would like to take a BA. As her father, my heart sings. If our roles as parents are to prepare our children to flourish in our culture when it is time for them to spread their wings, there is nothing I can think of that will prepare her better for what is to come. By doing this she will become truly educated in a way that only the super elite of society - the wealthy,connected, male aristocrats - could be even 100 years ago. She will stand on the shoulders of giants, learning things that remain difficult to access and learn outside of the regime of a BA program. Our culture will pass her a precious torch.