Get a traditional liberal education; it is the only thing that will do you any good.
This is hard; a liberal education is no easy thing to get, and not everybody wants you to have one. However, in times of rapid change, it is paradoxically more useful to immerse yourself in the basics and the classics than to try to keep up with the latest developments and hottest trends. You can be almost 100% sure that the hot theories making waves in academia today will be forgotten or superseded in twenty years — but fifty years from now people will still be reading and thinking about the classic texts that have shaped our world. Use your college years to ground yourself in the basic great books and key ideas and values that will last.
Hear, hear! I repeat: Read the whole thing!
1 comment:
I SOOO wish I had done this. Now I find myself having to read the classics around the main books for my research. This leads to reading highly abridged versions and introductions, skimming just to get the main ideas, etc. It's no substitute for actually reading and carefully considering the primary sources, but time is limited.
If I won the lottery, as soon as I had invested the winnings so that I could live off my investment returns, I think I would spend a year going through a Great Books program. St. Johns has a one-year MA program that seems to be a condensed version of their 4-year program, and there are probably others as well.
*sigh*
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