Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Science education is about teaching people to THINK, and that's perhaps the most important thing you can teach a child to do. That's why there are so many different jobs open to people who do have a science degree. It's not the subject matter of the degree that matters; it's the fact that getting to degree has (hopefully!) taught you the skill of critical thinking, and that's a skill that will repay you for the rest of your life.
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Truly, and that faculty of critical thinking is what leads me to the opinion that there are Useful Sciences and Useless Sciences. That's not to say I'm arguing that the Useless Sciences are wrong, just that they essentially contribute nothing to truly important human progress. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is fine when you don't have truly pressing societal problems to solve, but it's like eating out every day when you can afford to pay your credit card bill. People in school can gain all the benefits of scientific, critical thinking and still focus on the things that really matter. Wasting time on archaeology, for example, is just that: a waste. That person with all that capacity for deductive reasoning and years of education could be doing something that really benefits society, like finding a cure for my daughter's diabetes instead of wasting their life digging useless holes in the ground so tourists will have some pottery shard to look at in a museum.