Thursday, April 14, 2005

A Liberal Education

Charles Sanders Peirce, 1903:

"If I were asked to give a young gentleman a liberal education in 100 lessons, I should devote 50 lessons to teaching some branch, no matter which, thoroughly- say perhaps to boiling an egg- or at any rate so nearly thoroughly that the young man should begin to know what thoroughness really means, and should never thereafter be guilty of the ridiculous conceit of fancying that he knew English, for example. The other fifty I would distribute as follows: three lessons should teach the science of mathematics, one esthetics, two ethics, one metaphysics, one psychology, one the living and dead languages, one history, geography, and statistics ancient and modern, one dynamics and physics, one chemistry, one biology, one astronomy, geology, and physical geography, one law, divinity, medicine and the other applied sciences, and the remaining 36 should be devoted to logic. Thereupon I would give him a certificate to the effect that he was a more truly educated man than two-thirds of the doctors of philosophy the world over, and this certificate would have the singularity of being strictly true."

5 comments:

Marco Parigi said...

I was just reading Jenny's Procrastination Page , where she was commenting that try as she might to self google as it were, Jenny's Procrastination Page was just not coming up. Now it wasn't as if she was looking for someone who likes to make words up, or anotherblog with a current guitar obsession. My comment would be to pick some choice phrase such as "Jenny's Procrastination Page" and use it as the title of the blog in question and then get as many other bloggers to link to that page using the same phrase. This way, Jenny's Procrastination Page will no longer be lost in cyberspace, and all that anyone would have to do is type the words Jenny's Procrastination Page into their favourite search engine and they would find the perfect page to procrstinate with.

Dr Clam said...

You are a wicked, devious, man, Young Marco...

Marco Parigi said...

No - I am just a harmless comment spammer. Just think, if our web sites were more popular we'd be getting dozens of irrelevant comments on them, from various bots etc. I wonder if it will work in this case?

Dr Clam said...

I'm not sure if you can leave html in the 'things about me' bit of the JCU alumni page- it might be worth having a look...

Jenny said...

Theres a JCU alumni page? Knowledge of this probably came from one of the emails that I looked at, went "not necessary for my current survival" and deleted.