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."