Choosing a College for a Balanced Education | Opinion - The Epoch Times

So, you want to go to college. You want to acquire the knowledge, skills, and virtues you will need to enter and succeed in your chosen profession, let’s say one in a scientific, technical, or mathematical field, notes Paul Adams, professor emeritus of social work at the University of Hawai‘i and was a professor and associate dean of academic affairs at Case Western Reserve University.

Jordan Peterson at a public rally on free speech at the University of Toronto, October 11, 2016.
Photo: Quist via creativecommons.org

You also want to build on what you learned in high school, your family, and faith community about what is worth wanting.

In addition to the technical knowledge of your field, you are open to learning from your tradition and culture about the true, the good, and the beautiful. You want to explore what it means and takes to flourish as a human being, to discern what is worth living for, and how to look at life through moral and spiritual eyes. You want to grow in such virtues as intellectual humility and love of truth, charity and fair-mindedness in engaging with ideas different from your own, practical judgment, courage, self-mastery, self-criticism, and justice.

But, even leaving aside personal and cost considerations, finding a college where you can grow both in the knowledge and skills of a profession and also in the humanities is not so easy.

Some small private or faith-based colleges focus by design on the humanities, following a Great Books curriculum that includes Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton but from which you will learn nothing about probability, advanced calculus, and statistics or their use in financial risk assessment. They provide excellent education in the humanities but little or no practical preparation in the kind of profession that interests you...

A more specialized, technical STEM field, such as advanced mathematics or actuarial science, is less ideological and also turns out to be more practical than such practical fields as education, social work, or psychology. Those latter fields have become so ideological as to be, in important areas, worthless in providing practical use or guidance to professional practitioners.

For example, the highly politicized American Psychological Association recently produced what it called “Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.” As clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson argued, it is unscientific, evidence-free, and incoherent propaganda against men and masculinity. Furthermore, it lacks any guidelines for practice, so it’s practically worthless.
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Source: The Epoch Times