Obligations: Condemning and Redeeming

What's in an education? Being a college student, I sometimes ask myself why I'm taking classes on art history or Latin when my career plans necessitate the sciences only. It's easy to rant about the general education credits that every student of formal education is required to take.

Before this semester I was certainly one to condemn G.E.'s for the time they take from my specialty. However, I was struck this week with this remarkable thought: obligatory education is its condemning and redeeming quality. Let me expound.

The obligations of a formal education take time from a busy schedule. By forgoing all these extra classes students could graduate sooner and enter the workforce with specialized training from the classes they absolutely needed. To keep back students from working to pay off their increasing educational debts is condemnable. I certainly felt this way about an art history course I took last year that taught me nothing of importance and in so far as I can tell did nothing to improve my education.

Oppositely, these same obligations can afford special educational opportunities that would not happen in specialty classes. For instance, I'm obligated by my honors program to take classes and attend events that increase the amount of writing I do perhaps ten-fold (compared to earlier semesters when I wasn't in the honors program). This extra writing was condemned in the process and is now praised. This semester I have been forced to improve my pre-writing and that has improved my writing only through practice and volume. This educational outcome would not have taken place without the obligations of formal education.

The obligations of education, though condemned now, are justified in the end. That sounds like Machiavelli's Prince and perhaps what would be his approach at education.