Why do you say that? The nature of universities has changed. Universities in the past belonged to a few people. The undergraduate diploma is a professional certificate. With the expansion of university enrollment, there are a lot of college students. People won't treat you as a professional just because you have a bachelor's degree. Therefore, for those who want to become professionals, when choosing a major in a university, don't consider the professional counterpart immediately after graduation, but consider what kind of major can prepare for your postgraduate education.
The more management you learn, the more it will prevent you from becoming an enterprise elite.
Because of this, undergraduate education has become a generalist education, focusing on the mind, knowledge and interest of practical analysis, and cultivating basic humanistic care and character. In these respects, non-practical majors such as history and literature are closer to the goal of general education.
I said to my students: you want to study business management, but how can you enter the management class with an undergraduate diploma? You have to go to the school of management for graduate study. However, if you want to enter the graduate school of management, this kind of scientific management can only put you at a disadvantage. Because of good management colleges, undergraduates with management background are generally reluctant to enroll. They think that such students can't achieve great things unless they have narrow skills cultivated in technical schools and broad vision and tolerance. The more management you learn, the more it will prevent you from becoming an enterprise elite.
Non-practical professional education makes them more adaptable.
Why non-practical majors are better than practical majors? Because non-practical professional education can get rid of narrow utilitarian requirements, cultivate students' broad vision and analytical ability, and make them more adaptable.
For example, I met a software designer in his sixties. His career is very successful and he has started his own company. He studied liberal arts in college and sculpture in graduate school. He is still engaged in sculpture, and his works have the level of entering a museum. But because sculpture can't support the family, I went to work in a computer company when I was young, and now I study software design, and suddenly I become a professional. He told me that in his generation, there was no major such as software design in the university, but after graduation, he encountered such new things, and now he is speculating and selling, which is very successful. In his generation, many people succeeded in this field and studied art, probably because of their rich imagination.
Now the software design is standardized and professional. The younger generation is trained in the technical field, but the products they design often lack imagination. Especially now, the pure technical aspects of this business are outsourced to India. Skilled people may lose their jobs. And he is an artist-style designer, who is good at understanding the product needs of users in interpersonal contact with local companies and has imaginative ideas. This is irreplaceable by Indian craftsmen. So he's still a tumbler.
For example, when I talk about the history of ancient Greece, let students discuss which system was more suitable for the society at that time, Athens or Sparta. I emphasize: even if you go into business after graduation, this kind of discussion is a crucial training. For example, Wal-Mart sends you to open a branch in a strange country. You must be able to analyze: under the local special social and institutional framework, which organizational form is most suitable for survival? Humanistic education can raise people's experience to an abstract level and lay the foundation for cultivating first-class talents in various fields. Here, many first-class students are scrambling to enter the undergraduate majors of management and law, which is really a waste of education and talents.
First, it should be virtual rather than real. We don't have a free education university. But as a student, you can choose the major closest to general education. "Useless majors" such as history, literature and social sciences can often provide the best university education. College students have no social experience and their future is hard to guess. They don't need to learn too much, but learn to think abstractly about social and human affairs. Specific skills should be learned when there are specific needs after work. The ability to master human things and social problems abstractly is the basis of learning any specific skills. In the United States, the better the quality of universities, the greater the weight and proportion of these useless majors.
Second, it should be cold rather than hot. Highly specialized university education is rubbish, and the hot major is rubbish that decays rapidly in hot summer days. Now there are many popular majors, such as finance, management, law, communication and so on. The number of students is large and the teacher-student ratio is low. Often, one teacher can deal with dozens or even hundreds of students. There are few students majoring in unpopular subjects, and there are many opportunities for one-on-one communication with teachers. In addition, most of the popular majors are new subjects, and teachers often become monks halfway, or even make up for it. When I entered this school, I couldn't help deceiving myself. And some unpopular traditional disciplines have also accumulated. There are also more opportunities to meet teachers with real talent and learning.
Third, don't be a professional slave even if you enter a subject close to general education. When I was a freshman in the Chinese Department of Peking University, I had an extreme philosophy: professional training was slavery. The real university education is to pursue one's own life and social problems. And these problems can never be limited by artificial professional division. Therefore, I often skip classes. For example, skip the literary theory of our department and listen to Professor Zhang Guangda's General History of China. I think 1968+0980 It was a waste of time not to attend Mr. Zhang's Peking University literature and history class in the early 1980s. At that time, the question was why China was poor and backward for a long time. Now it seems that this may be a false question. Because China was not poor and backward before18th century. However, this was my inner voice at that time. Now I finally mistook history for a major, thanks to the rebellion against the major at that time.