Plato the ancient Greek philosopher
By: Ali Ismail
0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)
aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk
MAKE WAY FOR THE PHILOSOPHER KING
Even today there is room for the non-vocational degree course
One of the problems facing our young people today and their parents, in fact all young people and their parents, is the choice of subject to study at tertiary level.
Time was, particularly in the West, when it was the belief that the learning of knowledge and skills was a virtue in itself. In other words, somehow, the very act of learning was meritorious and it was not immensely important exactly what was studied.
In this way in the Britain of long ago, before large scale non-European immigration and for some decades after that started, the classics (especially Latin and Greek), Old Norse, church history, oriental studies and other non-vocational subjects were offered at the universities including the premier seats of learning such as Cambridge and Oxford.
There has been a change since those days. Life has become much more difficult for the young, particularly in terms of getting and keeping a job and maintaining a position in society.
Furthermore, the old spirit of forbearance towards people without practical skills has evaporated, although it is far from gone. Previously, the graduate in classics at Oxford (the degree course was called “Greats”) had a guaranteed position in the home civil service, a colonial civil service or else an administrative career somewhere in the Empire.
During the 19th century it was a truism that the former pupil of a fairly minor public school such as Shrewsbury or Lancing with a degree in a non-vocational subject such as Egyptology had a future as a district commissioner at one or other of the British colonies if he could not think of any other pathway in life.
Nowadays, that has evaporated tremendously. Not only are the non-vocational subjects shunned as degree choices by many senior school pupils approaching the end of their A level courses, even the vocational subjects in which job opportunities are limited are avoided. Mechanical engineering is not considered as “safe” as electrical engineering, for example.
Back in South Asia, of course, this is taken for granted. Not only are non-vocational degrees considered to be dangerous because of the difficulty of getting work afterwards, the non-provision of unemployment benefits leads to an unemployable graduate becoming a dependant on family charity for many years of his life; therefore, even usable subjects are shunned if the jobs are not there.
For example, most South Asian men avoid pure science subjects as degree course choices at university along with the dead languages because of the difficulty of finding work after graduation day.
What does a physics graduate in South Asia do post-graduation? His government is too poor to fund fundamental scientific research, so, if he cannot go abroad he has the choice of either teaching physics in a school to mostly wannabe doctors or working in some non-graduate job such as a shop assistant position.
Some of my relations once told me that a sensible young man in our original part of the world who seeks a respectable position in society and a wife from the proverbial “good family” has four classic and traditional career paths to choose from: law, accountancy, medicine and engineering. Anything else might be considered to be a least a tad risky or daring.
None of the above is surprising because it is common knowledge what the South Asian life priorities are and how we achieve our goals. What is more surprising is that in recent years the West has become more like this.
A survey conducted at the very start of this millennium in North America revealed that among the survey participants making more money was the single biggest reason motivating people to enter higher education.
To my way of thinking this is a tremendous shame. Those fast becoming unpopular esoteric subjects are the spice of life for everybody – not just the students and former students. When somebody learns something deeply everybody who comes into contact with him to any significant extent acquires a “rub off” influence. In marriage the wife who marries an educated man experiences indirect and implicit benefits arising from constant contact with her husband, for example.
Furthermore, the presence of classics, other dead languages, Assyrian studies and history graduates had spiced up many a British civil service department and given a richness of consciousness and a breadth of vision to administrative decisions and procedures which would have been totally lacking had they all been exclusively vocationally trained.
At the back of all of this is the undoubted fact that modern technology and transportation has resulted in a situation where the Western worker and manager is fighting for his place against millions of third world have-nots all clamouring for a slice of the cake, a piece of the Western dream, a morsel of the roses to eat instead of just the smell of them.
For example, I could write this article for this very newspaper in downtown Dhaka and then e-mail it to my editor in London and expect to be paid in Takas. Many a British and American computer programmer (especially the less gifted variety) has been forced to find his way to his unemployment benefit office followed by a low paid non-computer job because somebody in Bangalore had taken his work away and was doing it for 20% of his salary.
Now, philosophy is usually considered to be the king of all the subjects offered by a university. In fact, there are some who consider that a university without a philosophy department is not a genuine university at all.
Philosophy is all the subjects rolled together and more. It is not a science subject and conducts no experiments but it is not a religious subject either and requires no faith in anything to sustain it. It is the ultimate thinking tool and, in the view of many people, is the highest of all the subjects.
It was not for nothing that Plato advocated that the governance of the whole world should be entrusted to a philosopher king.
Philosophy is so vast that I could not even give an outline of it in this article. Suffice it to say that Western philosophy has been divided into the following principal branches: logic, aesthetics, politics and metaphysics.
Such is the rigour of Western philosophy that traditionally only the brightest prospective students have been chosen to follow this most gruelling subject and only the best have been able to graduate with earned degrees. The training in logic prepares the mind for a computer software career and the other branches qualify the philosophy graduate for a position in any society’s directing class.
Yet, for all that, philosophy is a non-vocational subject.
James Starmer is a career centre director at an American university. With regard to non-vocational degree courses he says: “Basically, we work with all majors. I am in a position where I work with these people all day.
“My philosophy is that most every career requires solid communications skills.
“I tell students that short of a very technically orientated career you can do almost any career with any major. Most of my experience says that most of our companies (i.e., companies that recruit students from the university- AI) are looking for talent outside the subject. If someone has the talent, that is the key factor.
“These companies are looking for students who have demonstrated these attributes throughout their college careers.
“I see this every day. If it is not a technical position they can train for the job. They (the companies) are looking for the trainability.”
My take on this is that Mr Starmer’s last quoted words are of high import. So, it seems that the employers are looking for trainability.
The psychologists would probably put it: “these companies are looking for candidates with fluid intelligence.” By fluid intelligence I mean the raw talent waiting to be harnessed.
Nowadays, many employers are looking for a person with a good holistic set of attributes. Therefore, they take into account not just academic performance but also all the non-curricular activities such as thespian involvement, sports and leisure reading including and especially fiction.
Philosophy was and will remain the one subject that stands aside from them all, analyses them all and synthesises them all. Furthermore, it adds the moral ingredient without getting bogged down in religious controversies and making claims about a deity.
It is for this reason that I submit that today and into the foreseeable future philosophy is the ideal background for statesmen and the highest levels of leadership in all the major avenues of human endeavour.
The philosopher who is of extremely high intelligence and of sound character is, in my view, the ideal individual to direct the affairs of the billions. Philosophy, in my submission, was and is the optimal background for a secretary-general of the United Nations.
There is a “speaker” at London’s Hyde Park who has the distinction of standing on his upturned plastic milk bottle box for hours on end in silence if he cannot find anyone worth speaking to.
When he does talk he sometimes says that the ultimate goal of philosophy is to answer the question: “How should a man live?”
It is for these reasons that I believe that should there be a child of exceptional talent in a family the guardians of that youngster should not boo-hoo the option of studying a non-vocational subject at university and, in the event of the child being a genius, then philosophy should be the first choice to be considered.
MAKE WAY FOR THE PHILOSOPHER KING
Even today there is room for the non-vocational degree course
One of the problems facing our young people today and their parents, in fact all young people and their parents, is the choice of subject to study at tertiary level.
Time was, particularly in the West, when it was the belief that the learning of knowledge and skills was a virtue in itself. In other words, somehow, the very act of learning was meritorious and it was not immensely important exactly what was studied.
In this way in the Britain of long ago, before large scale non-European immigration and for some decades after that started, the classics (especially Latin and Greek), Old Norse, church history, oriental studies and other non-vocational subjects were offered at the universities including the premier seats of learning such as Cambridge and Oxford.
There has been a change since those days. Life has become much more difficult for the young, particularly in terms of getting and keeping a job and maintaining a position in society.
Furthermore, the old spirit of forbearance towards people without practical skills has evaporated, although it is far from gone. Previously, the graduate in classics at Oxford (the degree course was called “Greats”) had a guaranteed position in the home civil service, a colonial civil service or else an administrative career somewhere in the Empire.
During the 19th century it was a truism that the former pupil of a fairly minor public school such as Shrewsbury or Lancing with a degree in a non-vocational subject such as Egyptology had a future as a district commissioner at one or other of the British colonies if he could not think of any other pathway in life.
Nowadays, that has evaporated tremendously. Not only are the non-vocational subjects shunned as degree choices by many senior school pupils approaching the end of their A level courses, even the vocational subjects in which job opportunities are limited are avoided. Mechanical engineering is not considered as “safe” as electrical engineering, for example.
Back in South Asia, of course, this is taken for granted. Not only are non-vocational degrees considered to be dangerous because of the difficulty of getting work afterwards, the non-provision of unemployment benefits leads to an unemployable graduate becoming a dependant on family charity for many years of his life; therefore, even usable subjects are shunned if the jobs are not there.
For example, most South Asian men avoid pure science subjects as degree course choices at university along with the dead languages because of the difficulty of finding work after graduation day.
What does a physics graduate in South Asia do post-graduation? His government is too poor to fund fundamental scientific research, so, if he cannot go abroad he has the choice of either teaching physics in a school to mostly wannabe doctors or working in some non-graduate job such as a shop assistant position.
Some of my relations once told me that a sensible young man in our original part of the world who seeks a respectable position in society and a wife from the proverbial “good family” has four classic and traditional career paths to choose from: law, accountancy, medicine and engineering. Anything else might be considered to be a least a tad risky or daring.
None of the above is surprising because it is common knowledge what the South Asian life priorities are and how we achieve our goals. What is more surprising is that in recent years the West has become more like this.
A survey conducted at the very start of this millennium in North America revealed that among the survey participants making more money was the single biggest reason motivating people to enter higher education.
To my way of thinking this is a tremendous shame. Those fast becoming unpopular esoteric subjects are the spice of life for everybody – not just the students and former students. When somebody learns something deeply everybody who comes into contact with him to any significant extent acquires a “rub off” influence. In marriage the wife who marries an educated man experiences indirect and implicit benefits arising from constant contact with her husband, for example.
Furthermore, the presence of classics, other dead languages, Assyrian studies and history graduates had spiced up many a British civil service department and given a richness of consciousness and a breadth of vision to administrative decisions and procedures which would have been totally lacking had they all been exclusively vocationally trained.
At the back of all of this is the undoubted fact that modern technology and transportation has resulted in a situation where the Western worker and manager is fighting for his place against millions of third world have-nots all clamouring for a slice of the cake, a piece of the Western dream, a morsel of the roses to eat instead of just the smell of them.
For example, I could write this article for this very newspaper in downtown Dhaka and then e-mail it to my editor in London and expect to be paid in Takas. Many a British and American computer programmer (especially the less gifted variety) has been forced to find his way to his unemployment benefit office followed by a low paid non-computer job because somebody in Bangalore had taken his work away and was doing it for 20% of his salary.
Now, philosophy is usually considered to be the king of all the subjects offered by a university. In fact, there are some who consider that a university without a philosophy department is not a genuine university at all.
Philosophy is all the subjects rolled together and more. It is not a science subject and conducts no experiments but it is not a religious subject either and requires no faith in anything to sustain it. It is the ultimate thinking tool and, in the view of many people, is the highest of all the subjects.
It was not for nothing that Plato advocated that the governance of the whole world should be entrusted to a philosopher king.
Philosophy is so vast that I could not even give an outline of it in this article. Suffice it to say that Western philosophy has been divided into the following principal branches: logic, aesthetics, politics and metaphysics.
Such is the rigour of Western philosophy that traditionally only the brightest prospective students have been chosen to follow this most gruelling subject and only the best have been able to graduate with earned degrees. The training in logic prepares the mind for a computer software career and the other branches qualify the philosophy graduate for a position in any society’s directing class.
Yet, for all that, philosophy is a non-vocational subject.
James Starmer is a career centre director at an American university. With regard to non-vocational degree courses he says: “Basically, we work with all majors. I am in a position where I work with these people all day.
“My philosophy is that most every career requires solid communications skills.
“I tell students that short of a very technically orientated career you can do almost any career with any major. Most of my experience says that most of our companies (i.e., companies that recruit students from the university- AI) are looking for talent outside the subject. If someone has the talent, that is the key factor.
“These companies are looking for students who have demonstrated these attributes throughout their college careers.
“I see this every day. If it is not a technical position they can train for the job. They (the companies) are looking for the trainability.”
My take on this is that Mr Starmer’s last quoted words are of high import. So, it seems that the employers are looking for trainability.
The psychologists would probably put it: “these companies are looking for candidates with fluid intelligence.” By fluid intelligence I mean the raw talent waiting to be harnessed.
Nowadays, many employers are looking for a person with a good holistic set of attributes. Therefore, they take into account not just academic performance but also all the non-curricular activities such as thespian involvement, sports and leisure reading including and especially fiction.
Philosophy was and will remain the one subject that stands aside from them all, analyses them all and synthesises them all. Furthermore, it adds the moral ingredient without getting bogged down in religious controversies and making claims about a deity.
It is for this reason that I submit that today and into the foreseeable future philosophy is the ideal background for statesmen and the highest levels of leadership in all the major avenues of human endeavour.
The philosopher who is of extremely high intelligence and of sound character is, in my view, the ideal individual to direct the affairs of the billions. Philosophy, in my submission, was and is the optimal background for a secretary-general of the United Nations.
There is a “speaker” at London’s Hyde Park who has the distinction of standing on his upturned plastic milk bottle box for hours on end in silence if he cannot find anyone worth speaking to.
When he does talk he sometimes says that the ultimate goal of philosophy is to answer the question: “How should a man live?”
It is for these reasons that I believe that should there be a child of exceptional talent in a family the guardians of that youngster should not boo-hoo the option of studying a non-vocational subject at university and, in the event of the child being a genius, then philosophy should be the first choice to be considered.
THE END
This article was published in the Bangla Mirror, the first English language weekly for the Bangladeshis of the United Kingdom - read everywhere from the Arctic to the sub-Antarctic.
posted by Ali at 1:23 PM
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