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18-04-2003, 12:32 PM

On Friday, in article
"Jim Webster" wrote:

"Oz" wrote in message
...

What's even worse is that numbers of kids doing sciences/maths is
steadily declining. At university it's even more pronounced.

as I grow older I realise that I should have stuck to the arts side, i could
happily and blathered my way through with no real effort.
Science tends to be hard work and on a strict cost benefit analysis you will
note that you often get a similar sort of job with a arts/humanities degree
as you do with a science

Sellafield used to take graduates for management, without bothering too much
what the degree was in.I suspect they are not the only ones

The non-science side is filling with a lot of fuzzy crap, as well as the
stuff which would arguably be better sold as advanced vocational
training. I don't think the educational accomplishment of a degree in
vehicle maintenance is necessarily inadequate, but calling that sort of
training a degree risks losing a distinction in the language.

Arts degrees in the not so distant past did prove a certain
accomplishment in the ability to think; to research a problem and find,
present, and judge the possible answers. My own recollection is that
there was a shift in what was expected at different stages in the
system. O-level was about knowing the book solutions, whether science
or arts. A-level began to bring in the problem of picking the right
approach from several choices. And I am not at all sure that anyone
could have blathered their way through a decent Arts degree. The
blather would at least have had to be a properly-written essay. rather
than the near-stream-of-consciousness which fills the modern media.

Having said that, and while still wondering if enough was done at my
school to teach the skills of structuring an essay, it is perhaps
possible to pick up a lot of the skills of an Arts graduate by some sort
of osmosis. Read the good stuff, whether Gibbon or Pratchett.

And anyone who thinks that there is nothing about writing which cannot
be learnt from Terry Pratchett's work probably hasn't noticed how it
floats in a sea of literary reference.

--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.

"Let me get this straight. You're the KGB's core AI, but you're afraid
of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?"
From "Lobsters" by Charles Stross.

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