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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 08:52:37AM -0700, saundrakaerubel.com wrote:
> Sound off on this discussion at cio.com and read what others have
> written on this topic
> 
> As the day-to-day work of IT professionals
> becomes more specialized, the lessons from a four-year
> college education become less relevant. Do IT
> professionals really need four-year college degrees?
> http://comment.cio.com/sound.cfm?ID=64

IMHO, and I'll qualify this by saying that I have a four-year liberal
arts in comparitive religion and philosophy, but with a strong focus
in philosophy of language and a concentration in cognitive science,
there are certain skillsets you learn from going to a four-year
liberal arts college that are difficult to learn on the job in the IT
industry. For example, simply being required to shift between many
philosophical/pedagogical traditions in the space of months or even
weeks gives you a perspective on abstraction, comparative analysis,
and the like that is extremely useful in this industry. I know I
wouldn't have been able to pick up programming anywhere near as
quickly as I did, and then shift from one language to many, without
having some experience in going to the abstract as a way to map
certain concepts to others and bootstrap my way into new areas of
thought.

If nothing else, going to college should teach you how to learn in new
ways -- it matters little whether the stuff you learn is actually
applicable, as long as it has some pedagogical value. Richard Rorty
(an American philosopher who started out in the Logical Positivist
camp, but who then switched to Continental practices out of a
perceived lack of value in LP) has said for many years that philosophy
as a practice has little to offer the world in the way of practical
conclusions, but has an enormous value to offer as a pedagogical
practice. I think this has strong parallels to what is being discussed
here, and I recommend "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" to anyone
interested in pursuing these lines of thought a bit more. It's a
pretty technical work at times, but still highly readable.

The prevalent idea in the MSCE adverts that you hear on the radio 
these days in the Triangle is that they'll teach you all you need
to know. I can't think of any more dangerous idea, personally, as
it simply encourages closedmindedness and provincialism and does
nothing to encourage communication between disciplines or between
practitioners with much to learn from one another. 

My $.02, and welcome to it,
Steve

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