College classes.

[Jovan Dragisic]

Full disclosure - I have a degree in philosophy. I had started intending to major in engineering, but started as an undisciplined young idiot, who shouldn't have gone straight to college... Point being, I had the qualifications for either a BS or a BA, including three semesters of calculus and a very good overall mathematics and science background.

Philosophy courses should teach the ability to think and the habit of thinking. Certainly, they can...but it really varies. I had a handful of outstanding professors, and I loved those classes. However, a lot of the classes fill general breadth requirements, and tend to be filled with maddeningly banal interlocutors. Moreover, people majoring in philosophy include a significant subset who are pursuing the major merely as pre-business or pre-law, and in my experience, they were some of the worst with regards of not wanting to actually engage their brain housing groups.

With a good instructor modelling, requiring, and inspiring rigor in the field of study, the benefits become immense, and far exceed the direct scope of the subject material. Likewise, a student accepting and leaning into rigorous study can reap great benefits, even without such an instructor. Sadly, both roles were not exactly full of such folks...

I am saddened that mathematics is sounding similar. The two fields, at their best, overlap more than many realize.

Philosophy get a bad rep, I think probably because students these days are not required to read books. I thought I was a casual philosophy reader, but I figured out when talking to philosophy majors that I have read much more of the stuff than they have. They should really make students, and I mean all students, read some of Aristotle's work, you don't have to agree with the dude, but it is a really nice set of principles for thinking. As you get closer to modern times, it starts getting to be a hot mess, of course.

[TommyGun]

There is value in having Calc 1 as a weed out course. Having said that, unless you studied engineering the Calc 2 and Differential Equations courses have diminishing returns. But here’s the problem for engineers: if you have any intention of progressing to being a registered engineer, the FE Exam had calc problems on it. (Call me out on this if I am wrong, I took the thing 30 years ago).

Interesting thread. If it was my choice, I would have dropped the diffies (Diff Equations) and studied more statistics.