Towards a theory of higher education.

I ran across the following quote in a post over at 37signals' Signal vs. Noise. I think it really communicates an aspect of my developing theory of higher education. You pursue education to learn how to think, or improve how you think, not to learn how to use a piece of software, speak a language, or read a book. Granted, in the process you may have to do all of those things and many more vocational tasks, but the over-arching goal is to learn how to think.

"It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities." Google’s advice to students