University students should take classes in many different subjects. |
"Hedgehog or Fox" has been a quite controversial issue and has yet to be resolved. It is evident that with the development of technology, the more specific knowledge a person has, the more chances he or she has to apply for jobs and the more likely he or she is to have a higer payment. However, as far as I am concerned, I am sure that you must not igonore the important reality that so called "Renaissance man" made the world and there are several reasons why you must not ignore jack-of-all-trades.
To begin with, without the help of other subjects, a specific research can not establish the desirable accomplishments and sometimes we would see the tragic consequences with the result of biased perspectives. To illustrate, doctors without ethics will concentrate on his financial matters, leading to distorted diagnoses and scientists without gereral ethics tend to isolate themselves leading to severe consequences. If we look into our history of the world, we can discover how many scientists did harm to human beings without the help of humanity. As a result, they ended up creating horrible weapons such as chemical weapons and atomic bombs.
On top of that, other subjects help university students do have a balanced view points and sometimes solve the problem which can not be resolved in one academic field. For example, last semester, I was studying on language acquisition and I was really busy preparing term paper about the second language acquisition. One day, as usual, I was stuck in one matter but I did not know how to solve the matter and could't find out the reason why such a theory is established. After a while, I had a chance to talk with a professor specializing on psychology and I asked her my problem. I had an hour conversation with her and finally found out that my problem was not about language itself but more complex things blended with child's psychology and behaviors. Without the help of psychology, it might have been impossible to further the study and I might have given up the paper. Therefore, just like we can not live only with bread, we can't study only one subject to go forward.
To recapitulate, it is not so much that all the university students should be so called "Well-rounded person". However, I strongly believe that students still need to learn about other subjects to escape from the isolated well for these reasons. |