I've noticed a lot of disciplines, particularly ones that sometimes have to justify their value, often make a similar claim:
"[subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: it teaches you how to think"
This raises some interesting questions:
I can believe, for example, that Art History instils in its students some useful habits of thought, but I suspect they're less general than those from a discipline with an explicit problem-solving focus. What kind of scheme could one construct to score the meta-cognitive skills learned from a particular subject?
Are there any subjects which are particularly unlikely to make this claim? Are any subjects just composed of procedural knowledge without any overarching theory, cross-domain applicability, or necessary transferable skills?
Are there particularly potent combinations of skills, or particularly useless ones? It seems that a Physics degree and a Maths degree would have similar "coverage" in terms of thinking habits they instil, but a Physics degree and a Law degree would have much broader coverage. "I have technical skills, but I also have people-skills" is a fairly standard contemporary idea. Do Physics and Law have strikingly different coverages because Physics Lawyers don't really need to exist?
I suspect that with "mastery of a skill" comes an ability to understand "mastery", in that - on a variation of man-with-a-hammer syndrome; holding the mastery of one area will help you better understand the direction to head in when mastering other areas, and learning in other areas.
to me the line now reads; "mastery of [subject] isn't just about [subject matter]: mastery teaches you how to think"
where can vary; the significance of what people are trying to convey is maybe not in the but in the experience of learning.
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