Should I Take A Philosophy Class? (And Should I Major in Philosophy?)

When deciding if you should take a philosophy class (or major in philosophy), you might want to ask yourself what kind of an answer you want:

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Raising Children, Education, and Indoctrination

Are we educating and raising children properly or indoctrinating them? Most people seem to assume that children are educated pretty well, and they assume that they raise their own children pretty well—but almost everyone admits that at least some people indoctrinate their children by using manipulative or disrespectful tactics. Many people worry that parents or educators pass on their beliefs to children no matter how horrible the beliefs are. Many people think it’s wrong for racists to teach their children to be racists, communists to teach their children to be communists, and even religious people to teach their children to have a particular religion.

Honor Killings, Moral Education, Justified Punishment, Justified War, and Dehumanization

An examination of honor killings will reveal the importance of philosophical, logical, and moral education; the inappropriate treatment of criminals; the inappropriate dehumanization of our enemies; and the use of poor reasoning to justify war.

Two Political Goals: Let’s Limit Military Spending & Demand Accountability

There are many admirable political goals, such as protecting human rights, helping the poor, protecting animals, protecting the environment, preventing wars, and so on. However, the government is notoriously bad at doing anything for the better of the common good because politicians have a lot of favors to return mainly to corporations and lobbyists who care little about the common good. Nonetheless, there are non-partisan goals and we should pressure the government to do the right thing when it is blatantly obvious to everyone what needs to be done. In particular, consider these two non-partisan goals for those of us in the USA:

An Analysis of the GRE Analytical Writing Test (Analyze an Argument Task)

The general GRE exam requires us to “analyze an argument” but I find the demands of this “test” to be highly mysterious to downright deceptive. In particular we are asked to do (or not do) the following: