Waste

I've been thinking a lot about the value of a liberal arts education. Much of this has been brought about by reading these two articles (WARNING both are VERY crude, and you do not have to read them in order to understand this post. Just wanted to put them out there cause some of these ideas are from the articles, not my own original thoughts):
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_stamps.html

Basically, both articles (particularly the Last Psychiatrist article) are critical of people who do not have valuable skills to offer society. College is a chance to acquire some extremely valuable skills, and people who spend college studying anthropology, English, philosophy, etc. are essentially squandering their best opportunity to learn something practical (engineering, medicine, business, etc.) that can actually help other people in a quantifiably valuable way. In fact, the LP article goes so far as to say that college is really not all that necessary, as long as one learns a practical skill somehow.

I find myself highly sympathetic to this line of reasoning. As an English major, I feel like there has to be something intrinsically valuable and helpful to society about a liberal arts education. Yet I can't think of what it is. Anybody can learn to read and write well; you don't need to go to school for it. I'm open to the idea that I offer less to society than a doctor, engineer, etc.

The thing I can't get out of my mind is formal logic. For the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years that people studied formal logical systems, more practical-minded folks must have considered these logicians to be totally wasting their time. Until computers came along. Computers are basically just machines that read and execute instructions written in formal logic. All along the logicians/mathematicians through history were unwittingly teaching us computer programming. What if they had all quit to do something more practical?