What is the importance of academic subjects in everyday life?

What is the importance of academic subjects in everyday life? This is a question often asked, but seldom answered to satisfaction. What benefit is to be gained from studying philosophy? How many professional philosophers do you know, making a lucrative living seeking the meaning of life, or challenging the eternal verities? Most people would claim even such a core subject as mathematics is inflicted upon our educational curriculum to an unnecessary level. Throw history, sociology, politics, economics, and a host of other arcane academia into the mix, and the opening question becomes ever more pertinent - just what is the importance of academic subjects in everyday life? The answer is our very humanity: it is education that raises us up above the other animals, the other creatures that crawl the earth; and it is the very breadth of education that empowers us. If we merely regard learning, studying, as the means to secure a certain institution accredited accolade, then we may have acquired some knowledge, but little humanity. When we consider Euclid's elements as a tool to pay the gas bill, or Mendeleev's periodic table as a ticket to a new car ever few years, we make erudition itself weep. By these heartless methods we merely become myna birds made up to look otherwise.

We learn in order to better ourselves - to become all we can, to realize our potential. Have you ever felt like an outsider in a conversation, because you didn't have a clue about Pushkin's influence on Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy? Have you ever hidden your ignorance about history, agreeing without knowing when conversation turned to Henry VIII and the reformation, or James II's complex relation with parliament? Have you cursed under your breath when talk turned to the arts, knowing you could never differentiate a Monet from a Manet? A good, broad education is an asset for a lifetime: it is not just a key to open the doors of various professions, but a social resource, enabling you to mix with many people. The world itself is a more interesting place to the educated person. Where the uninitiated will just see the rocks and the sea, the learned will notice the wave cut platform, and the variegated influence of erosion on different stone formations. To some the green atop certain roofs seems an unhealthy algae; and to others it is evidence of a chemical reaction - the once golden copper having reacted with the oxygen in the air to form a dark copper oxide, which in turn reacts with rainwater to form a green copper hydroxide. Education changes our eyes, lets us see things differently. A narrow education, merely serving ones chosen profession, narrows the very world. We should strive to be polymaths, studying a whole range of subjects! It is so easy these days to learn whatever we would like.

Tutor Hunt offers literally dozens of subjects, from English to art, from religious studies to psychology. Perhaps you have always been interested in photography, but have never used a manual camera - well, why not have a few lessons with a photography tutor? Maybe you have always had a secret inclination to know more about drama, but feel too shy to join a drama group - well, why not see how you feel after a some time with a drama tutor! Learning should not be a scary word! Teaching should not be an unpleasant school day memory, and you should not be restricted by what subjects others chose for you in the past. Education is not just important in everyday life - it is a vital part of life itself, and our enjoyment of it.