Education systems are generally built around producing employable workers, so they always have this tension between totally concrete, 'train them for the job th

Education systems are generally built around producing employable workers, so they always have this tension between totally concrete, 'train them for the job they'll have at the factory who founded the school', and totally abstract, 'maybe the job will change, so teach the foundations'. The sad thing about this framework, is there's no obvious place for stuff that's not only abstract, but perhaps orthogonal to the economic sphere. So nobody gets taught philosophy. I think this lets everybody down, because with stuff you learn at school, you generally either learn it's hard, or you learn some things about it. With philosophy, you learn neither. So you think it's easy, and you know nothing about it. I guess there's also some compounding effects from the prestige that gets attached to various subjects - I think philosophy is a weird case though, since the better an academic or scientist is, the more likely they are to take philosophy seriously. The whole thing used to really bug me - but then, when people take philosophy really seriously (which seems to me, the history of christianity - a lot of people getting beaten to death over kind of dry philosophical trivia), it generally leads to worse philosophy. So everybody making the subject a target of shame and ridicule, making it out to be a ridiculous, worthless and pretentious occupation - all this actually is to the benefit of good thinking, in the end, since you won't get anybody philosophizing with ulterior motives.