How worthless is Philosophy?

[Orbit]

Should this discipline be required in college? Should students who are pursuing unrelated degrees be required to take any philosophy classes at all at university? Why or why not?

What about History? Should business majors be required to take History 101? Why or why not?

Personally, I think philosophy is largely useless unless one thinks that politics, law, or morality is useful. So, therefore, I tend to think that most philosophy courses are useless to those who pursue business degrees and such. Even scientists, though they may be interested in philosophy, and not too shabby at philosophizing either... philosophy doesn't help science much at all. Even philosophy of science doesn't help science. Let alone the rest of it.

But I do think philosophy is immensely useful to those who pursue political science or law. Maybe even science to some degree. But, meh. Only so useful to scientists...

I think two philosophy courses ought to be required of all students: ethics 101 and logic 101. Beyond that, philosophy is useless to the vast majority of professions.

Actually, as a college instructor, I'm going to disagree with you, but for a different reason than you might be expecting. We were having a meeting with faculty in my program (Sociology) today, and the big complaint was that "undergrads can't write, even after they've had the required lower-level English composition courses". I said that it's not that they can't write, it's that they can't think. They have no idea what an argument is (other than a fight). Logic is alien to them. The basic idea of the scientific method is missing. And then they write, but because they can't think in the first place, what comes out is seldom a clear exposition of well, anything.

Philosophy, as a lower-level General Education-type class, is super valuable in teaching undergrads of any major what counts as an argument, how to support your argument, and what logic and logical fallacies are. I think every undergrad should have a class in philosophy at that kind of level at least. In social science, students need to conceptualize a research question, define their terms, and decide how to measure what they need to measure. Philosophy prepares them to do that. I know they aren't ready for formal instruction in epistemology at that level, but I want them to at least know how to think before they arrive in my Social Research Methods class.