How worthless is Philosophy?

[Belacqua]

There's a reason that society needs everyone to go through K-12 & it's not just to prepare for college, trade school, enlisting in the military, or entering the unskilled labor force; it's also for people to be able to pay their bills, taxes, manage their budget and income, and even make informed decisions. In most cases, this doesn't affect you and me, but there are exceptions, whether it's the goods or services that come to me from them directly or indirectly, or who they vote for in elections; when they make bad decisions in these cases, it can affect me in a negative & undesirable way. If fellow citizens don't have the logical and ethical skills to make the right decision when voting, by the time they're old enough to do so, that can have an adverse impact on both me and the rest of society.

This seems exactly right to me. Any conception we can have of a good society surely includes some basic minimum level of education, and good-faith efforts to get that to as many people as possible. 

I'll add some more, though, as it relates to philosophy. 

I do believe that a person can have a long happy life without ever studying philosophy. Lots of people have done that. 

Still, philosophy is something that enriches our experience. Some paintings are just good to see, and some symphonies are good to hear, and some ideas are good to think. They make life richer. Whether they have practical benefits or not is not the issue -- it is still preferable to have them in the world, as opposed to living in a world without. 

Maybe today we have a tendency to discriminate between intellectual classes when it comes to non-practical fields like philosophy. A lot of times and places have been the same, no doubt. But it's not inevitable. It's very interesting to read about 18th and 19th century England, and the intellectual life of working people. Coleridge, Ruskin, and many other thinkers gave public lectures which were very well attended by people from different social classes. It was entirely possible to work during the day selling men's hosiery and read philosophy in the evening. William Blake, for example, apprenticed to a printmaker at the age of 13, but read Locke, Berkeley, translations of the Greeks, and many other serious books in his spare time. He hung out at the shop of a radical publisher/bookseller and met many of the leading progressive intellectuals of his day. 

Naturally, Blake is in no way a typical person. But I see him as a difference in degree and not kind. Philosophy and serious literature were not restricted to those with a college degree. 

I think we should also acknowledge that philosophy is unavoidable, even if we don't want to think about it. One of the main themes of philosophy is "how should one live?" If someone is arguing that one should ignore the study of philosophy and focus on more practical pursuits, this is in fact a philosophical argument. And the argument can be improved by studying more philosophy.