Professor Peter Augustine Lawler makes a convincing argument
for broad based undergraduate education (‘general education’). He is critical of
the modern day obsession with specialization (see his insightful piece in The American Interest magazine):
“From one point of
view, the technological model of progress is very personal, insofar as it is
oriented around the security and autonomy of particular persons, but that
personal progress is achieved by surrendering the personal dimension in
understanding and research. We see that in our colleges “general education” is
shrinking and becoming more optional, in part to allow promising students get
right down to specialized research. The principle of specialization, of course,
is becoming a cog in a machine, making a small contribution to a whole process
beyond one’s own comprehension and control. So often the choice of “research
questions” doesn’t flow from one’s own informed curiosity and about nature and
human nature, but from what scientific and technological progress seems to
require at the moment. The important thing is to make some contribution.”
After reading the above noted piece by Prof. Lawler, I was reminded of the famous quote by the leading economist of the 20th century John
Maynard Keynes:
“The master-economist
must possess a rare combination of gifts .... He must be mathematician,
historian, statesman, philosopher -- in some degree. He must understand symbols
and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the
general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must
study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No
part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard.
He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and
incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.”