Colleges Should Be More Than Just Vocational
Schools
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/opinion/humanities-liberal-arts-policy-higher-education.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/opinion/humanities-liberal-arts-policy-higher-education.html
Some see liberal arts education as elitist. Why
it’s really pragmatic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/02/05/liberal-arts-education-is-pragmatic/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/02/05/liberal-arts-education-is-pragmatic/
Liberal arts education: Waste of money or practical investment?
The liberal arts are under attack. So why do the rich want their children to study them?
The liberal arts are under attack. So why do the rich want their children to study them?
Liberal Arts Education – Under Threat
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/12/the-liberal-arts-may-not-survive-the-21st-century/577876/
Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson:
Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson:
What Are We Doing Here?
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/what-are-we-doing-here/
Robinson notes:
"Our great universities, with their vast resources, their exhaustive libraries, look like a humanist’s dream. Certainly, with the collecting and archiving that has taken place in them over centuries, they could tell us much that we need to know. But there is pressure on them now to change fundamentally, to equip our young to be what the Fabians used to call “brain workers.” They are to be skilled laborers in the new economy, intellectually nimble enough to meet its needs, which we know will change constantly and unpredictably. I may simply have described the robots that will be better suited to this kind of existence, and with whom our optimized workers will no doubt be forced to compete, poor complex and distractible creatures that they will be still.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/what-are-we-doing-here/
Robinson notes:
"Our great universities, with their vast resources, their exhaustive libraries, look like a humanist’s dream. Certainly, with the collecting and archiving that has taken place in them over centuries, they could tell us much that we need to know. But there is pressure on them now to change fundamentally, to equip our young to be what the Fabians used to call “brain workers.” They are to be skilled laborers in the new economy, intellectually nimble enough to meet its needs, which we know will change constantly and unpredictably. I may simply have described the robots that will be better suited to this kind of existence, and with whom our optimized workers will no doubt be forced to compete, poor complex and distractible creatures that they will be still.
Why teach the humanities? Why study them? American universities are literally shaped around them and have been since their founding, yet the question is put in the bluntest form—what are they good for?"