Appearing in the Boston Globe on Sunday (link via boston.com) was a wonderful article by Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale and author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

The article explored - as presumably does the book - the reasons for which exploration of the most important questions in life have been abandoned by virtually all modern colleges and universities.

In a shift of historic importance, America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. This abandonment has also helped create a society in which deeper questions of values are left in the hands of those motivated by religious conviction - a disturbing and dangerous development.

With a few stellar examples cited in the text - Yale, Columbia, Reed College - Kronman explores why such well-rounded education in the humanties has been dropped by most institutions and attempts to make the case for why we need to reinstate such education.

He has no need to win me over - I find myself agreeing readily and entirely with the article - but it’s a delightful read and sobering reminder. I’m particularly pleased that he cited the “shift” as one of “historic importance” and made it clear that this “is a disturbing and dangerous development.”

Link

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tags: anthony kronman, books, education, humanities, philosophy

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at Sep 17, 07 | 4:50 pm and is filed under Books, Just Noumenon Posts, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.