If you've read some of my earlier posts, you'll know that I'm not against education that doesn't, or doesn't seem to, prepare a person directly for a job. For one thing, all sorts of other thinking, communication and other skills are needed for a variety of jobs, as well as life generally in the modern world. Yes, you need to acquire specific bodies of knowledge and skills if you want to be an accountant, nurse or practitioner of any number of other trades or professions. But you also need to be able to put yourself in another person's shoes if you're going to even get one of those jobs, let alone work with people in them. And there are situations in any job for which the purely vocational skills won't suffice.
As a result, I don't regret my undergraduate liberal arts education. Sure, it hasn't made me rich, but it has given me options at different times in my life. Plus, some of the stuff I learned was purely and simply interesting, at least to me.
But now I realize that I probably wouldn't be able to get that kind of education today. Some of the professors I had could be described as "old school": While their knowledge was mainly in the long-accepted canons of their fields, they had the mental flexibility to understand other modes of thought and expression. For most of them, their educations included Latin and even ancient Greek, as well as other languages not spoken by many living Americans. Their methods of inquiry and argumentation were rigorous, if at times rigid. However, they made sense even to students like me, whose pre-college education in no way resembled theirs.
That was the great thing about them: Even though they had spent most, if not all, of their adult lives in the academic world, they did not develop the kind of otiose verbosity, or sheer pretentiousness, that we see in too many current academicians, particularly in the humanities and law. I think in particular of the professor I had for Chaucer. He was an old man whom I had a very difficult time imagining as ever having been young. However, he communicated with a grace and wit that showed his extraordinary intelligence, even though he wasn't showing off. The man knew two dozen languages, about half of which were spoken by living human beings. Yet, during his lectures, as well as the time I spoke with him one-on-one, I always had the sense that he was in the moment, if he wasn't living for it.
He never spoke in the obscure, sometimes obtuse, vocabulary of literary scholarship. (Much of that vocabulary may not have even existed at that time.) Yet he was never condescending. That may have been a reason why even non-majors took classes with him, even though he didn't have a reputation as an easy grader.
He is long dead. However, another undergraduate professor of mine, who has since attained some renown as a poet as well as a scholar, is still very much alive, if at or near retirement age. I took her for classes in Milton and Creative Writing and, although her outlook and and methods of teaching, writing and criticism were very different from his, I value her class for many of the same reasons I valued his.
I fear that when she is gone, students won't have the opportunity to experience something I had, with her and him: an education for which I had to stretch beyond boundaries I didn't even know I had, but wasn't constricted by their own interests. Whatever writing skills I have came, at least in part, from having professors like them.
Few students today will have such experiences. And they won't gain very many skills that will help them get jobs, or to get along in life. Worst of all, they'll rack up debts I couldn't even have imagined to get such an inferior education. I pity them; I really do.
I enjoyed very much reading your post. It is entertaining at the same time that is informative.
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