Thoughts on Education in America. Pt. 1. College

Well, maybe I need to refute myself. This is apropos of my January 5, 2013 posting, "What Is College For?"

I read or heard recently that employers are complaining that college-educated young people don't have the skills they are working for.

So possibly my rosy vision of the liberal education is out-of-date, the product of an earlier era—maybe in fact about 100 years ago—when a college education was the province of the rich and the college grad did not have to have a lot of concern about finding a job after graduation. Or if he was going to work, his career might be medicine or the law—two fields for which your undergraduate education would not matter much and could be almost anything.

In those days of a hundred years ago, every educated person learned Latin and Greek—two things not much studied nowadays; and, unless you read old books that might include quotations in Latin an Greek which you were assumed to be able to understand, we pretty much get along without them.

So okay, maybe I have to concede that a college education has to, to some extent and in some degree, be geared to the exigencies of finding employment after graduation.

Even if I have to admit all this, I have to wonder, where to draw the line between "relevance" to something "useful" and clearly imparting job skills, and what I might call well-roundedness? I still have to lament what is not being learned these days. Young people nowadays don't learn, and don't care about, history—which means we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

They don't want to learn about literature or art. So they have little idea of the enormous, millennia-long march of civilization. I'm probably near to admitting that that might not be "useful," but I can't help believing that it is valuable.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Richard Stein