Go Ursinus.
This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 09 Oct 2008, by Nathan Rein.
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09 Oct 08
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defense of the humanities as food for the soul. The heart of the college experience, he believes, should be "a disciplined survey of the answers the great writers and artists of the past have given" to the question of how best to live, in order to "aid...students in their own personal encounter with the question of what living is for."
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social value of the new knowledge that academic research has produced-advances in medicine and communications, rational management of economies and legal systems, development of new technologies, and so on. At its best, the research ideal is generously collaborative, entailing a devotion to an enterprise unbounded by time and self, in which each individual scientist or scholar makes a contribution based on the work of predecessors, to be extended by successors.
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The humanities should be about helping students "stock their souls with the greatest and most lasting images of human striving and fulfillment, as guides to the choices they must face in the years ahead, and as a fund of perennial inspiration." But, as Kronman points out, the humanities have vitiated themselves by adopting the scientific premise that knowledge is progressive-at best a half-truth
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invite them into an "ongoing conversation that gives each entrant a weighted and responsible sense of connection to the past" and thereby helps them face the imponderable future
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with every passing year students feel more pressure to impress the professional school admissions committees or corporate hiring committees with a super GPA in some practical subject like economics, at the expense of pursuing learning for its own sake
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The ideals of individual freedom and toleration; of democratic government; of respect for the rights of minorities and for human rights generally; a reliance on markets as a mechanism for the organization of economic life and a recognition of the need for markets to be regulated by a supervenient political authority; a reliance, in the political realm, on the methods of bureaucratic administration, with its formal division of functions and legal separation of office from officeholder; an acceptance of the truths of modern science and the ubiquitous employment of its technological products: all these provide, in many parts of the world, the existing foundations of political, social, and economic life, and where they do not, they are viewed as aspirational goals toward which everyone has the strongest moral and material reasons to strive.
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I suspect it is the increasing population (mainly outside the Ivies) of "nontraditional" students-adults who have seen life from the vantage point of failure, or who feel unfulfilled after achieving what others deem success-who are asking the better questions. In short, there remains a real constituency for humanistic education-and if we take the broad and long view, it may even be growing.
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Nathan ReinClipping mainly because he favorably mentions my institution, Ursinus. Links: CiteBite http://snipr.com/47j35 , original article http://snipr.com/47j2t
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Add Sticky Notewhat I know of other colleges-from small Ursinus College in Pennsylvania to the honors college of the vast North Carolina State University-convinces me that humanistic education in Kronman's sense remains alive and well in many places around the nation
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