Perhaps unsurprisingly, what really sparked me into thinking about the liberal arts recently was a job posting I stumbled upon (or as a liberal arts professor might phrase it, a job posting upon which I stumbled). The posting was for a government agency in Vermont, and it advertized an entry-level position for a student just completing either a graduate or an undergraduate degree in planning.
Well, if up to this point I have been fairly complacent in my appreciation of the liberal arts, here was solid evidence that I had delayed my entry into a potential career by two or three years. Had I been a little bit better informed about the relationship between my interests, competencies, and the world's opportunities before I committed to Olaf, I could be well on my way to a career right now.
But there's the problem. I didn't know that much about myself or the world three years ago. I wasn't prepared to make that leap, though I acknowledge that at times I wish I had been. Still though, it is hard for me to imagine how my competencies or my understanding of the world (and its problems) without this education.
That's my experience with a liberal arts education; I suppose I should say something about Kagan's essay, whose title is a Catullus reference by the way. I find myself lost in his reasoning. Our liberal arts colleges are somehow both too conformist and too iconoclast? I don't know. What I do know is that this past semester I took an economics class where I had to frame an economic issue in light of historical Western perspectives on justice and the role of government. That seemed to me like what the liberal arts were really all about.
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