The Liberal Arts

When I was looking at colleges, I really wanted to go to a school that had great academics, a liberal arts bias, and a stellar music program. The school I ended up at -- DePauw University -- definitely had all three of those things. So, while I have a Bachelor of Music degree in performance, I learned a LOT academically at DePauw and got my "fix" of liberal arts studies and mode of thought through the Honor Scholar program.

Honor Scholar was the coolest class, and in some ways, I wish I could be in an Honor Scholar class for the rest of my life. We read a book a week and debated it with the same group of people for four years -- led by the comments and challenges of a professor. In my mind, it really does not get to be more fun than that -- I want to know how other people react to the same thing I am reading -- what was their thought process, what did they take away from that clever phrase, and what about their background gave them such a different perspective from mine?

What led me to this contemplation of and need to voice my appreciation for my Honor Scholar experience was an article in the New York Times looking back at Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind", published in 1987. The article talks about how Bloom's book pitted the vanguard of the classical literature canon against all of those whom would dare to suggest that students should read books written by women or minorities, and also points out that Bloom's emphasis upon thinking for thinking's sake while in college has fallen out of vogue due to the rising costs of college and the need to be able to put that degree to work to pay for college. Specifically:

Bloom himself wrote that a liberal education should provide a student with “four years of freedom” — “a space between the intellectual wasteland he has left behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits him after the baccalaureate.” Whether students today see college as a time of freedom or a compulsory phase of credentialing is an open question. From Bloom’s perspective, “the importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization’s only chance to get to him.”

And, I have to say that I read this paragraph and felt glad that I did have the opportunity to freely explore during college and leave the "dreary professional training" to my law school years. And, perhaps it is an open question for many about whether college is all about being able to make more bucks as compared to learning about the world and themselves, but, it was never a question for me. The issues of how I would make bucks came later -- college for me was about discovery and reading and learning, and I tend to agree with Bloom -- the importance of those years cannot be overestimated, at least in my own life.