"Show Me How to Think and How to Choose"

"Delbanco reminds us of Max Weber’s distinction between 'soul-saving' and 'skill-acquiring' education. The liberal arts, in their task to develop a certain roundedness in those who study them and their function, in Delbanco’s phrase, 'as a hedge against utilitarian values,' are (or at least were meant to be) soul-saving. Whether, in the majority of students who undertook to study the liberal arts, they truly were or not may be open to question, but what isn’t open to question is that today, the liberal arts have lost interest in their primary mission. That mission, as Delbanco has it, is that of 'attaining and sustaining curiosity and humility,' while 'engaging in some serious ­self-examination.' A liberal education, as he notes, quoting John Henry Cardinal Newman, 'implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of our character.'
"Delbanco warns that it won’t do to posit some prelapsarian golden age when higher education approached perfection. Surely he is correct. A good deal of the old liberal arts education was dreary. The profession of teaching, like that of clergyman and psychiatrist, calls for a higher sense of vocation and talent than poor humanity often seems capable of attaining. Yet there was a time when a liberal arts education held a much higher position in the world’s regard than it does today."

Joseph Epstein in The Weekly Standard laments the decline in emphasis of the liberal arts at universities.

Katie Billotte responds to Epstein in Salon.