I like this. I think this college does a good job of maintianing this philosophy.

http://www.wyomingcatholiccollege.com/Default.aspx

When in The Apology Socrates places his quest for truth above loyalty to the city or when in the first book of The Republic Plato has Socrates dismantle Polemarchus’s claim that justice is doing right by one’s friends are we not already, in some sense, aimed toward the loss of place and particulars?

But the answer seems to lie within the tradition itself. Is Aristotle’s connection of friendship with political philosophy not already an antidote to the abstraction of justice? The problem itself can be seen as one of the principle dialogs within the great conversation. A case in which, to borrow James Schall’s phrasing, we need Plato to refute Plato.

What might be some of the voices within the Western tradition that can be invoked to bring us back to the particular after we have flown high in the realms of abstraction? I take the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition to be a voice on the side of the particular. What other voices do we see filling out this chorus?

Harumph. Looks like modernity’s slip is showing. I thought conservatism held that the forming of souls was the work of the home, as in sola familia.

Trade schools and institutions of “professional education” operate at the expense of the liberal arts only when those sorts of education masquerade themselves as the liberal arts. That is, the liberal arts are damaged where liberal arts colleges offer majors and are indeed reliant upon business, education, pre-med, and pre-law ‘disciplines’. However, the “professional classes” are hardly harmed as you suggest by the existence of trade schools and explicitly professional schools, both of which purport to train only offer a certain set of skills necessary (though perhaps not sufficient) for the practice of a particular craft.

To be more clear, what I’m saying is that everyone ain’t made for college. Where colleges–and especially those of the liberal arts variety–go wrong is in believing this fact and believing in its converse nonetheless–that college is or can be made for everyone. This, in large part, is what leads to the degradation of standards in higher education, because if college can be made for everyone, then even the slowest of the slow-witted (see: our former president, or anyone granted admission in virtue solely of affirmative action policies) ought to be able to succeed at our best institutions because those institutions can (and, indeed, must!) be made to accommodate them.

What we’ve seen of late is the proof that this converse belief false–that no number of language labs, writing centers, interactive learning methodologies, or “Insert Your Race Here”-Studies Programs will be able to get some students through. So, in response, colleges either abandon the converse belief, saying, in essence, that everyone ain’t made for college, or they remake college in the worst way possible: they lower standards.

As you point out, this lowering of the bar surely does a disservice to the professional classes that require college education (say, the legal, medical, and in part business professions), but the specialization of trade schools and explicitly professional institutions surely doesn’t have the degrading effect you suggest. After all, law school is appropriately specialized for lawyers, as medical school is for doctors. But becoming, say, a master welder or carpenter requires the same sort of specialization that becoming a lawyer or doctor requires. The difference is that whereas doctoring and lawyering rightly require undergraduate degrees, welding and carpentry do not. Thus, the import of trade schools: they allow those unsuited for college to specialize their labor in accordance with the craft for which those people are best suited.

In keeping with Wendell Berry, what I’m trying to say is that while college may not be made for everyone, and while everyone may not be made for college, there is one thing that everyone is made for: work . And all work done well will require some degree of specialization. The liberal arts oughtn’t be about that sort of specialization, but trade and professional schools ought to be. That isn’t to say that someone made to be a carpenter isn’t also made to go to college. It’s that there’s a group of carpenters who really aren’t made for college, and professional schools are meant to accommodate them.

This may be what you were saying all along–in which case, we agree! It just didn’t come across that way in your comment. . . .

A liberal arts education also equips a person to be a lifelong learner, a steward of one’s mind and hopefully, a prepared citizen in a cross fertilizing world of ideas.

The increasing plunge into “professional education” , at the expense of liberal arts…the trade school approach that is not in service to craft but to professional occupation…does a great disservice to the professional class.

In Pune, India, many educationalists like Dr. Arun Nigvekar have come together to form Seamless Education Academy, that is the first and only Creativersity in India. they have very recently launched a blog (www.seamlesseducationacademy.blogspot.com) as well. it seems here that they want to give a focus to the creative genius in their students in RJ, Sound Engineering, Gemmology, Animation and Broadcast Media. i think that initiatives like these are a ray of hope and really need to be commended.