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Show Editorials Dying Arts Liberal arts is gasping its last. At one time, going to college connotated a beautiful notion of developing the imaginative im-aginative and reasoning powers apart from marketable skill and professional competence. At one time any college graduate, whether an engineer or a philosopher, was recognized recog-nized as someone capable of contemplation with a cultivated sensibility and judgment. He would refer to college as the "four happiest years of my life." Things have changed. If colleges were ever places of elegant leisure, they are no longer. Look around the campus and all you see is anxious pre-occupation. Students are married, employed, going to or returning from a conference, apprehensive about examinations and ruled like the ulcered executive by the clock. They are not in cloistered walls but in the midst of all the specialties of the world's functions which is why so many are also in the midst of psychiatric treatment. What are called the best colleges today have been invaded, if not dispossessed by the advanced agents of the professions, by those who want to seize upon the young recruit re-cruit as soon as possible and train him in a "tangible skill." Specialization is accellerated not only by the professionals but by the students themselves. The students want to get on as soon as possible and feel they can't afford to take anything any-thing in the last two years of college which doesn't relate directly to their future professions. Any objection or criticism of this new higher education would be like trying to turn back the ocean. The change is regrettable but inevitable. Our training must adapt to our technological society. Latest indications are that the trend will naught but accellerate because no longer is one sheepskin sheep-skin to one sheep enough. Post-graduate work is a necessity for those who seek to go the farthest. So new cries to cut the normal course to three years, or to add a fifth year that would bring with it a graduate degree, will undoubtedly eliminate those last few "wasted" hours in subjects outside our specialities. Liberal education is being accelerated out of high schools, and squeezed into specialization by the necessity for graduate degrees and pre-determined specialization. Freshmen Fresh-men and sophomores need to recognize their general education edu-cation classes as valuable and limited opportunities, because oddly enough, while the old liberal education is being exterminated, ex-terminated, the professional schools continue to demand it in their candidates. |