Comments on: Leisure and the Liberal Arts https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/10/23/leisure-and-the-liberal-arts/ Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:23:54 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.15 By: Close Reader https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/10/23/leisure-and-the-liberal-arts/comment-page-1/#comment-15433 Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:23:54 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2133#comment-15433 I agree with many of your critiques, but I think that you miss the point. Neem is not arguing against economic motivations. He is stating, first, that the liberal arts do have other goals that are worthy in non-economic terms but, second, if we do not provide students the “freedom” to engage in the liberal arts, only families with a lot of economic capital or cultural capital will do so, and they alone will be the elite. Other families will look to more narrow, vocational degrees, and their students will neither get access to high cultural capital jobs, but also to influence as citizens that cultural capital offers. Moreover, access to better graduate schools and professional schools depends on one’s major. This freedom to study the liberal arts, therefore, can provide more economic mobility to people than the current model that privatizes the responsibility and forces students to think narrowly and be risk averse. It is an argument about civic/human benefits as well as economic ones.

]]> By: Withywindle https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2012/10/23/leisure-and-the-liberal-arts/comment-page-1/#comment-15424 Wed, 24 Oct 2012 04:34:14 +0000 https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=2133#comment-15424 Thank you for the link; interesting article–not least, for me, because it overlaps my current research. Some thoughts:

1) You can accept the goal “we must democratize leisure by offering undergraduate college students the time and opportunity to study the liberal arts” and differ on the best path toward that goal. E.g., you can justify free-market policies as leading toward the economic growth that provides, in time, the preconditions for leisure for the greatest number of people. The market becomes the precondition for leisure, the liberal arts, etc., rather than something opposed to these.

2) More broadly, I take this goal to be so general in the hardwiring of our civilization that it doesn’t (or shouldn’t) map exclusively onto any contemporary partisan polemic.

3) The point of the liberal arts is ideally to make a citizen, but practically to make a competent bureaucrat. The trouble with democratizing the liberal arts is that we can’t afford to employ everyone as a bureaucrat. Also, unemployed would-be bureaucrats get all bolshie, or Faschie, or snarkie. Whatever, it ends in tears.

4) And a fanatical devotion to the pope.

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