Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to say our goodbyes to one whom we will sorely miss: the free soul. This individual was the one of our age, the jack of all trades and the patron of liberal arts. All too often in this world, man becomes a machine in the sense of being programmed.
Don’t look so concerned reader, you probably didn’t know this individual, commonly going by the title Renaissance man or woman, and although you may not have been holding the smoking gun, you watch as he or she bleeds out upon the floor.
Today’s trends follow strict adherence to a “plan” and a drive for specialized super-computer college graduates with a one-track mind.
The new American way of collegiate education is to pump out programmed individuals for “X” career. In theory, this sounds great. Give me doctors in 7-8 years, lawyers in 6-7, etc., and the world will continue to turn without even a jump in the record.
The only problem is even though those lawyers can tell you every case-related civil suit against a large commercial industry, they will search “calculator” in an online search engine when given a simple arithmetic problem. Doctors on the other hand, can easily lay out a complicated procedure, but one look at their sentence formations would make the “Twilight” series seem worthy of the Pulitzer. Curriculums around the nation are thinning in variety and bulking in advancement.
Pressure is put on students to choose a field of study or fall into the nightmare of an undecided student. The enjoyment and freedom gained in college to explore one’s meaning in life or career, or heaven forbid, passion, becomes ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Although, I suppose the experimentations of drugs and alcohol can nicely fill that void. This, compounded with parents expecting their childeren to fulfill a certain lifestyle, as chosen by their parents.
Students climb these mountains of accreditation only to find they don’t like their career choices, and they are left on the summits with no rescue helicopters nearby. I do hand it to those who are resistant and who continue to march on. I commend those colleges and universities, Creighton among them, who continue to have a liberal arts curriculum, despite the liberal arts movement toward synonymy with specialized education.
I also hand it to Creighton’s individual departments who don’t just develop chemistry majors or music majors, but well-grounded graduates. It is in these core classes that you become human again.
As the coffin is lowered into the ground, we can continue to watch, or we can take it upon ourselves to spread the philosophy of liberal arts. College should be a place of developing functional and intelligent human beings, not one track drones cognizant only of the task at hand. As you say your closing prayers, think: why should we not demand anything less, and can we not strive toward greatness?