The liberal arts is dead. Long live the liberal arts.

There is nothing else I want to do but be immersed, the way I am, in liberal education.  To those who say put your money where your mouth is, well, I have: I gave up what would have certainly been a fantastically remunerative career in electrical engineering, which is more than enough evidence of my mouth and money.

This commitment and belief in liberal education is also why I am terribly disappointed with the contemporary state of liberal education.  Self-aggrandizing faculty through their endless intellectual Onanism have converted liberal education into a process to clone as many of their like-minded replicants as possible.  One unfortunate result of all this, among many, is that liberal education now arrogantly and systematically disses any kind of professional training--the trades, as Camille Paglia refers to them.

I have written about this and have, in the process, earned more enemies than I ever imagined would be possible.  But, it is an important issue that we cannot ignore--because, we are screwing up the futures of hundreds of thousands of youth.

Paglia's latest commentary is too good to merely provide an excerpt.  So, here is the entire piece--a short one to commemorate the ten year anniversary of the Chronicle Review.  (Only now do I realize then that my own essay that was published there in 2001 was in its infancy. Cool!)  Camille Paglia writes on "Revalorizing the Trades":

Vanishing of jobs will plague the rest of this decade and more. Meaningful employment is no longer guaranteed to dutiful, studious members of the middle class in the Western world. College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class.

Yes, an elite education at stratospheric prices will smooth the way into law or medical school and supply a network of useful future contacts. But what if a student wants a different, less remunerative or status-oriented but more personally fulfilling career? There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks.

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.

Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their hands—ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.

The elite schools, predicated on molding students into mirror images of their professors, seem divorced from any rational consideration of human happiness. In a period of global economic turmoil, with manufacturing jobs migrating overseas and service-sector jobs diminishing in availability and prestige, educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings, with all teachers responsible for a core curriculum. But every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.