PERSPECTIVErnBurn This Bookrnby Thomas FlemingrnWhy do we send our children to school, much less to a collegernor a university? I have put this question to anyrnnumber of parents, teachers, and headmasters and only rarelyrnreceived a better answer than “So they can get a good job.”rnNever having had what most people would call a good job, Irntake their word for it that taking out tonsils or keeping felons outrnof jail constitutes a good job, so long as it brings in more dianrn100k in the second or third ear.rnBut surely it does not take 20 v’cars of schooling to learn howtorndraw up a contract or even to perform a bypass operation.rnThese technical skills could be taught successfully to teenagersrnwho would be ready to receive their licenses by the age they normallyrnenter (or at least finish) college, hi fact, man}’Americanrnparents who want to prepare their children for a vocation arernlooking awav from traditional colleges, which cost annually asrnmuch as a lower-middle-class worker makes in a ear, and the-rnare turning to apprenticeships and conmiunity colleges asrncheaper methods of acquiring “the job skills ou need in thisrncompetitive worid,” as the l)rochures put it, or “career trainingrnfor the new millennium.”rnI think we can take it as given that colleges and universitiesrnare a waste of time and moneys staffed, as the’ are, by laz’ andrnincompetent anti-intellectuals—and while “higher” educationrnhas declined since the days of my youth, when I learned ancientrnGreek in a ramshackle Victorian house on Green Street inrnGharleston (or was it College Street?), American colleges havernnot amounted to much at any time in this centur)’. JacquesrnBarzun and Thomas Molnar railed against the educationalrnstandards of the 1950’s and 60’s, and Albert Jay Nock was ridiculingrnthe universities of his day over 50 years ago, pointing outrnthat education had declined sharply between the 1880’s and thern1930’s. If there was a golden age of American education, it wasrnclearK’ before the Re’olution, when men like John Adams andrnThomas Jefferson were growing up. It has been a himdred earsrnsince we had professors as educated as they were, to say nothingrnof presidents.rnI also take it as given that there is a reason (apart from jobrnskills or the need to reduce competition for jobs) that we stickrnvoung men and women in college for four to five crucial ‘earsrnof their lives. To discover that purpose, as it was once understood,rnwe have to go back to the ideals of the Rena)S,sance humanistsrnor further still to Quintilian, who defined the end resultrnof a training in rhetoric as a “good man skilled in speaking”; thatrnis, a person of good character who had been trained to put hisrntalents to useful purposes.rnThat ancient rhetorical curriculum, whose sources lie bothrnin the Greek experience and in the writings of Aristotle, Gicero,rnand Quintilian, was eventuallv Christianized and turned intornthe medieval curriculum of “liberal arts.” In recent years, tiiatrnexpression, when it does not evoke a sneer, is usually glossed asrnthe “liberating arts.”rnI was surprised to learn that this interpretation goes back atrnleast to Montaigne, who must have known that it was not literall-rntrue —that, in fact, the artes liheraks (from Greek technairnekuthemi?) were the pursuits worthy of a free man (as opposedrnto die training gien to a slave, peasant, or manual worker). InrnlO/CHRONICLESrnrnrn