Bernard graduated from college several years ago. He studied hard and earned honors. He has a good job and a comfortable existence. At a family get-together his father mentions a newspaper editorial that says the U.S. should reassert the Monroe Doctrine in the Caribbean.

"Your company does business down there, son. What do you think?".

"Well--I don't know--What's the Monroe Doctrine?".

"What is it?," comes the playful but pointed response. "With all of that money we spent on college, are you sure it went in the right direction?".

This isn't the only missing piece of knowledge Bernard has been confronted with over a short period of time. Earlier in the day his seven-year-old niece overheard a television news story about a typhoon, and asked him if it was like the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. He'd gotten out of that by saying, "Yeah, it's a big storm," but realized he'd about covered the extent of his knowledge on the subject, and was glad the TV hadn't mentioned hurricanes or monsoons--more big storms that came to mind but that he knew only as names. And then there was the business meeting he was in yesterday. His boss explained the new marketing strategy for one of the company's feature products by saying that Americans aren't really Epicureans, but they are into conspicuous consumption. Not knowing the terms, he'd spent an uncomfortable half-hour nodding silently, trying to understand the logic of the new rationale and at the same time keep up with other things being said.

What does all of this mean? How much knowledge like this is there that Bernard doesn't have? According to society's standards, he's an educated person. Still, intellectually, is he really a success? Or is he just managing to get by?

BERNARD ISN'T ALONE. He's like many--dare we say most?--college graduates. There is a great deal of basic knowledge he is lacking. Traditionalist educators for years have bemoaned this situation. Business executives sometimes notice it too, and complain about it. And there is statistical evidence to back it up. A 1989 Gallup survey of college seniors nationwide showed that slightly more than half knew when the Civil War occurred (in a 50-year span), what the "Reconstruction" period was, and that the Koran is the sacred text of Islam. Fewer than half knew what the Magna Charta was, what the play Antigone is about, that the Mayans lived in Mexico, what the Missouri Compromise decided, that the purpose of the Federalist Papers was to gain ratification of the U.S. Constitution, who wrote The Tempest, The Republic, Crime and Punishment, and a raft of other information.

Another national survey of college seniors done by Roper in 1996 makes the situation look even worse. While Gallup used mostly multiple-choice questions (with four possible answers, and a 25% chance of guessing the right one), Roper required respondents to fill in the blanks. 47% knew how many U.S. Senators there are, 16% knew that Harry Truman was the U.S. President at the beginning of the Korean War, 8% knew that the expression "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people" comes from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, 41% could name four major religions outside of Christianity, 24% could name 4 countries (any four) in Africa, 53% could figure out the perimeter of a room 65 feet wide and 35 feet long, 61% could compute how long it will take an airplane flying 6 miles a minute to travel 720 miles. The rest of the 20-question test was of a comparable level of difficulty. Only 7% of the respondents answered at least 15 correctly, 70% failed to get half right, and a third got 5 or fewer.

These surveys and others like them present clear-cut evidence to underscore what less-statistically-minded critics have long complained about--that the supposedly well-educated portion of our population actually has little of the kind of basic knowledge we would associate with studying the liberal arts. How, then, have our colleges reacted to the situation? What they haven't done is rush out and overhaul the curriculum to ensure that students learn what the surveys show is lacking. For the past decade or more there has been a nation-wide reform movement focused on the general-education portion of the curriculum, and many faculty and administrators are proud of it. But the changes it has made have had little impact on the issue at hand. Some of the changes have done nothing for it all--like adding multiculturalism requirements and freshman seminars. Other changes are meant to deal with the missing knowledge, but what they amount to is merely a bit of restraint on the smorgasbord of courses students can choose from to fulfill their basic requirements. For whatever colleges have done in the name of reform, they continue to graduate students like Bernard. While critics find this to be a cause for alarm, and an embarrassment for American education, the majority of the higher education community goes along with it, and the general population seems not to be overly concerned. The critics are in the minority. No matter how hard they try--and they have tried hard time and again--they fail to get enough people worked up about the situation to do something about it. The fact is that most people today--the general public and many professional educators as well--are not convinced that the knowledge in question is really important. They have other priorities.

Some, mainly professors, believe that knowledge is relative and that there is no set of knowledge that is of ultimate worth, or that multiculturalism should supersede the Western tradition, or that it is more important for students to develop their attitudes and emotions than to concentrate on learning a set of facts. And more people, truly large numbers including students, parents, and other interested parties, as well as many professors, are concerned foremost with preparation for jobs. What they are looking for is learning they think will apply well in today's world, that will help people get along in it, and where needed, change it for the better. To sum it up under a single word, people want knowledge that is practical. They don't see basic literature, history, geography, etc. as filling the bill. It appears to be frivolous, the sort of thing that's good for playing Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy, the currency of elitist mind-games. But what difference does it make in the real world of practical everyday affairs if a person doesn't know about the Civil War, or about Shakespeare, or exactly where some place is located on the map?

Here is the challenge that liberal learning must meet if it is ever to have a chance of gaining widespread support. Pointing out the knowledge that is missing, as the surveys do, is only a first step. A strong promotion needs to be mounted for why what's missing is a problem. And it needs to be made on grounds non-believers are willing to listen to. They see the value of a college education in utilitarian terms. Believers need to find a better way to deal with this crucial factor than they have so far. What is needed, in short, is a new type of public relations campaign.

The old campaign has consisted of two main sales pitches, one of which is antagonistic to the cause, and the other of which has been made only vaguely and without the force that could make it work. Oftentimes liberal learning has been presented as the antithesis of utilitarianism. Its value, we're told, is intrinsic: it is learning simply for its own sake, the reward is in the enrichment of the mind or soul. Activity done for its own sake is a higher form of activity than the practical, and something everyone who is initiated into it in college will benefit from.

There have been many eloquent pronouncements to this effect, and in fact the idea is sound. It is an admirable reason for liberal learning. The problem with it is that it doesn't tell all of the story, and certainly not the story the utilitarian mindset is willing to listen to. It rubs the wrong way. For one thing, utilitarians who listen long enough to understand it respond by asking why students should be required to spend their time and money in college on pursuits of intrinsic value, when what they really want is strictly practical. Many times, however, the philosophical subtlety gets lost, and the devastating caricature comes out in which liberal learning is portrayed as trivia. When this happens, no amount of moralizing about intrinsic worth is going to change people's minds. In either event, what is needed is to tell them the other part of the story about the worth of what they are rejecting. Learning the basics of the liberal arts is indeed practical. Studying them yields valuable knowledge of a utilitarian sort.

Advocates for liberal learning have raised this point in its support, making it their other sales pitch. Many have conceded that the knowledge-for-its-own-sake position attracts few new followers, and they have taken to promoting the liberal arts as having an important practical dimension. But their explanations are brief and largely uninformative. Sometimes they seem to assume the answer is intuitively clear, and other times we get vague warnings about how a lack of basic liberal learning leads to failure to perform on the job or to our country being in a precarious position in the global marketplace. But generalizations like these don't get to the heart of the matter. What is needed are clear-cut, specific examples of how having a broad liberal-arts knowledge will make a person better off, or how lacking that knowledge leaves someone ill-equipped to function well. People need to see just how the knowledge in question makes a difference to them in their own individual practical affairs, how it applies in a variety of situations they face in their everyday lives. And to show only a few situations won't be enough. The support liberal learning needs lies in the cumulative effect of numerous examples of everyday-type occurrences. If it can be demonstrated that time and again knowing the basics of the liberal arts has true utilitarian value, the case will have been strengthened for pushing colleges to ensure that their graduates have this sort of learning, and for convincing the consumers of higher education that the effort to acquire it is not foreign to their interests but actually consistent with them.

A good starting point in demonstrating the practicality of liberal arts knowledge lies in the concept of cultural literacy. Its popularizer, E.D. Hirsch, in his book by that title has concentrated on the knowledge he believes students should acquire by the completion of high school, but it can be argued that much of the material he wants covered should also be present in the college curriculum. While this might seem like repetition, there are good reasons for it. One is that while students may be getting the important material in high school (it may be suspected that many are not), obviously they haven't learned it there or they wouldn't be showing their ignorance the way they have on the surveys. The other reason is that at the college level, courses deal with topics in a deeper and more sophisticated fashion. Important material gets a fully adult treatment.

The main point of cultural literacy is that human thinking and communication rely on the possession of a body of relevant background information. In order to pick up a newspaper or magazine or book and comprehend what it says, or do likewise in listening to someone speak, and particularly to think critically about and evaluate all of this--here another popular concept, critical thinking, fits together with cultural literacy--a person must have knowledge of certain fundamental facts and ideas: important terms, dates, names. Otherwise there are many gaps in meaning, and understanding is reduced, along with the power to relate one thing to another and thus make judgments. There is relevant prior knowledge we have to possess before what we read and hear makes sense to us and can be applied to understand our world and live well in it. Without this knowledge we can only fumble along like Bernard.

Applying the notion of cultural literacy, taken at a level we would hope for in college graduates, we can come up with examples of how it is important in everyday life. The examples I will cite here are hypothetical but realistic, and are meant to show that the instances where having cultural literacy makes a difference occur in many settings.

* You overhear a conservation about a company you have scheduled a job interview with. The comment is "They're looking for Machiavellian types." Just what is it that they value in their employees? In your last interview they were big on family values--Should you emphasize that?

* You read a TV Guide summary of a movie. It says about the main character, "He meets his Lady Macbeth." Perhaps you recognize the reference to a Shakespearean figure, or at least to a famous figure from somewhere in literature. But what was she like?

* At an auction you consider buying a chair you are told comes from an important old Southern family. "How old is it?," you ask. "Antebellum," you're told. "What's that mean?," you venture. The auctioneer smiles and answers, "Before the flood." Now wondering if the furniture in the room may have been water-damaged, you examine the chair. On the underside of it there is a faded but readable manufacturer's seal dated 1874. Should you bid on the chair?

* You read editorial that a politician you are considering voting for is easily swayed by his superego. You assume that means he thinks too highly of himself.

* Your boss hands you a client list and tells you to divide it into those east of the Mississippi and those west of the Mississippi. She needs it pronto. You can handle the east coast and west coast, but the midwest, where your company has a number of clients, is a mental blur. You don't have an atlas on your shelf. You begin to panic about the promotion you have been hoping for.

* At a dinner party with your boss you're caught in a discussion about great portrait painters. Rembrandt and Gainsborough have been mentioned. The only other famous artist's name you can think of is Jackson Pollock. You don't know anything about his painting. Should you drop his name?

* You inquire about the academic performance of the students at the school where your child attends the fourth grade. You're given a sheet of statistics from standardized testing, with lots of numbers, and terms like mean, median, and standard deviation. For the main test the school relies on, you see that the fourth graders have a mean percentile of 70 and a median percentile of 52. Are the fourth graders considerably above the national average, as the principal has announced?

* You ask what sort of mood someone is in, and you're told, "A docile 7.5 on the Richter Scale." Is that a good mood or bad, you wonder. "If I'd only taken that intro to psychology course....".

* In looking through the directory outside a large office building you encounter terms like: telemetry, semicondictor, fiber optics, kinetics, hydraulics. What do they do in this building, you wonder? On the ground floor there is a restaurant, and next to it in the window of a beautician's shop is a sign for "Electrolysis." Could there be a clue here?

* You're finishing college and hoping to go to law school. You go for an interview for a summer internship with a judge. In trying to impress him, you throw in some terminology you've heard floating around. "Your Honor, I want to be associated with quality. And I've heard that you run a Star Chamber." You're surprised at the judge's negative reaction.

Cultural literacy is highly practical, as these examples demonstrate. And there are many more--hundreds, at least--key terms, dates, names that it is not a trivia exercise to be familiar with. Knowing them gives a person mobility of word and thought, a grasp of what is happening in the surrounding world that allows for successful navigation through it. Not knowing them means going through life encountering frequent confusions and uncertainties about what to do and say. In the absence of knowledge like this people may find ways to cope and get along, but in order to get along well in the world we live in, in order to function at a high level in it, that knowledge is a prerequisite.

Still, as valuable as cultural literacy is, it explains only part of the worth of a solid liberal arts education. There is much more that is important. Beyond coming to know various individual pieces of information, is the capacity to put the pieces together so as to see the big picture. Broad study of the basics contributes to the development of what education critic Jacques Barzun has referred to as "general intelligence." This isn't a reference to native capacity, or what might be called IQ, but instead to the trained capacity to make sense out of or give structure to the many and diverse ideas and facts floating around in our lives. General intelligence allows people to go beyond a single mindset or single discipline, beyond limited and narrow perspectives on the world.

More specifically, what is involved includes the ability to analyze or sort out information and to synthesize it and generalize, and, further, to prioritize it and evaluate it. The process of doing all of this well requires not only a great deal of factual knowledge, but an understanding of certain fundamental ideas that underlie the various disciplines and all high-level intellectualization. Students eventually come to apply these ideas comfortably, by understanding what their components are and how the ideas fit together with one another. Overall there is an emphasis on understanding humanity and understanding how human beings fit into the larger scheme of things--what it consists of, what we can control and what we cannot, and to what extent.

This is general intelligence in the abstract. To put it in more concrete terms, we can start by naming some of the ideas, and then look more closely at a couple of them to see just how they are involved in practical everyday affairs. As with the case of cultural literacy, some examples may help to describe it more fully. Philosopher Mortimer Adler has identified 102 "great ideas," each divided into topics and some into subtopics, that underlie the structure of the Western intellectual tradition, the tradition of the society we live in. Adler's list is an excellent source for understanding what the fundamental ideas are, although there is room for debate about whether it is fully comprehensive, and about which ideas are really the most fundamental and which should have topic and subtopic status. And while Adler prefers to aim only at the Western tradition, the fundamental nature of the ideas makes at least many of them applicable for other cultures as well.

Some examples from Adler's list include beauty, change, citizen, duty, eternity, family, freedom, God, induction, labor, love, mechanics, punishment, quantity, revolution, slavery, time, truth, war and peace, and will. These concepts are obviously fundamental, although some are more broad and extensive than others. Here the relationship of general intelligence to cultural literacy may begin to become apparent. They are not discrete sorts of knowledge, but overlap and converge, with general intelligence containing and organizing items of cultural literacy, and the recognition of those items drawing upon a comprehension of fundamental ideas.

The meaning of Sigmund Freud's term superego, used in my earlier example about the politician, is a recognizable item of cultural literacy. The superego is one of the main elements in the picture Freud presents of the human psyche. But it's not this specific picture itself that is Freud's most significant contribution to our basic knowledge of things; rather it is his positing of the unconscious mind--the notion that beneath the conscious level of the mind there lies another level, the unconscious, that influences it. The notion of the unconscious mind is a fundamental idea, basic to psychology and discussed in philosophy, and sometimes drawn upon in other disciplines. (Adler's schema treats it as a subtopic of the idea of mind.) Freud's notion of the unconscious has been picked up by other theorists who offer their own versions of what its contents and workings are. In practical terms the idea of the unconscious translates into the recognition that what is inside a person's mind as an influence on behavior often isn't clear to or even available to that person's conscious understanding of self and world. Based on this notion, various personality tests have been devised to reveal a person's inner self, and competing versions of the nature of the unconscious have led to the development of competing approaches to therapy (Freudian, Jungian, existential, client-centered, etc.).

In spite of all of this, the existence of the unconscious, or at least the importance of it, hasn't met with universal acceptance. The behaviorist approach to psychology, fathered by John Watson and popularized by B.F. Skinner, deals with changes in behavior without asking about what may be in a person's "mind." Various behavior modification strategies (rewards for desirable behavior, punishment for unacceptable behavior) have been devised to deal with problems of smoking, overeating, overly aggressive youngsters, etc. A whole behavior modification industry has grown up alongside that of its rivals who cater to the unconscious.

The idea of the unconscious mind is highly influential in our way of thinking in the twentieth century. It is a main explanatory factor for what before had simply been called madness, and thought of as inscrutable or as the work of Satan. Today we have elaborate scientific explanations for mental illness, and the role of the unconscious is well-accepted as the basis for them. The idea is important, too, in our conception of criminality. Many legal cases involve defenses built around the idea of deep-seated psychological problems that are introduced as mitigating factors in judging criminal behavior. Further, we employ the notion of the unconscious in dealing with other important social problems--racism, for instance. The stage was set in the Brown versus Board of Education case, where the decision to desegregate schools relied on the notion of psychological damage to young minds: that black children would develop deep-seated feelings of inferiority if kept isolated in segregated schools. Today the claim is often heard that white people harbor underlying attitudes of racism that they are not conscious of.

Given that the notion of the unconscious is a mainstay of twentieth-century thought, it still remains to be shown how it touches specifically on the lives of people who could benefit from having studied about it in college. As with cultural literacy, the challenge is to make clear how having a particular sort of knowledge in a person's background is an advantage in situations that person may encounter, in other words, how having that knowledge is valuable for more than arm-chair intellectualizing. There are various situations where what can be learned about the unconscious (and related matters like schools of psychology and psychological testing) through a good liberal arts education in college--the understanding about it that is developed--will be helpful.

* A friend or member of your family has psychological problems. You want to help in choosing a professional for the person to see. Several recommendations have been made to you, but how do you begin to sort out among them? Does it make any difference as long as the person chosen is good? In ignorance of the differences among Freudian, client-centered, etc. approaches to therapy you might easily say no. But if you were choosing political advisor, would you not consider the difference between a Republican and a Democrat, or the differences among a priest, rabbi, or a minister in looking for religious counsel, or the difference between a supply-sider and a Marxist when looking for an economic advisor?

* You are on a jury where a psychological profile is part of the defense's case. A fellow juror says, "That's all Freudian baloney." Where do you stand?

* The company you work for in a managerial role is trying to deal with problems of absenteeism and theft by employees. You have a voice in deciding what should be done. Should personality testing be used to screen employees or potential employees? Should you hire counseling psychologists to deal with offenders or potential offenders? Should you take the general preventive measure of having all employees go through a "consciousness raising" program? Should you consider behavior modification techniques? Are you better off simply hiring a better security force, maybe including undercover detectives?

* As member of a union you are presented with a wage and benefits proposal to vote on. One controversial item is whether or not to include psychiatric/psychological services among the medical benefits--it will cost more to do so. Where do you stand?

* In a salary discussion with your boss, you are asked why you are entitled to a raise when your performance has been judged average but not exemplary. You are a minority member, but you cannot cite overt instances of racism against you on the job. Do you want to introduce the topic of racist "tendencies"?

Having developed in college a basic understanding of the unconscious mind, and learned about related matters in psychology, will not mean that someone can answer these questions easily. There are other matters to be taken into consideration as well--legal, ethical, economic. And the psychological factors are not clear-cut; they involve opinions and value judgments. But a basic understanding is important. An informed opinion or judgment is the key. Having a knowledge of the fundamental ideas that underlie or subsume the rest of our thinking, the ideas we bump up against in making difficult choices, makes the holder of that knowledge more ready to make those choices and to do it successfully.

As another example of a fundamental idea, consider the idea of freedom. This idea underlies many issues we hold opinions about, and situations we confront. Our preference for a political party, put in general terms, is likely to be determined by the extent to which and ways in which we believe government should exert control in our lives. Matters like gun control, abortion, free market economy, affirmative action, immigration, school prayer, that we debate about and that are key factors in determining who we want to represent us in political office, involve the idea of freedom. And decisions made by legislators and judges about these issues have direct effects on everyday life--automobile manufacturers are forced to recall automobiles with questionable safety records, minority-owned businesses are given preference over white-owned businesses in securing government contracts, and so on. But the idea of freedom carries further into areas of everyday life that may or may not fall within the scope of our lawmakers and interpreters, and that don't make the national news. Yet here, too, as with the more high-visibility issues, having a well thought out understanding of what freedom is all about will be valuable.

* One of your co-workers likes to play rap music while on the job, within earshot of other workers who have complained. Discussion ensues about cultural insensitivity, about the content of rap, and with claims about constitutional rights. Should the music be stopped?

* You are told by the local merchant's association that the new sign you've put up advertising your business does not conform to the association's standards--it is too large and too brightly colored. Will you change your sign? Just what is at issue here?

* One of the neighbors asks for your signature on a petition to erase the ordinance in your state requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets. He is glad to discuss the issue with you. How do you approach it?

* The school district where your children are enrolled is considering requiring students to wear uniforms. Do you find this to be an abridgment of freedom? If so, is it an unacceptable one?

* The school district where your children are enrolled is considering offering a Bible course. The proposal causes much debate over freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Where do you stand?

* You have a well-paying professional job at which you are performing successfully. But you are tired of the rat race. You consider several options: yoga; quitting your job and becoming an at-home consultant via distance media; selling your property and moving to an inexpensive out-of-the-way cottage. What should you do, and just what is this elusive freedom that you seek?

* In a church sermon you hear the statement that the many freedoms we have are actually limiting; ultimate freedom is to know God and to know truth. What does this mean?

Just as with the idea of the unconscious mind, a well-developed understanding of freedom will not mean that you can come to easy answers when confronted with issues and situations such as these. And people who have not attended college, as well as people who have attended but haven't learned much about the basics of the liberal arts, still employ the notion of freedom in their thinking, and still face the same kinds of issues and situations that more fully educated people do. How, then, does a solid liberal education in college make a difference? The difference is in how well-informed and discerning an individual is. One thing students should learn in college is a bit about our political system, particularly about the United States Constitution--what freedoms are granted under it, and what decisions were rendered in that regard in some of our most famous court cases. Moving further into the study of history we can learn of concrete instances in the quest for freedom that relate directly to our lives today and indirectly but importantly to our understanding of humanity in general--about wars and rebellions fought for freedom (the American Revolution, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and lesser-scale occurrences like the Whiskey Rebellion, Boxer Rebellion, Hungarian Revolution), about the migrations of people for the purpose of finding freedom, about the civil rights movement, the labor movement, etc.. Further, there is the subject matter of philosophy, economics, literature. In studying works like The Republic, On Liberty, The Social Contract, The Communist Manifesto, The Second Sex, Invisible Man, 1984, The Brothers Karamazov, Wealth of Nations, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, and others, students come to consider the origins of freedom as a natural right and as created by human law, the concept of equal rights, the tension between freedom and responsibility, limitations on freedom by race and gender, and distinctions among such types of freedom as freedom of expression, religion, economics, thought, the soul.

People who have learned about what has happened in history, about the foundation of our system of law, and about fundamental philosophical considerations concerning freedom are better equipped than those who haven't gained this knowledge are to deal with issues and situations such as those described here--when claims like "I've got my constitutional rights" really mean something; what other statements about freedom (like the one from the sermon--about "ultimate freedom") are getting at; how changes that have occurred in history come into play in judging whether today we have gone too far or not far enough in the quest for freedom (for instance, from emancipation from slavery to affirmative action); about our nation's tradition of church/state separation and what it has meant for our schools; weighing the impact of freedom of one sort or for some people on freedom of another sort or for other people (as in playing the music of your choice versus not having to listen to offensive messages).

The examples cited here of cultural literacy and "general intelligence" demonstrate that basic liberal arts learning is far from the trivia exercise that its challengers might suggest. Knowing about Shakespeare, about where some place is located on the map, about the abstract concept of freedom, and so on does make a significant difference in a person's life. As the examples suggest, that difference can be understood in utilitarian terms. Liberal learning is practical: it can be applied in ways that make us more comfortable, more successful in dealing with many situations we find ourselves in as we go about our daily activities. One way comfort or success is thought of is in terms of the job world--not "job-specific" terms like knowing the tensile strength of building materials in engineering, or in marketing knowing how to construct a particular type of advertisement for a particular occasion. Instead the knowledge liberal learning provides is the sort that can be applied across a variety of occupations to deal with situations that move outside the details of specialization. It's the sort of knowledge that extends a person beyond being a mere technician in any given field, and produces a more comprehensive competence. This knowledge includes the factual information and the fundamental ideas necessary for understanding what intelligent, educated people have to say, for getting along with fellow workers, for making management decisions, for understanding one's place and worth in the general scheme of things. These are not trivial matters; they are crucial ones that confront a person time and again on the job, and that can spell success or failure there.

So far this is to confine the worth of the knowledge in question to terms of the workplace, terms that practically-minded critics of the liberal arts should be willing to listen to. However, preparation for jobs isn't the only educational ideal liberal learning serves. Many of the examples that were cited here describe non-job-related situations that could be identified as personal and civic. They are as much a part of our everyday lives as our jobs are. They are practical situations. Here is another important ideal that studying the liberal arts addresses. Getting along with friends and neighbors, making wise choices for our children, and dealing with community issues that require our input--these are all areas of life in which we want and need knowledge of a practical sort, knowledge that helps us to get things done and to accomplish goals. While it is not as common to think of the worth of college studies in these terms as in vocational ones, the case for that should be understandable, and if it's made clearly, it should be found acceptable, since it shares with job training the fundamental assumption that what students learn about in their college studies should be practical.

And there is further overlap of the personal and civic realms with the vocational. Consider the hypothetical situation concerning rap music. Issues like this one come up in the workplace--they are inextricably part of the setting, and they affect success on the job. Similar situations occur outside the workplace, and the knowledge needed to deal with them there is the same. The rap music case might as easily occur in a domestic setting as in on occupational one. It could involve roommates or neighbors as easily as co-workers. Consider also the example about motorcycle helmets. That might be recast in terms of requirements about wearing safety gear in the workplace. What happens on the job often involves matters that occur off the job as well.

It is tempting to carry the concluding discussion further here about the philosophy of knowledge and human activity, and perhaps to reintroduce the notion of the intrinsic worth of liberal learning. That, too, is a most worthy educational ideal. Much more could be said. But all of that seems counter to the point. The philosophical generalities and lofty appeals have been heard before, and they are precisely what nonbelievers and challengers to liberal learning have found unconvincing. What is important--what has been missing from the promotion of the liberal arts and is needed to make it convincing--are specific examples. The examples I have provided are a start. There are surely many more that other people can cite--examples of practical everyday situations a typical college graduate might face where having basic liberal arts knowledge can spell the difference between success and failure, or awareness and confusion. If enough examples are brought to light, and enough emphasis is placed on them, then people who have dismissed liberal learning as mere trivia may begin to change their minds and see its true worth. That is the kind of new P-R campaign the supporters of liberal learning need to mount. Their product is excellent, but the sales pitch they've been using has limited appeal. It's time to revise the pitch, to put it in terms that tell people more concretely and graphically about the qualities of the product that make it good for them.

Added material.

WILLIAM CASEMENT argues that the case has yet to be made for the practical uses of liberal studies, and he provides a number of specific instances where what some dismiss as trivial not only can provide a cultural literacy but also improve the quality of one's thinking about the fundamental issues that confront us in many different guises. Now director of a large art gallery in Naples, Florida, Casement was a professor of philosophy and humanities at St. Thomas University in Florida and of educational studies at S.U.N.Y. at New Paltz. He has published widely in scholarly journals, including The Midwest Quarterly, on educational theory, political theory, and literary theory and criticism, and in 1996 produced The Great Canon Controversy: The Battle of the Books in Higher Education for Transaction Publishers.

BIBLIOGRAPHYAdler, Mortimer. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of the Western World. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952.

Barzun, Jacques. "A Future for the Liberal Arts, If ..." Academic Questions, 7:4 (1994).

Hirsch, E.D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

"National College Senior Survey April 18-25, 1996." Storrs, Connecticut: University of Connecticut Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, 1996.

"A Survey of College Seniors: Knowledge of History and Literature." Princeton, New Jersey: The Gallup Organization, 1989.