#laswritten

Working on the paper tonight is turning out to be something of an exercise in catharsis. This stuff is really important to me so it’s both a joy and a struggle to get it down on paper. 

http://www.adam-j-smith.co.uk/

The Idle Student and Useless Knowledge: Rethinking Academic Virtue in the Liberal Arts

This paper will be a reflection on the position of the liberal arts student on the fault line between education for its own sake and the prevailing institutional and societal focuses on education as a tool for employment. It will seek to place contemporary liberal arts students in the wider historical context of the Western tradition and argue that a liberal arts education is one of the few places in the twenty first century where the virtues of idleness and uselessness can be explored and embraced.  

Bertrand Russell foresaw a turning of the educational tide in the mid-twentieth century when he wrote that “knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely and ingredient in technical skill”[1]. This paper will explore whether the student of the liberal arts in the twenty-first century is able to reverse that tide and retain education as a humanising, useless experience. As well as reference to thinkers such as Aristotle, Weber, Veblen and Russell this paper will also include a personal reflection on my own position as an undergraduate and aspiring idler in the liberal arts.