Rarely have young people been expected to have truly deep knowledge of particular texts. Instead, education, especially in its "liberal arts" embodiments, has been devoted to providing students with navigational tools—with enough knowledge to find their way through situations that they might confront later in life. (Even the old English public schools flogged their students through years of Latin and Greek not because Latin and Greek were intrinsically valuable, still less useful, but because the discipline of such study would have a salutary effect on young men's characters. And these are the terms in which survivors of that system typically praise it.) This is one of the ways in which the artes liberales are supposed to be "liberal," that is, "liberating": They free you to make your own way through the challenges of life without requiring external props.this is the sort of education we need to be getting in our schools. these days there are so many different avenues for getting information it is easy to be overcome with information overload. As noted in the article information overload has been heralded as a problem since books were first printed on the Gutenberg press, and since then many techniques have been developed to try and overcome this problem. Techniques such as speed reading or skimming are advocated, and while these techniques work for some and are effective in trying to filter out the good from the bad they simply don't address another symptom of information overload: that is the fact that there is so much information that even if you are able to snag a piece of literature we don't have the mental determination to deep, focused attention needed for serious analysis and learning.
A Liberal Education is the sort of education I want, an education that doesn't just fill me up with knowledge and trivia but that build character and the attributes necessary to lean on my own, yet as the article discusses it is something that is difficult to teach. Rarely do people have the passion, focus, self determination or whatever you want to call it these days to not only search out a book but become engaged and actively thinking, interacting with what an author of a literary work is trying to express. I myself find that I am far to passive and merely sit back and absorb what I can from a book.
Those who proclaimed that 'knowledge is power' meant that the only true education is self-education
