A growing number of initiatives include Great Books programs that require students to read primary sources in fiction and nonfiction such as Shakespeare’s plays and Plato’s dialogues. They encompass special institutes and centers that offer students havens to discuss the foundational works of Western civilization that liberals increasingly have dubbed racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ.
SEE ALSO: College students follow the money into STEM education, killing off struggling liberal arts programs “There is clearly a hunger among students and their parents for a solid liberal [arts] education rooted in the serious study of the classics,” said Jeff Sikkenga, an Ashland University political scientist who co-directs a primary sources scholar program. He said his program has grown from fewer than 30 students to more than 140 since the Ohio-based Christian school established it in 1998.
The study of English and history fell by one-third and humanities enrollment dropped by 17% over the past decade, according to Robert Townsend of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Alex Tirador graduated in 2022 from St. Jerome Institute, a classical high school that parents from St. Jerome Catholic Church in Hyattsville, Maryland, founded in 2019. Now, he’s a freshman majoring in computer science at the University of Maryland.
At Ashland University, Mr. Sikkenga runs the Ashbrook Center, an independent program that supplies core humanities documents to K-12 schools and trains teachers in their use. The move strengthens the college’s founding commitment to the liberal arts, as seen in the ongoing requirement of a senior capstone project, according to a statement the New College of Florida Office of Communications and Marketing emailed to The Times.
The financial value of the liberal arts comes from the role that “freedom studies” plays in helping students reflect philosophically on the value of individual liberty, said Daniel J. D’Amico, a libertarian economist who serves as the Stephenson Institute’s founding director. He assigns his students readings from free-market political thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville.
If students are to think critically, they need to expand readings to other culture’s writings as well. We live and work in a global society and having knowledgeable citizens about all cultures is important.
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