Educations End - Looks like an interesting read

Throughout my various college careers I have been highly opposed to the General Education requirements, mainly because outside the Math and Sciences requirement they seems to be designed to impose a political ideology on me and I hated that. In the past year or two I have slowly come to the realization that a well laid out humanities requirement can do more than tell me what to think, it can help me learn how to think.

This opinion has been bolstered by my nearly completed reading of Great Books by David Denby, which explores Columbia Universities Literature and Humanities and Contempory Civilization course and their effect on students. (Which I started reading to complement my reading list over at Olympia Academy)

Today at Instapundit I found I blurb regarding "Educations End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life" which looks like it might be a good follow-up.

Book Description
The question of what living is for—of what one should care about and why—is the most important question a person can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this eloquent and carefully considered book, Tony Kronman explores why this has happened and calls for the restoration of life’s most important question to an honored place in higher education.

The author contrasts an earlier era in American education, when the question of the meaning of life was at the center of instruction, with our own times, when this question has been largely abandoned by college and university teachers. In particular, teachers of the humanities, who once felt a special responsibility to guide their students in exploring the question of what living is for, have lost confidence in their authority to do so. And they have lost sight of the question itself in the blinding fog of political correctness that has dominated their disciplines for the past forty years.

Yet Kronman sees a readiness for change--a longing among teachers as well as students to engage questions of ultimate meaning. He urges a revival of the humanities’ lost tradition of studying the meaning of life through the careful but critical reading of great works of literary and philosophical imagination. And he offers here the charter document of that revival.

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Books, Great Books, Western Canon, Humanities, Education