Link: Better Living Through Consciousness: Why You Should Take Your College Education Seriously :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, and Views and Jobs.
Universities contain not merely knowledge, but an ethos about the value of knowledge in living out your life. They communicate the conviction — at least the good ones do — that if you want to live a good life, you should live it attentively, with a mind always ready to be engaged in the pleasures and exertions of intellectual, moral, and aesthetic clarity. The arts and the sciences — that’s how we present our curriculum to you, and the distinction reflects this basic existential orientation toward, well, beauty and truth. The attentive intellectual has an informed and critical orientation toward the world; the attentive moralist approaches human quandaries with a grasp of ethical theory; the attentive aesthete responds to natural and created beauty with taste, judgment, and, often, aesthetic achievements of her own (playing a musical instrument well, knowing how to write a solid short story) that allow her an insider’s knowledge of a particular form of art.
