With all the general ed classes students in high school and college are required to take, why add more? In high school there are set requirements that are forced upon the requirements for the diploma. College has the same system. What would be the point to adding more classes that lose emphasis on the direct educating students want to receive?.
College classes are expensive, not everybody goes to school on scholarships or grants. At Madonna, classes are about $1,000 each. Students have a hard enough time understanding why to pay for classes that won"t affect their major, but it has them experience a little bit more. The emphasis on students major would get lost. Nobody wants to hire a business major that doesn"t know how to use a spreadsheet on the computer. Name one person who would say, "Yea, my nurse doesn"t know how to read my heart rate, but it's okay because they can quote Shakespeare." .
There are certain aspects of liberal arts that are important. Most people don"t know about the canon and could use the basic knowledge of them. In humanities they make you read several different books, put some of the canon into humanities. In English they could make you read different books, or study a little bit of it all. .
The canon can teach so many students how to write. But at a college level how many students are just learning to write papers. These books should be offered at a high school level with much more time and options to choose. Students know they want to be writers before college, so offer a class in high school that could teach them more directly then advanced placement classes. In these AP classes the students are forced to read several books a summer and mostly just skim through the ones they are interested in. So give them a Liberal Arts class teaching about the canon. .
Gitlin said, "Now, it is true that no one but impressionable psychotics could be held in thrall for long by most of the miniscule dramas and depictions we find in popular culture.