Quote of the Day (Eli Amdur, on the ‘Most Important Career and Life Skills’)

“Your three most important career and life skills are critical reading, critical listening and critical thinking. When everything else is stripped away, that’s all you’ve got.”—Career coach and journalist Eli Amdur, “Parting Advice As Financial Columnist Takes a Bow,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), July 7, 2024

I agree with everything Eli Amdur wrote in the above quote except for the verb in the first sentence; I would replace “are” with “should be.”

The reality is that the business world these days stresses tech skills—many of which can be learned on the job—but doesn’t particularly care about the critical skills he mentions, which are only mastered after years of education.

All of this is part of the relative devaluation of the liberal arts that has taken place over the last several decades. The American educational system has responded to cues from the business world by de-emphasizing the liberal arts, to such a point that headlines now talk about the “crisis” in the liberal arts or even their “gutting.”

No matter what the causes of this change in educational priorities, they are inevitably rotting away our commercial and civic life. Wim Wiewel, former president of Lewis and Clark College, summed up the stakes four years ago in this New Republic article:

“The liberal arts also enable us to navigate other core challenges arising from our embattled civic order—such as climate change, inequality, mass incarceration, and immigration—while exploring broader, more inclusive conceptions of the common good.”

The “crisis” referenced by Wiewel back then was the COVID-19 pandemic. These days, it is what he called more generally “our embattled social order.”

Without the skills Amdur identified, the business world will be unable to find workers to meet unforeseen challenges; our civic institutions will crumble amid rampant, unquestioned; and even our personal lives will suffer as we fall prey to those offering easy answers to our pressing daily questions. 

Quote of the Day (Mark Van Doren, on ‘The Art of Teaching’)

"The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery."—Pulitzer Prize-winning poet—and beloved Columbia University “teacher” — Mark Van Doren (1894-1972), Liberal Education (1943)

Quote of the Day (David Denby, on Reading as an ‘Opening to a Wider Life’)

“[T]he liberal arts in general, and especially reading seriously, offer an opening to a wider life, the powers of active citizenship (including the willingness to vote); reading strengthens perception, judgment, and character; it creates understanding of other people and oneself, maybe kindliness and wit, and certainly the ability to endure solitude, both in the common sense of empty-room loneliness and the cosmic sense of empty-universe loneliness. Reading fiction carries you further into imagination and invention than you would be capable of on your own, takes you into other people's lives, and often, by reflection, deeper into your own. I will indulge a resounding tautology: every great civilization, including ours, has had a great literature and great readers. If literature matters less to young people than it once did, we are all in trouble.”— David Denby, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-four Books That Can Change Lives (2016)

(Photo of David Denby, from February 2016, taken by Michael Bednarek.)

Quote of the Day (Joseph Epstein, on Teaching as a ‘Magical Art’)

“Teaching remains a mysterious, magical art. Anyone who claims he knows how it works is a liar. No one tells you how to do it. You walk into a classroom and try to remember what worked for the teachers who impressed you, or, later in the game, what seemed to work best for you in the past. Otherwise, it is pure improv, no matter how extensive one’s notes.”—Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed the Liberal Arts?” The Weekly Standard, September 17, 2012