THE POOR OLD LIBERAL ARTS

Father Robert Gannon, past president of the world's largest Catholic university -- Fordham in New York, skims over the peaks of the history of education in America. In a reminiscing essay Father Gannon attempts to distill the mental climate of his world which came to bloom as a young Georgetown student in 1909 and which faded a half-century later. His pot shots at modern progressive education are delivered with tongue in cheek. So too his melancholic eulogy of the ratio studiorum and the exchange of classical liberal arts schooling for pre-professional and scientific training. The elegant cadenced style which characterizes Father Gannon's prose is a sub-rosa testimony to the poor old liberal arts.