Initiating students into classics has long been considered central to the idea of a liberal education. These works are deemed “classics” because a tradition (or culture) confers upon them the status of greatness. Classics set standards and are taken to represent the most significant and refined reflections of that tradition. To recognize a work as a classic is also to acknowledge that it has taken part in our intellectual and cultural formation and continues to…
Today, our everyday lives are fraught with some kind of larger intellectual conflict. This comes to the fore especially when youngsters are forced to take part in a ritual, say like a Shraadha, or a pooja. Aren’t these superstitions which any educated person should shed? Why are we being forced to perform these outdated traditions which are irrational and have no scientific basis? While it was alright to hold on to these practice two centuries…
One of the problems confronting us today is the lack of an appropriate idiom for discussing education in our times. Even our new age ‘liberal arts’ institutions that have come up all over India today do not give their students a sense of what it means to be educated in this way. One of the reasons for this is, perhaps, that our discussions on liberal (arts) education are suffused with the views of liberalism; sometimes…