For true believers in liberal education, the new Atlantic

For true believers in liberal education, the new Atlantic
by sorin69 (2024-04-16 00:55:20)

has an article on "The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts." It's a beautiful tribute by one David Shribman to his uncle Phil Shribman, who was killed while serving on a PT boat off Guadalcanal in February 1943. His uncle was a recent Dartmouth graduate who wrote his younger brother Dick, the writer's father, who was still in high school, to impress on him the value of a liberal education vs. learning a trade. Without a hint of snobbery, the letter defends the civilizing role of liberal education in broadening our grasp of the world and preparing for a lifetime of learning. The writer's grandfather was a Russian Jewish immigrant who had settled in Salem, Mass., and made a success of himself in real estate and insurance -- but never made it to college. When the grandfather, Max Shribman, lost his son to war, he later endowed a scholarship to Dartmouth from young men (and women) from Salem. The writer says that he spent time over the course of fifty years trying to learn as much as possible about his uncle, from college classmates and people who served with him in the Navy and were on his boat when it was set ablaze by a Japanese destroyer after a torpedo attack. (Ten crew members survived nine hours in the ocean; one, with two broken legs, was lost, perhaps to sharks; and Phil was killed instantly by gunfire.)

The story pays moving tribute alike to liberal education and to the patriotism and love of democracy that it nurtured. Link provided, though it's probably paywalled. You could do worse than subscribing to the Atlantic. The long article in the same issue on the bitter split between Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is a fascinating look into the looming schism in Eastern Orthodoxy caused by super-heated nationalism and clerical venality.

Click here for link at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/russia-

Good articles...

...I re-subscribed to Atlantic on your recommendation a while ago, after some years away.

Grammar, rhetoric, and logic--the "trivium." We are a verbal species, and our interpersonal relations rely greatly on words--expressed as sounds, written symbols, or signed gestures.

Arithemetic, astronomy, music, geometry--the "quadrivium." We understand our world largely through numbers and their relationships, whether tuning a keyboard to just temperament, analyzing petabytes of galactic spectrographic data, parsing genetic codes, or solving optimization problems in economics.

I can't try to calculate an ROI on being good at words and numbers, but I would err on the side of understanding versus ignorance. The 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics mentioned in the story about David Shribman would have been a good world to explore, even if now a bit dated.

There something poignant about this young sailor and

college grad paying tribute to his education before giving the last full measure of devotion. And about his parents' recognition of his death by funding someone else's chance for the same education.

As for the clash between Moscow and Constantinople (how archaic is that?), I will send you and the other member of our triumvirate a link to a horrifying bit of Christian ethno-nationalism issuing from the Moscow patriarchate.