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Notes -
The place is that universities aren’t purely vocational, they’re at least theoretically for producing well rounded intellectuals as members of the leisure class.
Of course the reality is that a very large majority of the population needs to at least pretend to be productive with their time, so if everyone goes to college it inevitably becomes about jobs training. But the kinds of people who spend their careers in academia think that’s boring and low status, so they make engineers take English classes because it makes them feel like they’re still producing well rounded intellectuals out of the leisure class.
In the US.
In much of the rest of the world, the place for that is high school. I keep being surprised by how extremely myopic many people are about this topic here. There's a whole vast world outside the US (much of it even western) where the entire university system doesn't revolve around "liberal arts" or even have the concept of a "liberal arts" college / program at all.
In theory, the US teaches a lot of this stuff in high school as well. Reading and discussing classic books and plays, learning about art and art history, etc. But usually it's done fairly poorly and the students care even less than in college.
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