ABSTRACT
Each age selectively forgets the past in its drive towards self-definition. This fact is clearly displayed by current attempts to rethink the purpose and value of teaching the liberal arts to future generations of students. The familiar disciplines of history, philosophy and literature survive, but their raison d’être is largely forgotten. Subjects which evolved from traditions of humane study going back to the ancients are taught without reference to the rational curriculum they devised. Little remains of that training in rhetoric which informed western pedagogy until the end of the last century. Now cut off from that training, the standard humanities disciplines seem increasingly out of date and irrelevant to political and economic pressures very different from those which brought them into being. They are beginning to seem remote and educationally incoherent. Distance is increased again by the recent blossoming of theory in all the liberal arts, which questions the assumptions of standard teaching methods and curricula.
