Anthony Kronman in Today's WSJ

Hitting the Books Without Having a Clue
By ROBERT MESSENGER
From October 4, 2007 Wall Street Journal

In the late 1930s, the Oxford classicist Hugh Last organized the defeat of a measure to make anthropology a degree-subject at the university. "An acquaintance with the habits of savages," he said, "is not an education." Behind Last's quip was a claim that anthropology is in no way formative knowledge of the kind that students require.

Exactly what students require -- what "an education" really entails -- is the subject of "Education's End," an impassioned defense of the study of the humanities by Anthony Kronman, a professor at Yale and formerly dean of its law school. "One cannot live a meaningful life," Mr. Kronman writes, "unless there is something one is prepared to give it up for. People's lives are therefore meaningful in proportion to their acknowledgment that there is something more important than the lives they are leading: something worth caring about in an ultimate way. The question, of course, is what that something is or ought to be."

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