The following is an email I wrote to my father that started as a brief thought and blew up into a short essay. He'd forwarded me a correspondence of his with the author of a recent WSJ Letter to the Editor whom he contacted (and whom I will refer to as "W----"). In it, the author advocates for Liberal Arts education, and my dad asked my thoughts on the topic. The resulting essay draws from my experience studying at a Liberal Arts college, where I studied English and Physics, and is heavily inflected by my work teaching in the classroom and, presently, in a high school after-school setting where as a community we study Critical Pedagogy and refine our practice.
(And in one of the emails, the author of the Letter to the Editor explains his mandate that pupils study Latin with the presumptuous statement: "You study Latin because you want to study the foundations of our language, because you want to be a better, closer reader, because you want to understand more about words..." Which is to explain why I refer to studying Latinate roots of English words more often than I might normally if I were writing an essay.)