General education is basically an attempt to democratize what had been an elite mold. It’s a combination of Humboldt, with the whole idea of Bildung, and a little bit of Oxbridge, I think. There used to be the idea of an educated gentleman, who was able to confront a whole range of problems, from sewage in Calcutta to tribal warfare in Iraq on the basis of having thoroughly studied the classics. Now, we don’t do that kind of canonical education, and Sosc Core is of course much more critical than that. But the attempt to promote critical awareness flies in the face of vocational education. So it’s a critical attempt. I think it could be a profoundly democratic attempt.

that’s very different from reading Freud or Durkheim or whomever to work out the categories with which they’re trying to explain our world. It’s a different exercise, and a different hermeneutic.