DISCOVER YOUR COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGES. The dean at Anonymous Community asks readers to suggest advising terminology more inspiring than "get your gen eds out of the way". The conversation turns to a more general exchange on the purpose of higher education, the failures of the high schools to do their work, and the tendency of students to focus on majors too soon. The Cold Spring Shops position holds that the purpose of what the barbarians call general education, but what used to be called the core curriculum, was to enable students to discover their intellectual strengths. You can choose any course of study you want, but first you run an intellectual septathlon in which excelling at some events but not others is expected and ultimately reinforced.

There is a second purpose, which emerges in a survey post at University Diaries. The money quote comes from David Brooks (there's an InstaPundit comment on Mr Brooks that concurs in part and dissents in part).

Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.

I'm not sure if contemporary law students read the older Supreme Court rulings any more, in which classical allusions proliferate. On a more mundane level, it is difficult to appreciate those Capitol One Huns without some understanding of medieval castle-sacking techniques, although I doubt that real Huns spoke English with a London accent. Those commercials must have been conceived of by somebody who knew some history.