The Language of Composition: "In Defense of a Liberal Education" by Fareed Zakaria

In an age defined by technology and globalization, everyone is talking about skills-based learning.

A classic liberal education has few defenders. Conservatives fume that it is too, well, liberal (though the term has no partisan meaning).

Newcomers, often from lower-middle-class backgrounds and immigrant families with little education, enthusiastically embraced the liberal arts. They saw it as a gateway to a career, and also as a way to assimilate into American culture.

But the drumbeat of talk about skills and jobs has not lured people into engineering and biology—not everyone has the aptitude for science—so much as it has made them nervously forsake the humanities and take courses in business and communications.

In a speech in January 2014, President Barack Obama said, “I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." He later apologized for what he described as a “glib" comment, but Obama has expressed similar sentiments during his presidency.

In their comprehensive study of education, the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz note that, historically, Britain, France, and Germany tested children at a young age, educated only a few, and put them through a narrow program designed specifically to impart a set of skills thought to be key to their professions.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, was fervent in his faith in big engineering projects.

When founded by British missionaries in the Victorian era, the school had been imbued with a broad, humanistic approach to education.

And we soon began to hear from early trailblazers about the distinctly American approach to learning.

I had never heard of Bergman or Fellini, but I was amazed that watching movies was considered an integral part of higher education.

He arrived during the worst of the blitzkrieg, with German V-2 rockets raining down on the city.

Rather, they were an eclectic mix of people who either had spent time abroad (because their parents had foreign postings) or had some connection to America.

While we were all thrilled and impressed, many friends remained apprehensive when told the news. It sounded prestigious to say you were going to attend Harvard, but would the education actually translate into a career?

The mood was still more 1970s malaise than 1980s boom. The country was in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

In those years, it was fashionable in elite Indian circles to denounce the United States for its imperialism and hegemony.