The definition of an educated person -- and the appropriate college curriculum to produce that person -- has been the subject of ongoing debate in the United States since the 1960s. Until that time, few questioned the notion that the study of the liberal arts and the classic works of Western civilization were the appropriate focus. But with a new consciousness of minorities, changing perceptions of the role of women, and the economic demands of the information age, many educational institutions across the United States are seeking to redefine, through their curricula, the definition of what it means to be truly educated. Columbia University, a prestigious American institution, had for many years offered a curriculum embodying the classic liberal education. David Denby, a graduate of Columbia, recently returned there to spend a year experiencing the school's revised liberal arts curriculum. What follows is an eloquent statement of the value of a liberal arts education.

When we speak about an educated person, we refer to someone with a reading knowledge of Homer, Plato, the Bible -- Old and New Testaments -- and Shakespeare. These are absolutely essential to the Western tradition, as would be St. Augustine, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology. That would be the minimum. And, of course, from the United States perspective, the Federalist Papers and the Constitution -- the writings of the Founding Fathers -- would demand inclusion. Conservatives would embrace all of this as well, and would add Adam Smith and Frederick Hayek to the list of required readings. I would agree with that.

Taken as a whole, this body of work conveys both a sense of what a human being is and is capable of -- in spiritual and ethical dimensions -- and also a definition of what a civil society ideally can be. At the same time, it reflects what the weaknesses and possible dangers to that civil society are. Moreover, these writings provide certain notions of what a self is -- in a secular and spiritual sense; what a citizen is and what his or her duties and obligations are; and what the society's obligations are to its citizens. Those concepts are all central to what we are. That is the traditional view, and indeed, it's still absolutely necessary today.

To round out the essence of an educated person, we must include a knowledge of what the Americas were before the Europeans arrived, the contributions to American civilization from Latin America, the central traditions of black literature and intellectual life. The history of slavery, black emancipation, the civil rights movement -- the writings of W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass and some contemporary contributions -- all would be vital.

It's interesting and encouraging to me that when I talk to younger people about corporate careers, I am getting the sense that corporations want people of character. It's not just that you have to have certain technical skills. Much of that is job-specific, and can be learned very quickly if you have the readiness and the learning skills. But they want people of character, who can present themselves, make decisions, manage and be managed. All of the knowledge I've mentioned above forms character, and I don't see it becoming any less relevant as our society becomes more specialized and hi-tech. Anyone can punch numbers into a computer. But to run any kind of large organization, you need a much broader perspective. So when we speak about the training of an elite, and what employers are looking for in candidates for positions of responsibility, the tradition of the educated person is as essential as it ever was.

They can't always define it. We're talking about judgment, character, sensibility -- notions that by their very nature are hard to quantify. Ultimately, it simply comes down to someone steeped in the tradition of the educated person.

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David Denby is film critic of New York magazine. He is the author of Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (Simon and Schuster, 1996), an account of a year spent recently immersed in the Western canon at Columbia University, a course of study he first took three decades earlier as an undergraduate at the college.

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