Isn't it oh-so-convenient to think that your own education is the one uniquely possessed of universal truths. Doesn't sound particularly liberal or educated to me. The education described above was neither traditional or classical but rather existed ONLY in the early to mid 1900s.
Before then, Greek and Latin was taught not to appreciate the classics but rather as mental logic training, like math drills. You might be assigned to translate a work of English into Greek!
Science was not taught. You learned to be a chemist or physicist like you learned to be an electrician - through apprenticeship and working long hours at the lab.
After WWI there was an attempt to teach "pro-American ideology" like American exceptionalism & Western superiority and it took root in places like St Johns and Hillsdale. Some of the old curriculum DID need reform and we DID need to add literature and political science and American history other things we now consider liberal subjects, as well as the physical sciences. But whatever we think of it, it's only historically accurate to regard them as *temporal* responses to certain political and cultural climate.
Today's curriculum at almost all universities is the evolution of that focus, only the scope and depth has expanded, i.e. now we teach literature from the other 5/6 of the world, and we learn about film and theater and other media, etc. Same with history and the social sciences.
I recommend y'all read "The Opening of the American Mind" by US historian Lawrence Levine.
"Much of this nostalgia is fueled by a faulty sense of the history of the American university. We are told again and again that until the 1960s university education was ruled by the study of Western Civilization and a canon of the Great Books. In fact, Great Books and Western Civilization courses enjoyed only a brief ascendancy: they emerged largely after World War I and declined in the decades after World War II. The canon and the curriculum that were supposedly governed by Matthew Arnold's dictum of "the best that has been thought and known in the world . . . the study and pursuit of perfection," were in truth never static and were constantly in the process of revision with irate defenders insisting, as they still do, that change would bring with it instant decline. The inclusion of "modern" writers from Shakespeare to Walt Whitman and Herman Melville came only after prolonged battles as intense and divisive as those that rage today. Thus when John Searle maintains that "until recently" there was no controversy over the existence of a widely agreed upon corpus of writers, knowledge of whom was "essential to the liberal education of young men and women in the United States," he is oversimplifying to the point of distortion, as Part II of this book will demonstrate. What is happening in the contemporary university is by no means out of the ordinary; certainly it is not a radical departure from the patterns that have marked the history of the university--constant and often controversial expansion and alteration of curricula and canons and incessant struggle over the nature of that expansion and alteration.
None of these realities stop James Atlas from asserting: "The Great Books. The best that is known and thought in the world. The canon," were "until a few years ago . . . our educational mandate." We would all benefit if those who tell us where to go understood more clearly where we have been. Atlas, who attended Harvard from 1967 to 1971 and is grateful for what he gained from his years there, can't help longing for an earlier, more glorious day: "What my classmates and I managed to learn in those four years couldn't begin to compare with the knowledge absorbed by earlier generations of students, for whom the study of literature included the study of Greek and Latin classics in the original." Fortunately, we can turn directly to the students he envies who, while they did indeed read the "classics" in the original Greek and Latin, read them not as works of literature but as examples of grammar, the rules of which they studied endlessly and by rote. James Freeman Clark, who received his Harvard A.B. in 1829, complained, "No attempt was made to interest us in our studies. We were expected to wade through Homer as though the Iliad were a bog. . . . Nothing was said of the glory and grandeur, the tenderness and charm of this immortal epic. The melody of the hexameters was never suggested to us." Henry Adams proclaimed his years at Harvard from 1854 to 1858 "wasted" and exclaimed in his autobiography: "It taught little, and that little ill. . . . Beyond two or three Greek plays, the student got nothing from the ancient languages...."