Arakin 4 kurs new 001 176. indd

6. a) Read the dialogue and pay attention to phrases of accomplishment
Martin: Happy birthday, Helen. So how does it feel to be 21?
Helen: Kind of strange. I suddenly feel a little anxious, like 
I’m not 
moving ahead
fast enough.
Martin: But don’t you think you’
ve accomplished quite a bit
in the 
last few years?
Helen: Oh, I’
ve managed to get good grades
in all my courses, but 
I still haven’t been able to decide on a career.
Martin: Well, what do you hope you’
ll have achieved
by the time 
you’re 30?
Helen: For one thing, I hope I’ll have seen more of the world. But 
more important than that, I’d like 
to have made a good start on
my 
career by then.
b) Continue the dialogue between Martin and Helen and find out what he has 
managed to achieve and what his plans for the future are. Make use of phrases 
of accomplishment
7. Below are two texts concerned with trends in higher education. Read 
them attentively and say how the authors emphasize the value of a broadly based 
liberal education and criticize the increasing dominance of western society by 
specialists
(A)
Organized education began in the Western world when the civiliza-
tion of ancient Greece was at its height. Itinerant teachers claimed to 
teach the skills and capacities necessary for a successful, contributive 
public life in the Greek city-states. Schools developed around the great-
est of these teachers, and the precursors of modern colleges and univer-
sities flourished throughout the Greek and Roman worlds. One of these, 

---

13
founded by the Greek philosopher Plato, was called “the Academy,” 
a name we celebrate in every reference to the academic enterprise.
Though the classical tradition withered with the beginning of the 
Middle Ages, the great religious institutions and scholars of the West 
sustained the learning of the ancient world. Throughout Europe the 
foundation of education was the seven liberal arts: the trivium of 
grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium of arithmetic, ge-
ometry, music, and astronomy.
As in ancient Greece, higher education in America has provided 
for individual human flourishing through encouraging a command of 
the sciences and the humanities, while preparing young adults to take 
an active role in the public life of a participatory society.
The precise definition of the liberal arts has changed with the 
evolving understanding of human well-being, but the substance re-
mains the same: the education necessary to afford persons the op-
portunity to seek what is, in a deep sense, the best life; and the educa-
tion most likely to equip them for, and engage them in, the search for 
a just society.
Implicit in the academic enterprise from its beginning is the con-
viction that neither individual well-being nor the just society emerg-
es inevitably from human nature. Nor is our nature opposed to these 
accomplishments. Rather, the premise of the liberal arts college is the 
idea that only purposeful cultivation in a community of the right sort 
will result in the emergence of excellence.
(B)
Archilochus, the Greek poet, left us only bits and pieces of his 
writings; the most famous is Fragment 103: The fox knows many 
things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. No one is certain about 
Fragment 103’s original meaning. But it has become a metaphor for 
a modern dilemma the increasing dominance of Western society by 
specialists-hedgehogs, if you will. This means, inversely, the decline 
in influence of generalists-foxes.
The supremacy of hedgehogs is dangerous because it creates 
a climate of rarefied ignorance. The man who invents an exotic new 
form of chemical weaponry has probably forgotten – if he ever knew 
– the generalist’s view of history, with its lessons about the origins 
of war, the junk bond and insider information scoundrels, who sullied 
the reputation of Wall Street, were obsessed with the one big thing 
they knew. The prudence and moral balance, which comes from a 
broad general vision of society, were lost on them.

---

14
Perhaps the dominant power of the specialist hedgehogs was in-
evitable, as science and technology became increasingly complex 
after the mid-nineteenth century. The argument here is not against 
specialists, but rather their inordinate influence over our lives. In the 
mores of Western society, the generalist fox, who knows (but is not 
expert in) many things, is dismissed with such derisive clichйs as 
“jack-of-all-trades, master of none.”
At
 
the turn of the twentieth century, there was an acerbic classicist 
at Oxford who used to tell newly arriving students, “Nothing you will 
learn here in the course of your studies will be of any use to you in later 
life save only this: If you pay attention and work hard, you may eventu-
ally come to know when a man is talking rot.” In other words, Oxford 
taught you how to think by teaching you many subjects that enrich and 
broadened the mind. The hedgehogs know how to think, but only about 
one big thing. The time may be approaching when the people who 
dominate our lives won’t know when a man is talking rot.