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Originally Posted by Velvet
Sounds like classic liberal education.
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It was a liberal arts school, yes. Emerson College, founded by Charles W. Emerson as a school of oratory for boys in Back Bay, Boston. Went through a few different incarnations, as a girl's school for a short period, and eventually ended up co-ed. Communications Studies and dramatic and multi-media arts are its main components.
Norman Lear, Jennifer Coolidge, Henry Winkler were all students there. Denis Leary graduated the year before I did and taught one of my creative writing classes for one semester before he headed off to become famous. Mario Cantone (the guy who played Anthony Mariantino in Sex and the City) and I were "wall buddies." We hung out together at "the Wall" between classes. It was literally a 3-foot wall in front of 96-98 Beacon Street, the school's headquarters.
And we all had to learn the same "all-college" requirements if we wanted to graduate. We didn't have AI, there were no TI-83 or TI-84 calculators or any other graphing calculators at the time, they hadn't been invented yet. Neither were laptops, tablets, public internet, or smartphones. If we needed to look something up we'd go to the library and use the dewey decimal system file wall to find a book we thought would help us. Or we'd look for something on the microfiche.
We were taught critical thinking skills. How to ask the right questions, to understand what we were dealing with from one moment to the next. We were taught spacial awareness. You couldn't go to Store24 at 3 in the morning during midterm week by yourself, without having an acute sense of spacial awareness (and a kubotan, and memorizing a Shakespeare sililoquy and not being afraid to recite it LOUDLY to make your assailant think you were insane and leave you alone).