I've published this excerpt from my memoirs in this forum before, but I thought it relevant to your comments to repeat it again. It describes my reaction to the University of South Florida's Basic Studies program, which greatly influenced me when I was an undergraduate there, between 1964 and 1971 (My education was interrupted by two years of military service.) It occurred to me much later that what made these times so special was that it was the presence of large numbers of middle and working class students at the universities due to the massive government investment in scholarships, grants, particular in state-supported schools. You didn't have to be rich or even upper middle class to attend college anymore, it was affordable without crippling loans.

Further reflection has since led me to consider another factor. Our teachers were very often beneficiaries of the GI Bill that provided college educations to large numbers of returning WWII vets that might not have had that opportunity to go to college. The sixties college generation was, to a great extent, the kids of the working class, and their teachers were the kids of the working class. That is not a situation that is likely to repeat itself now. I've often wondered how much of that reality is due to blind social forces, or an implementation of deliberate government and business policy.

The university had a core curriculum of what it called Basic Studies that every student had to complete prior to graduation. This consisted of a review of the basic divisions of human knowledge: science, mathematics, social and behavioral sciences, literature, composition, languages and the humanities. It was an almost medieval concept, the fundamental liberal arts grand tour that connected us all to the community of scholarship founded in the Middle Ages, one of the great cultural achievements of Western Man. Students were allowed to bypass those survey courses which related to one's major, for example, I skipped math and science, but I eagerly plunged into the others, it was like my old days at the neighborhood library. USF took this program seriously, it was taught by the best scholars on the faculty, and it was emphasized as a major part of our education, not just a preliminary to be gotten through prior to starting on our majors. Each course lasted two trimesters, so it was possible to go into the material in some depth. The middle sixties was the calm before the storm, the intellectual seed of what was to explode on the world by the end of the decade, and we were systematically prepared for what was coming without either us or our teachers realizing it. We learned that there were always reasons why things happened, but we also learned that they were not always immediately obvious. As a generation, we learned that the events of our time were not conspiracies of the present, but the result of cultural and social forces that had roots in the past, and that failure to realize this was in itself a major moving force behind those events. We read Mead and Harrington, McLuhan and Weiner, Keynes and Fanon, Jung and Skinner, Horney and Heilbroner. It was a heady mix and an excellent education for survivors of the Florida secondary school system, and the music of the Beatles and the bands of the British Invasion was everywhere.