A recession may stunt more than material growth. It can also drain intellectual curiosity. For economic pressure can lead people to settle for what only seems to be security instead of following their dreams. Which can be a tragedy for both the individual and a society that depends on people reaching ever higher, rather than not settling for what only seems safe. Poverty is much overrated as a spur to human achievement. Rather, it’s a brake on it. The romantic image of the starving artist creating a masterpiece in his garret, charming as it may be, has little connection with reality. Walking around hungry is not a good thing, no matter what people who’ve never been hungry say.

Maybe that’s why it hurts to learn about the declining enrollments at some of the country’s finest liberal-arts colleges. Such schools have long stood out as islands of education in a sea of technical training, but they’re short of students these days.

Look what’s happening to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., long an exemplar of classical education in this country. Its students read and discuss Homer, Euclid, Chaucer and Einstein. They don’t just read about them. At this school, there are no major and minor fields to choose; all study the same classics and specialize in none. St. John’s offers a striking alternative to the typical university with its familiar cafeteria-style assortment of “practical” skills that can prove impractical as soon as the next technology or technique replaces the old.

At St. John’s, the object is to broaden the mind, not narrow it. It’s an exciting prospect for the intellectually ambitious, but St. John’s freshman class, which numbers 137 this year, is about 20 students smaller than last year’s. Applications are down 15 percent. The enrollment figures aren’t any more encouraging at Reed College in Portland, Ore., or Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Or little Lyon and Hendrix Colleges here in Arkansas.

Other fine schools may not stick to the classics as rigorously – some would say obsessively – as St. John’s, but they, too, try to avoid the trap of teaching students more and more about less and less, putting them on a career track from their first day on campus. Which could mean that, by the time they graduate, all they’ve learned is obsolete.

One can hope that those who have received a good education will have thought about the permanent things of all time, not just absorbed the fashionable slogans and brittle jargon of our one time.

Why would students choose a general liberal arts education over a job-oriented one even in a recession? Tim McClennen, an entering freshman at St. John’s, explained it this way: “If you go to school and you learn to do one thing, and then you change careers down the line, you know nothing that will help you.”

Many of the students at St. John’s hope to go on to graduate school – in law or medicine or business – but they’d also like to be educated. Specialization can wait until after they’ve had a chance to think about what they might want to specialize in, rather than be funneled into a job that may or may not exist by the time they graduate. Which would seem a prudent way to approach the choice of a career.

The purpose of an education ought to be something more than to prepare the next generation for entry-level jobs in whatever field is hot just now. Or rather was hot four years before they got their degree. Yet too often “educators” in this country have been reduced to telling business or government: You tell us the kind of worker you want, and we’ll mass-produce them. Which is a formula for turning out ranks of robots.

Our educantists produce one fad after another in education. And each is scarcely introduced before it is discarded in favor of the next. While the permanent things are ignored.

Perhaps even now, in the early morning hours, on some small campus somewhere in the dark fields of the Republic, a young student is putting aside the old book she couldn’t close all night. Maybe it will be Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, with its description of Themistocles, who “was the best judge of what was about to happen and the wisest in foreseeing what would happen in the distant future,” and so “surpassed all others in the faculty of intuitively meeting an emergency.”

From whence will come our Themistocles? Maybe from the ranks of students like her at our small, struggling liberal arts colleges.

© 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.