This week on Uncommon Knowledge, renowned diplomat and Yale professor Charles Hill. Amb. Hill served as an adviser to Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz. The Diplomat-in-Residence at Yale, Amb. Hill teaches a famous seminar, “Studies in Grand Strategy.” His latest book: Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order. Today, Amb. Hill on the shrinking of American education:

When students come to a great university they want to answer big problems. Then they find that the social sciences, especially political science, reduce any problem to a small corner, only taking questions that can be addressed in a way that’s scientific and replicable. “You can only work,” students are told, “on this little thing over here.” That’s not the way education was in the Victorian era or in America in the early part of the twentieth century. But during the upheavals of the sixties, when the curriculum was changed, things got smaller. So as American involvement in the world got larger, our education was shrinking.

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