>>24451794
You need to differentiate between the "liberal arts" as an academic discipline within the academy (and how that trickles down to even high school classrooms) and the liberal arts as a whole. I think a lot of people have a great love of the liberal arts. Many of the most ferocious critics of what has happened to the liberal arts as a discipline think the liberal arts are essential to a functioning republic and self-governance (at both the individual and corporate level).

Those who see them as useless, who tend to see English as largely just preparatory for on-the-job writing, and want education to be rigidly technical tend to embrace highly deflationary philosophies (tending towards empiricism, utilitarianism, etc.), but also are often just responding to how completely ridiculous the liberal arts have become. We are now at a stage where Gen X is 50+ and making decisions about education and they grew up with the liberal arts already post-modernized and see little value in them. I don't think most people exposed to Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Dante, etc. find them useless. If they have been taught well, they are, at the very least, interesting, and I think most would say much more than that.