The preparation which a study of the humanities can provide stems from three observations about education in our world of accelerating social and technological change. First, with the rate of change, we cannot hope to train our student for specific technologies. That kind of vocational education is obsolescent. By the time the specific training will have been completed, the world will have moved on.

  If our education consists of narrow training, we will not be prepared to change. Second and paradoxically, what our student desire from their education is preparation for specific careers – business, engineering, medicine, computer programming and the like, but we will not be able to train them for a life-long career. Their confronting the depressed job market gives our students a certain anxiety, but the solution they seek in vocational training is not sufficient. Third, we sense in our students a narrow materialism, with the good life defined in terms of material comforts. Education then means learning to do a job which will make money. I see in this definition a limiting sense of what education and thus life offer, a definition which excludes joy and meaning. Our narrow approach to the study of the humanities responds to these three related problems. In our changing, yet narrow world, the teaching of the humanities finds one powerful justification – it teaches student how to think.

  Those who are familiar with it will tell you that Ludo, like human life itself, is a game both of chance and skill. You need skill in deciding how to make the most advantageous use of the figures that turn up on the die when you cast it. Since each player has at least four alternative ways of using his figures, two players with equal luck may fare differently, depending on how cleverly each one uses his figures. The element of luck, again as in human life, plays a dominant role however. For no matter how skilful a player may be in using the figures he gets on the die, he has a slim chance of winning if he continually throws low figures. While a combination of ones and twos may be useful in checking the advance of one’s opponents, it will not take one home fast enough to win. On the other hand: consistent throws of sixes and fives with the very minimum of skill, will help a player to home all his four counters before any of the three other players, unless, of course, he has no idea of the game at all.