It might not be a locust year in Western Pennsylvania, but we have a different brood of 17-year pests with which to contend. It's graduation season, and teachers of high school seniors know too well the mayhem that ensues when these subterraneans first sniff the fresh air of the "real world."

The graduating senior is a peculiar species -- half adolescent human and half Labrador Retriever tearing through the neighborhood on a snapped leash. If you've ever been the sorry guy whose minivan inches down the street in confounded pursuit of the fugitive, you can relate to the business of instructing 12th graders in the closing weeks of the school year.

Senior year is for most students the first scenic pull-off on their lifelong trek, and the view is swell. They look out over all they're leaving behind -- the regimented bell schedules, parent consent forms, early morning swimming classes -- and understandably they rejoice. The only problem is that they stay parked at that rest area for weeks on end, unmindful of the traffic jam amassing behind them.

Much of this is sarcastic exaggeration, I know. But I would like to challenge one truly exasperating behavior of the graduating senior. In relishing the casting off of secondary school formalities, seniors make sure to proclaim the perceived uselessness of their liberal arts education. Classrooms all over the country resound with variations on a theme: "When will I ever need to know the causes of the Spanish Civil War in the real world?" "Who is ever going to ask me to calculate the area under a curve?" "Like I'll ever use 'Hamlet' like ever again!"

If theirs is an arrogant cynicism, it is also a natural one born of cultural expectations. Rightly or wrongly, we define ourselves by our professions. Clever literature teachers will draw a valid and profound connection between "Hamlet" and, say, an accounting career, but the appeal requires that students be mature beyond their years. The cornerstone of a graduating senior's identity is his college and declared major, and so naturally he questions classes not manifestly preparatory towards his future course work.

Yet throughout the millennia the liberal arts have never promised to align neatly with the objectives of vocational education. In classical antiquity, the liberal arts were so called because liberated people studied them. Slaves learned a trade, but privileged free individuals studied philosophy, poetry, music and astronomy.

The liberal arts aimed to teach integrity, leadership, creativity and discernment. They made a man intellectually fit, toned up his curiosity, broadened his humanity. Liberal arts students were trained to succeed not merely as jobholders, but more fundamentally as citizens, neighbors, spouses and parents.

That modern history ushered in public education reflects just how liberated we are. By requiring students to read the classics, study the past, examine the natural world and express themselves through art, we assert that adolescents are not slaves to their future college majors -- that they are more than employees in the making.

It takes a few cycles of aggravation, but 12th grade teachers come around to seeing student apathy as an indication of the readiness to graduate. As commencement day approaches, excitement overtakes cynicism and teachers find that their seniors become rather likeable again. On the last day each party bids the other farewell, one relieved to have finally escaped and the other to have finally arrived. Which is which I'm still not sure, but the longer I work at this job the more I think "Hamlet" does, like, have the answer: "We know what we are, but know not what we may be."