Debate: Liberal Arts Education (original) (raw)
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What a Liberal Arts Education is ... and is Not 1
2010
or some time, educational experts have been challenging the relevance of liberal arts education. Liberal arts education has been derided as elitist and dismissed as outmoded and ‘in trouble’. Even its advocates speak of a need for ‘revitalization’ and ‘restructuring’. These attacks have been heard most from within American academe, where the liberal arts have had the greatest impact and left the largest imprint on the higher educational establishment. Paradoxically, this criticism has reached a crescendo just at the time when interest in liberal learning is spreading across the globe. Whether in Eastern Europe or Asia, Western Europe or Africa, an increasing number of educators are looking to import and adapt liberal models of higher education.
This paper begins by discussing the liberal arts in a global context. It follows with a discussion of my own field of education and its relationship to the liberal arts. Although I consider the natural sciences as part of the liberal arts I cannot speak for them since I feel I do not have a sufficient background to do so. I feel the same about the fine arts and economics even though I consider these fields to be part of the liberal arts. I later discuss why I think the Liberal Arts are important to North Park University and how this type of education is important to all students today. In my final section I conclude with reading books and the liberal arts. This last section may feel a bit more disjointed from the rest of this paper but I felt it was important to discuss the importance of books and reading
For years I've questioned the efficacy of the liberal arts and like parents who hoped their child didn't enroll in the liberal arts for fear of a non-prosperous future, I wondered about the overall contribution of the liberal arts to society. It wasn't that I thought the liberal arts had no value but rather that I questioned the cost-benefit of several years of study in the humanities.
A Historical and Global Perspective on Liberal Arts Education: What Was, What Is, and What Will Be
Godwin, K. A. & Altbach, P. G. (2016). International Journal of Chinese Education, 5, p. 5-22.
Debates about higher education’s purpose have long been polarized between specialized preparation for specific vocations and a broad, general knowledge foundation known as liberal education. Excluding the United States, specialized curricula have been the dominant global norm. Yet, quite surprisingly given this enduring trend, liberal education has new salience in higher education worldwide. This discussion presents liberal education’s non-Western, Western, and U.S. historical roots as a backdrop for discussing its contemporary global resurgence. Analysis from the Global Liberal Education Inventory provides an overview of liberal education’s renewed presence in each of the regions and speculation about its future development.
Liberal Arts and Sciences Education: Responding to the Challenges of the XXIst Century
Voprosy Obrazovaniya / Educational Studies Moscow, 2015
This essay has two primary goals. First, it seeks to define liberal art and sciences as a system of higher education that involves curricular breadth as well as depth, student-centered teaching and academic and administrative structures which facilitate learning. Second, it makes the case for liberal arts and sciences education and why it responds to the demands of the XXIst century. The essay is informed by experiences of liberal arts and sciences education across not only in the United States, where it has found its greatest influence, but by the growing movement to experiments in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Asia. At its core, liberal arts and sciences education is concerned about the development of students and their capacity to learn, to express ideas and communicate effectively, and to adapt to changing circumstances. In countries where vocational training, hyper-specialization and didactic pedagogic approaches dominate higher education, liberal arts and sciences educa...
Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education , 2021
Although the United States is often heralded as the leader in the liberal arts and sciences model of higher education, the idea of a "liberal education" itself remains both loaded and vague. Do we yet have a consensus on its meaning and application today that does not rely on some appeal to a vaguely defined and putatively historic tradition? In this article, we sketch out the problem and trace its historic origins in the United States to better address one of the enduring and valuable meanings of a US liberal higher education. Our purpose is to illuminate the essential holistic and student-centered dimension of US small liberal arts college (SLAC) education, and why it is worth preserving through the current crises and pandemic. We draw from this dimension of the US liberal education tradition several helpful suggestions about how to escape our confusion surrounding the meaning of the idea: focusing on the character formation of individuals that can serve their communities, shifting curriculum away from mere breadth and depth in disciplinary knowledge and to breadth and depth of character development, supporting teacher tracks in higher education to foster this kind of student-centered learning, exploring the possibilities for liberal holistic learning in other contexts and at distance, and finally being unafraid to defend a robust holistic liberal education even if it demands a lot to carry out well.