The Meaning of a Liberal Arts and Sciences Education in the United States: Anachronistic Lessons from a Parochial Past (original) (raw)

Reclaiming the Core: Liberal Education in the Twenty-First Century

Perspectives on Political Science, 2013

Colleges and faculties of liberal arts are facing potentially devastating declines in enrollments, driven in part by their own loss of clear purpose. To stem the tide and regain their rightful place at the center of the university, liberal arts faculties need to rethink the meaning of liberal education. This article argues that education in the liberal arts should be directed above all to cultivating practical wisdom, for which a deep inquiry into the central questions of political science is especially valuable. It discusses the relation of liberal education to civic education, the proper tasks of civic education at the university level, the benefits of dialectical inquiry, and the means by which students' thoughtless relativism can be replaced with habit of moral reasoning suitable to a modern cosmopolitan society.

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.

University of Liberal Studies : To Make a Life, Not Lust a living

Life is a multifaceted endeavor. Students' ability to balance their chequebooks is distinct from their ability to choose how, when, what, and with whom to spend their money. Liberal arts education, in general, prepares students to think critically and actively about the difficulties and possibilities they will encounter as employees and employers, as members of friendships, relationships, families, and communities, and as citizens of a nation and the world. Worldwide, higher education has been on a journey. Throughout our tenure, several changes and challenges on numerous fronts have had a significant impact on our lives. However, one thing has remained constant: the value of a college education and its power to transform people's lives. That life-changing influence is sometimes underestimated in the shifting world of higher education. Colleges and universities face economic, demographic, and societal challenges. One of the most critical is the public's developing perception of the purpose and value of a college education. This chapter covers the factors that contributed to the establishment of Liberal Arts Universities and their consequences.

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...

The Fate (and Possible Future) of Liberal Learning: Lessons from Mass Higher Education in the USA

Society, 2021

In his classic essay, "Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education," Martin Trow observed that in every advanced society, the problems of higher education-including ostensibly the ability to deliver a liberal education-inhere in growth. With growth, the character of institutions changes. University attendance increasingly carries varied meanings for students: first conceived as a privilege, then as a right, and finally as an obligation. "Massification" is connoted with an optimism about access to higher education and about the democratization of society. Yet, it is prone to propagating structural and cultural conditions that are antithetical to an authentically rigorous, text-based, discussion-centered, writing-intensive liberal education where students and faculty convene on behalf of education for the mind. The emergence of this problem centers on the seemingly irreconcilable triad of size, quality, and cost; that is, how liberal education is made possible and cost-effective on an increasingly large scale. The solutions suggested here are threefold: the institutionalization of proper information about universities, their purposes and functions; the practice of proper matching of applicants with institutions in institutionally differentiated higher education systems; and the standardization of proper understanding of expectations about what it means to be a bona-fide student in an institution of higher education.

Distinctively American: The Residential Liberal Arts Colleges

Social Science Journal, 2002

compile 15 articles primarily written by men and women engaged in liberal arts colleges as administrators, trustees, professors, former students, or chaplains. Inspite of their direct connections with and, often, professed allegiances to small, liberal arts colleges (SLACs), the contributors to this volume present a very clear, detailed, and honest portrait of many aspects of the past, present, and anticipated future of these schools. The articles, originally written by the various authors for different occasions, avoid the romanticized, sentimental presentations that they might have been. Instead, they both deconstruct and reconstruct the ideology about and reality of the SLACs.

Liberal Education Imperiled: Toward a Resurrection of Reason and Revelation in Higher Education

I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 3 Even a half-century ago, the question of life's meaning had a more central and respected place in higher education than it does today. But the questions of how to spend one's life, of what to care about and why, the question of which commitments, relations, projects, and pleasures are capable of giving a life purpose and value: regardless of the name it was given, and even if, as was often the case, it was given no name at all, this question was taken more seriously by more of our colleges 2 Anthony T. Kronman, Education's End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 2-3, 9, 10-11, 35, and 39. Many of Kronman's criticisms were laid out more extensively in Eva T. H. Brann, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 23-30. 3 Kronman, Education's End, 40. 4 Ibid., 41.