From the liberal to the practical arts in American colleges and universities: Organizational analysis and curricular change (original) (raw)
Related papers
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 Curriculum of Liberal Arts Colleges: Beyond the Major
This study examined the formal curricula of 82 liberal arts institutions as described in college catalogs. These institutions included both Liberal Arts I (LAI) and Liberal Arts II (LAII) schools in the 1994 Carnegie classifications. Two recent studies have contended that many institutions identifying themselves as liberal arts colleges are really not. This contention has been based on the percentage of graduates in professional majors. Attention in this study was placed on relating the course descriptions to six attributes of the liberal arts curriculum, identified in the literature and through the comments of chief executive officers of liberal arts institutions. Findings indicate that professional majors dominate LAII institutions, However, the general education program at both LAI and LAII institutions appears to be the primary means of accomplishing attributes related to the formal curriculum of a liberal arts college. (Contains 35 references.) (SLD) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
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.
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.
2020
Liberal education, which has been foundational to American higher education since the seventeenth century, is under increasing pressure to give an account of its value to students, parents, and society. Driving this pressure are widely-held expectations that an undergraduate education ought to provide students with the skills and abilities to prosper immediately in the job market. Such expectations have revived a long-standing debate on whether a liberal education is a good in itself, yielding indirect, utilitarian benefits, or intrinsically practical and engaged closely with contemporary social and economic realities. This debate has prompted another related, enduring debate within higher education circles on the proper relationship between liberal education and the professional and applied disciplines. The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of faculty concerning the relation between the liberal arts and professional, vocational, and skills-based undergraduate academic programs. The study participants were 15 purposefully selected faculty who taught at a Tier I, public urban university, a public, urban university in service mainly to adult learners, and a private faith-based university, all located in the Gulf Coast Region of Texas. This qualitative study used a collective case study research design to identify and understand faculty perceptions of and experiences with the relation and interaction of liberal education and the applied academic disciplines. The settings for this study were private conference rooms and faculty offices located on the campuses of the aforementioned universities. Data were collected through multiple methods, including the lens of the researcher, semi-structured, open-ended interviews, print and digital documents, field notes, and reflexive journaling. The constant-comparative method and a three-stage coding process were used to analyze the collected data, develop categories and themes, and interpret and construct meaning. This study’s results indicate that faculty favor an undergraduate education that encourages student to value the play of ideas and the acquisition of practical skills. Faculty also favor forming students in particular academic disciplines, but they believe that such formation should simultaneously keep students alert to productive connections with other disciplines. Faculty affirm that organizational structures and cultures should encourage this sort of disciplinary-based interdisciplinarity. The study concludes with a series of implications and recommendations that suggest how colleges and universities can create cultures of learning that value thinking and doing equally, and structures that enable a vibrant interdisciplinarity, rooted in strong disciplinary commitments.
The Limits of the Liberal Arts
2018
College majors are well chosen in proportion to their return on assets for living well. University education is not about making yourself into a vessel, for use by others, in the way that most enhances your power as a consumer. Instead, university education is about coming to know what makes your life valuable, in a way that most enhances your power to find satisfaction and realize your potential. This is why the liberal arts are valuable: they empower us to live well. (This is a write-up from a presentation to the AddRan College of Liberal Arts at Texas Christian University, January 2018.)
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.