Liberal Arts Education

Career-Based and Broad - Based education

Historical background

In classical era (a period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the civilizations of Greece and Rome, in which literature flourished), the liberal arts denoted the education worthy of a free person—unlike the lack-of-education, or purely manual/technical skills, proper to a slave. In the 5th century AD, Martianus Capella defined the seven Liberal Arts as: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music.

Introduction

Many studies have shown that a big percentage of people believe in practical education as a means to land a job upon graduation. Consequently, many higher education institutions have made the decision to provide students with the career-based education they want, thus ensuring desired enrollment and funding. In providing customers with what they want, many colleges and universities have allowed themselves to become more like corporate businesses interested in profits rather than institutions interested in educating students.

Educational institutions should provide students with the desire to learn much more than one topic of study. In doing so, they will spawn a lifelong desire for learning which will support the overall success of students.

Yes, technical skills might give one the “foot in the door” in terms of entry into the workforce, but a broad-based education will provide the staying power, serve as a foundation for continuous growth and development, and lead to success at all levels. Viewed in this context, liberal arts education is the practical brand of education that will equip us with the knowledge base, skills, and values to function effectively and productively in the world.

This term has a fuzzy meaning for most people. For some, it means all those required classes that stand in the way of technical training, which some people feel is the only way to prepare for a job. But, upon closer inspection, the liberal arts can be understood as the key to survival in any field.

Liberal arts courses are organized around reading books, having discussions, composing papers, giving presentations, delivering talks, etc. they include anthropology, archaeology, communication studies, science, cultural studies, demography, economics, history, media studies, political science, psychology,

social work, sociology, geography, religious studies, languages, philosophy, etc…

Objectives

Liberal arts education is designed to provide students with intellectual, historical, spiritual, and futuristic context for recognizing:

1. The continuity between the past and future

2. To question the values dimension of human beings

3. It connects learning to life by understanding and evaluating human events and interactions. 4. Liberates us from the limitations of our own experience and opinions by proffering alternative views, and explanations.

5. Liberal arts education embraces the concept of unity in diversity in which we appreciate the differences and similarities among world cultures. It also prepares the individual to recognize the interdependency of all of our global partners.

6. Communicating clearly and effectively, thinking critically and acting logically. 7. Awareness of the spiritual dimension inherent in us.

8. Enabling you to develop your own opinions, attitudes, values, and beliefs, based not upon the authority of parents, peers, or professors, and not upon ignorance, whim, or prejudice, but upon independent investigation of truth.

9. Developing an active engagement with knowledge, and not being just a passive recipient of a hundred facts.

10. To prepare graduates to understand the relationships between science, market forces, and human behavior.

11. No educational institution however great, no faculty however adept, can teach you in certain number of years everything you need to know. But by teaching you how to learn and how to organize ideas, the liberal arts institution will enable you to understand new material more thoroughly and permanently.

12. Wisdom is seeing life whole - meaning that every realm of knowledge must be connected to others to discover a full truth.

13. Will become a better teacher, but, you say, I'm not going to be a teacher, yes you are. You may not be a school teacher, but any time two human beings get together and open their mouths; teaching is going on. Attitudes, perceptions, understandings, reasons, and information--all these are revealed and discussed.