Liberal art teaches you how to think, how to read, write, and speak intelligently, get along with others, and conceptualize problems.
Growing ranks of corporate executives are lamenting that college students are specializing too much and too early. What corporate America really needs is students soundly grounded in the liberal arts—English, especially---who then can pick up more specific business or technical skills on the job. Today’s best selling courses offer evidence that students want to take courses that provide direct job related skills rather than the most basic survival skills in the work place: communications and thinking skills.
Education for education’s sake is noble but impractical to today’s college student who is facing a competitive and rapidly changing job market.
Adaptability and lifelong learning are the cornerstones of success in today’s complex and rapidly changing society. No longer can the person who is steeped in one academic discipline, but knows nothing about any thing else, meet today’s demands.
The time has come to rethink what education really is and how it relates to the functions of society. Perhaps what a liberal education does to an individual, which is more important than anything else, is to prepare him for more learning. The liberal arts background equips one with thinking skills, coupled with the desire to learn, are the best preparation for career and life that any of us can possess.
First, granting that our graduates know a great deal, their knowledge lies about in fragments and never gets welded together into the stuff of a tempered and mobile mind. Secondly, our university graduates have been so busy boring holes for themselves, acquiring special knowledge and skills, that in later life they have astonishingly little in common in the way of ideas, standards, or principles.
But genuine education, as Socrates knew more than two thousand years ago, is not inserting the stuffing of information into a person, but rather eliciting knowledge from him; it is the drawing out of what is in the mind.
The most important part of education is this instruction of a man in what he has inside him.
He was being so stuffed with miscellaneous facts, with such an indigestible mass of material that he has no time (and was given no encouragement) to draw on his own resources, to use his own mind for analyzing and synthesizing, and evaluating this material.
The job of teaching is not to stuff them and then seal them up, but to help them open and reveal the riches within.
Training is intended primarily for the service of society; education is primarily for the individual. Education is for the improvement of the individual, it also serves society by providing a leavening of men of understanding, of perception, and wisdom. They are our intellectual leaders, the critics of our culture, the defenders of our free traditions, the instigators of our progress.
In the liberal arts college, student is encouraged to explore new fields and old fields, to wander down the bypaths of the knowledge.
The study of law gives him an understanding of the rules under which our society functions and his practice in solving legal problems gives him an understanding of fine distinctions.
In general, certain courses of study are for the service of society and other courses are for self-improvement.