The Importance of Liberal Arts Education

Liberal arts education encompasses the entire human intellectual experience, including the humanities, the arts, and sciences, both social and natural. While students’ educational and post-graduation goals (i. e. employment and graduate school programs) tend to require more and more specialization, the world that we live in today is becoming continually complex day by day. When students arrive for the first time in school, many of them are amazed at the general education classes they have to pass before they can graduate.

Some wonder why somebody who is schooling to become a psychologist, bookkeeper or television maker should undertake courses that have no direct relationship with their fields. It is indeed, a fair question. Why should one study literature, history, art, philosophy, music or other courses outside of one’s major? Why should one engage in subjects that do not help in training him for his future job? Why study logic when all you want to do is be a first-grade teacher or church organist? Is it necessary to study computer programming when you will probably not ever write a computer program in your field of work?

To answer this question, let us take a look at some benefits a good liberal arts education, and the accompanying widespread knowledge to be gained from liberal arts education.

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Students arrive at school with many career objectives and options like public service, law, service vocations, health professions, business, engineering, teaching, and ministry. A good Liberal education is required for all of these and more. Liberal learning provides the critical intelligence, skills, talents, and the range that enables people to have access to many careers, even if one does not seek graduate or professional training after a bachelor’s degree.

The year 2001 human development report stated that A broader approach to research in human development is proposed that focuses on the progressive accommodation, throughout the life span, between the growing human organism and the changing environments in which it actually lives and grows. The approach emphasizes the use of rigorously designed experiments, both naturalistic and contrived, beginning in the early stages of the research process. (The Human Development Report. 2001) Liberal Learning

Liberal Arts Education is important and it helps in forming lifelong learners. Participating in a liberal education is a challenge and a privilege. “To be liberally educated is to be transformed. Open and free inquiry, a devotion to excellence, the development of character, the mastery of competencies, the ability to think critically, the excitement and rewards of learning — these are the aims and principles of a liberal arts education. ” (The Liberal Arts Education. http://www. lawrence. edu/about/libarts. shtml)

Liberal learning liberates and frees people from time and place restraints, thereby enabling growth, change, and response to new, unexpected or unforeseen circumstances. Being liberally educated means living imaginatively in worlds that are not our own, and being able to examine values that are not of our making. A liberal education tests our ability to investigate and understand the nature of an organism, the applications of a theorem, the behavior of a crowd, the principles of a political system, the meaning of a poem, the causes of an event, the consequences of an argument, or the composition of a symphony.

Liberal education promotes diversity, skepticism, and debate. It views the world as changing, not fixed. It asks not only what, but why. It insists that we make judgments rather than have opinions, that we treat ideas seriously, not casually, that we be committed instead of indifferent. (The Liberal Arts Education. http://www. lawrence. edu/about/libarts. shtml)