Liberal Arts Essay

An information conducted in a spirit of free inquiry undertaken without concern for circus tentical relevance or vocational utility. This smorgasbord of learn is non only bingle of the en largements of existence it is one of the achievements of civilization. It heightens students awargonness of the kind being and natural worlds they inhabit. It receives them more reflective well-nigh their beliefs and choices, more self-conscious and criticising, speaking, particular and logical thinking. Law schools report that by the yardsticks of law review and grades, their top students come from math, classics, and literature, with political science, economicalals, pre-law and legal studies ranking lower. In todays fast evolving world, geniusers across the spectrum of vocations and professions need a broad inventive and critical capacity, not a prematurely narrow point of view. In terms of the actual world, a solid freehand arts and sciences teaching method go forth gener in some(prenominal)y prove the intimately practical education for umpteen another(prenominal) demanding, high-level c atomic number 18ers, or for the several c atomic number 18rs that an increasing number of adults will last pursue.No particular concentration or bea of study is inherently a better ticket to security, leadership, or personal satisfaction than another. Students should be encouraged to follow their passions and interests, not what they guess (or what others tell them) will lead to a supposedly more marketable set of skills. Of course, higher development has a utilitarian function. In that regard, as Robert Bellah states, it possesses its experience legitimacy. Yet, it is crucial to blend in and integrate that function with other aims and ends, with what Bellah holler outs education for the development of character, citizenship, and culture. A good system of higher education plys m all rewards scientific discoveries, dismantletual and even unforeseen appli cations, thoughtful political leadership, intelligent public discourse, cultural vitality, and an educate acidifyforce. Higher learning serves several goals in coordination, goals that be mutually reinforcing.The aims ar at once personal and social, private and public, economic, ethical, and gifted. Harvard College exists to serve all these goals and offers a broad array of concentrations and courses for the purpose of educating the whole individual. Why? Because that kind of education, and not one aimed at certain occupational targets, is, in the long run, the outdo preparation for advanced achievement. The very broad, capacious form of education that we call the better-looking arts is rooted in a specific platform in classical and medieval times. But it would be wrong to bring that because it has such ancient roots, this kind of education is outdated, stale, fusty, or irrelevant. In fact, sooner the contrary. A plentiful-arts education, which Louis Menand defined in The Marketplace of Ideas as a orbit mentality, a style of thinking, a kind of intellectual DNA that informs work in every specialized area of inquiry, lends itself particularly c drop offly to coeval high-tech methods of imparting knowledge. We all wrestle with the challenges of educating students who are used to multitasking, doing their training while listening to music and texting on their iPhones. For such students, the Web-based facilities of elicit liberal-arts courses are particularly salient.What would Aristotle or Erasmus or Robert Maynard Hutchins not impart given for a technique that allows one to tour the worlds greatest museums, looking closely at the details of count slight masterpieces explore the ruins of ancient castles and pyramids and forums aggregate archaeological digs at your desk, turning objects approximately to see all sides of them visualize problems in geometry or astronomy or mathematics in several dimensions and work out their solutions. An excell ent example of the power of multimedia coupled with the liberal arts is Imaginary Journeys, a general-education course sometimes taught at Harvard University by Stephen Greenblatt. The course is described as being round global mobility, encounter, and exchange at the time that Harvard College was founded in 1636. Using the interactional resources of computer technology, we follow imaginary voyages of three ships that leave England in 1633.Sites hold Londons Globe Theatre, Benin, Barbados, Brazil, Mexico. With this kind of course in mind, it seems that the liberal arts could almost apply been designed for sophisticated online learning, so uttermost from being stale or fusty are these styles of knowing. This kind of education has become more and more appealing to students and teachers at universities around the world. Donald Markwell, the warden of Oxfords Rhodes House, recently gave a series of lectures in Canada entitled The lack for Breadth. He referred to a surge of interes t in liberal education in many other countries. He cites a major track in London by Yales Richard Levin in which Levin noted that Asiatic leaders are increasingly attracted to the Ameri stool model of under grade curriculum, specifically because of the two days of breadth and depth in different disciplines provided in the beginning a student chooses an area of concentration or embarks on skipper training. Levin described liberal-arts honours programs at Peking University, South Koreas Yonsei University, and the National University of capital of Singapore he also referred to liberal-arts curricula at Fudan University, Nanjing University, and the University of Hong Kong.Yet, as we know, the trends in the United States are in the opposite direction, and this is not just a recent problem. Menand cites essay that in the United States, the proportion of undergraduate degrees awarded annually in the liberal arts and sciences has been declining for a hundred years, apart from a brief swipe between 1955 and 1970, which was a period of chop-chop increasing enrollments and national economic growth. Thus, paradoxically, as a liberal-arts education becomes more appealing to leaders and families in Asia and elsewhere in the world, it is losing ground in our own country. At least(prenominal) three factors are at work in this decline a) the concept of increasingly specialized disciplines, and the rewards for faculty members for advancing knowledge in those areas b) the economic premium that is thought to reside in a highly technical foul form of preparation for careers and c) a growing focus on graduate education from the early 20th century to the present day. These developments have all the way not been beneficial for American undergraduate education.Liberal education in crisis is a tiresomely familiar theme, and countless commissions, reports, and study groups have attempt to organize it. I am under no illusions that I have the magic key to resolve a problem th at has stumped so many brilliant educators. But these are not just theoretical quandaries, they are the issues we confront almost every day How do we defend liberal education against the skepticsparents, potential students, the media, the marketplace, even some trustees and students? The first, most practical excuse is that the liberal arts (and sciences) are the best accomplishable preparation for victor in the learned professionslaw, medicine, teachingas well as in the less traditionally learned but increasingly arcane professions of business, finance, and high-tech innovation. So my first defense of liberal learning is what you are taught and the way you learn it the materials a doctor or financial analyst or physicist or humanist needs to know, but taught in a munificently construed fashion, so that you look at the subject from many different dimensions and structured the material into your own thinking in ways that will be more than more likely to stay with you, and help y ou later on.This way of learning has several distinct advantages Its insurance against obsolescence in any rapidly changing field (and every field is changing rapidly these days), if you only focus on learning specific materials that are tending(p) in 2012, rather than learning about them in a broader context, you will soon find that your training will have become valueless. about important, with a liberal education you will have learned how to learn, so that you will be able to do research to answer interrogatives in your field that will come up years from now, questions that nobody could even have en hatfuled in 2012, much less taught you how to answer. The second, slightly less utilitarian defence of a liberal-arts education is that it hones the mind, teaching focus, critical thinking, and the dexterity to express oneself clearly some(prenominal) in writing and speakingskills that are of great value no matter what profession you may choose. Its not just that you are taught s pecific materials in a munificently designed context, but more generally, the way your mind is shaped, the habits of thought that you develop.These skills were well described by a former dean of the Harvard Law School, Erwin Griswold, cited in a recent speech by the current dean, Martha Minow. Griswold was discussing an ideal vision of the law school, but his arguments fit a liberal education wherever it is provided You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts or habits for the art of expression, for the art of entree quickly into another persons thoughts, for the art of assuming at a moments notice a new intellectual position, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and mental soberness. My third argument is that a liberal -arts education is the best education for citizenship in a democracy like ours. In her book, Not for Profit, Martha Nussbaum points out that from the early years of our republic educators and leaders have connected the liberal arts to the preparation of informed, independent, and sympathetic citizens.Nussbaum argues that democracies need complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and record the significance of another persons sufferings and achievements. Among the skills a liberal-arts education fosters, she notes, are the ability to think about the good of the nation as a whole, not just that of ones local group, and to see ones own nation, in turn, as part of a tangled world order. At a time when democracy is struggling to be born in countries around the world, and countries that have long enjoyed democracy are struggling to sustain it against pressures of multiple varieties, this may be the best of all the arguments for a liberal-arts education. My fo urth argument I borrow from Michel de Montaigne, who thought of his own mind as a kind of tower library to which he could retreat even when he was far from home, filled with quotations from wise mess and experimental thoughts and jokes and anecdotes, where he could keep company with himself. In his essay Of Solitude, he suggested that we all have such back rooms in our minds.The most valuable and attractive people we know are those who have rich and fascinating intellectual furniture in those spaces rather than a pervert between their ears. Virginia Woolf used a different spatial image to make a similar point in her book Three Guineas, when she talked about the importance of cultivating taste and the knowledge of the arts and literature and music. She argues that people who are so caught up in their professions or business that they never have time to listen to music or look at pictures lose the sense of sight, the sense of sound, the sense of proportion. And she concludes What th en remains of a human being who has lost sight, and sound, and a sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave. So my fourth argument for a liberal-arts education is that it allows you to furnish the back room of your mind, preparing you for both society and solitude. My concluding argument is that the liberal arts admit you to a community of scholars, both professional and amateur, spanning the ages. Here I would quote one of my predecessors at Wellesley, Alice freewoman (later Alice Freeman Palmer).When she presided over Wellesley in the last part of the 19th century, it was kinda unusual for girls to go to college (as indeed it even is today in some parts of the world). In a speech she gave to answer the repeated question she got from girls and their families, Why Go to College? she said We go to college to know, assured that knowledge is impertinent and healthy, that a good education emancipates the mind and makes us citizens of the world. The sweet and powerful knowledge i mparted by a liberal-arts education is specifically designed to follow out this promise. But how can college presidents today best go about make the case for the liberal arts? First and most obvious, they should use the tittup pulpit of the college presidency deliberately and effectivelyat convocations, commencements, groundbreakings for new buildings, in speeches to the local Rotary Club or the state 4-H club convention, and addresses to alumni clubs.This is a truly precious opportunity that few other leaders have, to address the community in situations where there is likely to be respectful heed to their message, at least for a while They should use the opportunity with tanginess The second way is by using their fund-raising skills and obligations to raise money for exciting programs like Greenblatts Imaginary Journeys. They can make this case effectively to foundations and generous alumni who remember their own liberal-arts education fondly, and thus enhance the resources p urchasable for this purpose. Presidents can demonstrate their can of the liberal arts in how they honor faculty members. With the teaching awards and other distinctions their colleges offer, they should single out for praise and support those who have been most effective in advancing the liberal-arts mission.And then they can ensure that these awards and recognitions are appropriately highlighted in college publications and in messages to parents and prospective students. And mayhap the most effective way presidents can use their leadership to offer support is to speak from a liberal-arts perspective in their own discourse, both formal and informal, by citing examples of fine literature, drawing on instances from history, referring to the arts, and describing learning in the sciences in liberal terms. Rhetoric was one of the original artes liberales, and it can still be one of the most transformative. Taking my own advice about larding words with liberal learning, I will conclude w ith a poem by Imam Al-Shafii, which I discovered in a brochure on a recent visit to the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, in Doha, Qatar consort to the measure of hardship are senior high school achieved,And he who seeks loftiness mustiness keep vigil by nightAs for he who wants heights without toil,He wastes his life seeking the impossibleSo seek aristocracy now, then sleep once more (finally),He who seeks pearls must dip into the sea.As this poem reminds us, a liberal-arts education is not always light it involves paying close attention, taking risks, exploring uncharted territory, diving into the sea. But condescension these challenges, the deep rewards of a liberal education are surely charge our best efforts on its behalf.