Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Why Liberal Education Matters


A liberal education, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, should deepen our ability to “animate” dimensions of the world around us ... Emerson wrote that colleges “serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius ...

As Dewey put it, to discover “what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity
to do it, is the key to happiness.” Rather than starting out with a predetermined
outcome for what students must do, liberal education helps them make those discoveries and secure those opportunities...

Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters



We all seek a deeper understanding of love, death, anger, pain, and many other themes treated in great works of art, literature, and philosophy. No matter how we earn our living, we all need to confront ourselves, our own life and death.

Students should have a major subject, which might prepare for a career... But they should also take some courses that prepare them more broadly, for citizenship and life.

Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities



...the drumbeat of talk about skills and jobs has not lured people into engineering and biology-not everyone has the aptitude for science-so much as it has made them nervously forsake the humanities and take courses in business and communications. Many of these students might well have been better off taking a richer, deeper set of courses in subjects they found fascinating and supplementing it, as we all should, with some basic knowledge of computers and math...

Fareed Zakaria, In Defense of a Liberal Education

Why does liberal education matter? https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VKsoOZf1C1ubs7gjOE7SAI2lVD8k_wop/view?usp=sharing

1 comment:

  1. Cami Farr H-0311:01 AM CDT

    This might be an interesting point to bring up if after you earn your degree your mother brings up how you wasted 4 years of your life on a worthless degree at Thanksgiving dinner every year. Just saying.

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