Who, if Anyone, Needs to Have a Liberal Education - Assignment Example

 Who, if Anyone, Needs to Have a Liberal Education? The question of who needs a liberal education does not have an easy answer, and as with most philosophical questions, it depends on which side of the fence you currently occupy. A large majority of educators wholeheartedly agree that everyone should have at least some education. Employers will often not even consider candidates who do not hold a degree of some kind, even if the degree is in a different field than the job. Parents scrimp and save so their children have money to go to school, so there is a push to make sure no opportunities are lost (whether the child needs them or not). And students are led to believe that the primary way to show they are successful young people is to get good grades and enroll in college immediately after high school. What does one mean by a “liberal” education, and what constitutes success? Under Shannon French’s definition, a liberal education studies a variety of issues (some of them frightening or disturbing) in order to produce a person who can define his or her morals and know why they have those morals. For French, if her students “come back with their shields” they have been successful (para. 24). Blanche Blank and Bill Coplin recognize that expecting universities to churn out workers destroys the underlying essence of a liberal education. Coplin’s portrait of a successful person paints someone who is dependable, pays attention to detail, works well in a team, can find and use information, is good at problem solving, and who can write clearly (para. 18). Certainly all those skills would serve anyone well in a working life, no matter if they have a college degree or not. These authors’ underlying definitions of a liberal education are right on the mark: Advanced schooling can be just about attaining a wide base of knowledge, and a liberal education is valuable even if it does not teach a specific skill set. Specific degrees are available for students to pursue, which are geared toward a working life; a broad education is just geared toward living a full and aware adulthood. Gregory clearly says that the only important job for humans is “deciding what kind of person he or she will become” (para. 12), so it can be assumed that a successful person “knows” himself or herself. By the same token, a failed person has focused solely on attaining skills and ignored all the other information that came by. Gregory very clearly articulates how he feels about a liberal education: “Liberal education is the pursuit of human excellence” (para. 10). A “liberal” education refers to the broad-based four year degree and touches on a variety of topics: ethics, philosophy, literature, languages, mathematics, all branches of science, and contains a smattering of more practical topics like nutrition and physical education or specific skills such as writing, arithmetic, and so on. These are not skills, per se: they are life skills which will help a person succeed in any area they choose to pursue, throughout their lifetimes. The problem, as voiced by these authors and by college students on every university campus, is that a broad education creates a lot of “useless” information for the student. A truly liberal education is quite impractical. Thus it would seem that very few people, indeed, actually “need” a liberal education; most of us would be better served by learning specific skills rather than tracing the history of literature from cave paintings to the present. However, there is more to it than that strictly reductionist statement. The four authors whose opinions are under consideration here seem to agree that there can’t be a middle ground between the truly liberal education and learning applications. Coplin is forceful in his assessment of his own educational experience: “However, I was plenty angry at a system that treated all students as if they were in college to learn for the sake of learning when in fact the vast majority wanted college to prepare them for a successful career” (para. 8). It would seem that there were many levels of unmet expectations all around him when he was in college, a situation which has not fixed itself in the intervening 50+ years. His own expectations of what college would teach him stemmed from a desire to learn a skill-set so he could go to work, and he ended up being a teacher of English, the second-most liberal of majors after Philosophy. Blanche Blank adds that perhaps a college degree isn’t a requirement—workers can be highly successful by all measures without having a degree. In fact, Blank argues, life may be less meaningful for college students: “But we seem to be generating a college population that oscillates between apathy and hostility” (para. 12). College degrees were an unattainable goal in previous generations, making them seem very valuable. If students enter college programs (and exit them) with unrealistic expectations that a degree immediately equals a high paying job, they may be sadly disappointed. On the other hand, Marshall Gregory definitely seems to value learning for its own sake, and he sees a liberal education as one important way to develop the natural, inborn skills of humans: imagination; appreciation for art and beauty; the art of being thoughtful; skill in using the language to convince, discuss, or be convinced; and rationality and ethics (para. 6). This ideal human is concerned with more than a career and an eventual retirement, and it could be assumed that this person would contribute to education almost as much as he or she takes out. Once Gregory’s basic skill set is internalized, the person is ready to go. Finally, Shannon French’s essay seems to agree with Gregory’s basic skills requirements with a more practical twist. She says, “The privileged warriors of today increasingly will find themselves pitted against adversaries who fight without any rules or restraints because they see no other way to advance their objectives” (para. 6). This statement can be broadened away from her select population of students (military cadets) and placed in the larger context of our culture. The more liberal a person’s education, the more likely they have been exposed to a number of ideas and ideals, many of which they will disagree with—and in that disagreement, they can develop ideas and ideals of their own, based on how they understand the world. The person with a liberal education can see multiple paths for advancing objectives, grounded in a true understanding of both the personal culture and the world culture. The purpose of a liberal education has never really been to teach a specific skill set; that is the job of technical programs, business programs or advanced specializations. Gregory paints an amusing picture of the liberal educator attempting to justify his “moldy corner in the university” (para. 7), when in actual fact a liberal education is what it is—the expectations of students, parents, and college recruiters that the investment in an education will be directly repaid is “off” in the equation. There is a lot of sense in the idea that a liberal education does not deliver a specific skill set which can be applied to a future career; it really doesn’t do those things, because that’s not what it is designed to do. But there is also a lot of sense in the idea that a liberal education provides a solid foundation for future generations of decision-makers. That is, indeed, a very important outcome of broad exposure to multiple ideas in an academic setting. So, who “needs” to have a liberal education? Again, it depends on who you are and what your intentions are once the education has been attained. No one (or at least the very few who plan to get jobs in academic pursuits) needs a liberal education. On the other hand, everyone needs this well-rounded foundation—and needs to pay attention to it, while they are pursuing a degree. Perhaps French comes closest to defining the purpose of a liberal education, without ever coming right out and saying it. She sees that her role as a teacher is to develop the minds, hearts, and even spirits of her students because they will eventually be faced with big questions: honor, integrity, and following codes of conduct. In the United States, we live in a participatory society—we have the right to vote, to change jobs, to use birth control, etc., but most of all we have the right to formulate our own laws through our three branches of government. Each individual voter has the duty to participate in the system in order to keep it running. So, if nothing else, a liberal education prepares us to participate in our society and to make well-thought decisions regarding our own actions and those of others in the society. There is no final answer to the question, “Who, if anyone, needs to have a liberal education?” The simple fact that we are asking the question, and are searching for an answer, is answer enough. Without a liberal education, our answers to many philosophical questions such as this would be much too brief. References Blank, B. (2007). A question of degree. Writing from Sources, B. Spatt, ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 11-14. Coplin, B. (2007). Lost in the life of the mind. Writing from Sources, B. Spatt, ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 295-298. French, S.E. (2007). When teaching the ethics of war is not academic. Writing from Sources, B. Spatt, ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 80-85. Gregory, M. (2007). A liberal education is not a luxury. Writing from Sources, B. Spatt, ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp Read More