A Liberal Arts Education: Global Trends and Challenges

Abstract

The debate about the effectiveness of the liberal arts curriculum is centuries old, but recent financial and social pressures have placed the survival of the liberal arts in the United States at even greater risk. Using Kimball's (1995) notion of the oratorical and philosophical traditions of liberal education, this article first identifies the critical importance of balancing breadth and depth in the curriculum before honing in on breadth as being in particular danger in the current climate. After analyzing the major threats to breadth in American higher education, the article looks overseas to find a new case for the value of breadth in the curriculum. It focuses on Hong Kong's university system, where a large-scale, multiyear project is underway to graft a fourth year of general education onto a three-year model of discipline- or profession-specific training. The resulting contrast between American institutions discarding curricular breadth while foreign universities rediscover it is telling. This topic has particular relevance for Christian colleges and universities as they seek the holistic development of their students.

Notes

The 33.5 credits of STEM courses include a 1-credit interdisciplinary lab for which offerings vary each semester but are generally interdisciplinary within the natural sciences as opposed to other areas. The 4.5 credits of non-STEM courses include a 1.5-credit introduction to academic writing and a 3-credit course that rolls the humanities, social sciences, and the arts into a single offering.

William Pannapacker, professor of English at Hope College and faculty director of the GLCA collaborative, has published a number of useful pieces on the digital liberal arts in The Chronicle of Higher Education. See http://chronicle.com/article/No-More-Digitally-Challenged/143079 and http://chronicle.com/article/Stop-Calling-It-Digital/137325.

In addition to breadth and higher-order thinking, the other goals that Freake mapped were civic/global responsibility (common to 6 institutions), ethics (6), lifelong learning (5), literacy and communication (5), multicultural skills (5), Chinese culture (3), teamwork (3), healthy lifestyle (3), quantitative skills (2), and information literacy (2).