Higher education should be equipping students to answer these four questions:
What is worth knowing?
What is worth doing?
What makes for a good human life?
What are my responsibilities to other people?
College is not the only place in which answers to these questions can develop, but it is an important place. And siloed, specialized training in a discipline—any discipline—will answer none of them.
Liberal arts training, done well, appreciates and exposes students to the many different forms that good thinking takes, that truth takes, and that evidence takes. It nurtures a kind of wise appreciation of the complexity of the world and it’s problems. It makes clear to students that not everything is a nail, awaiting their hammer.
Specialized training can teach that. But we also need people capable of recognizing big problems and articulating them in a way that can move scholarly disciplines and professional practices in a whole new direction. I’m pretty sure that specialized training will not teach that...continue reading.
-- Barry Schwartz
