I attended a Polytechnic State College (California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, to be specific), so what I say next might surprise you.
I had a broad and liberal education. I took physics and fiction, history, philosophy, and economics. Some of these were my all-time favorite courses even though I was a biology major. I regret that I did not take a poetry course.
Because of this, I wince when I hear that people say statements such as, “All higher education needs to do is focus on technical/career preparation for the job,” at the expense of a liberal education. I am puzzled when all the pundits claim our graduates will have seven or eight different jobs in the future, jobs that we don’t even know how to currently describe!
America’s education worked in the past precisely because it was not as narrowly-defined, prescriptive and technical as either the European or Asian models. America’s education allowed our students to explore, to try ideas (and majors) out, to reason, to sample many different subjects, to conceive and to create. There are many things within higher education that we should change and/or refresh, but losing a liberal education is not one of them.
There is so much we want our college graduates to know and do, such as:
- How to find and access knowledge (of course!)
- How to learn
- How to analyze data
- How to reason
- How to make a scientific argument
- How to recognize the interconnectivity of life and the world we live in
- How to compare and contrast belief sets
- How to experiment
- How to communicate
- How to understand our own and others’ motives and choices, and finally,
- How to live with a curious, open-ended attitude in a world of complexity with enough intellectual, emotional and hands-on skills to navigate it, come what may.
A narrow, job-training focus won’t provide our graduates with what they need to know to succeed.
Let us not become limited and limiting in an age when all of human knowledge is accessible and the future is limitless. Let’s preserve a broad general education. Update it. Focus on problem-solving and integration, but keep it.
Our democracy and national well-being depends upon it. So do we all.