Relationship With Professional Education
Liberal education and professional education have often been seen as divergent. German universities moved towards more professional teaching in the nineteenth century, and unlike American students, who still pursued a liberal education, students elsewhere started to take professional courses in the first or second year of study. In the early twentieth century, American liberal arts colleges still required students to pursue a common curriculum, whereas public universities allowed a student to move on to more pragmatic courses after having taken general education courses for the first two years of study. As an emphasis on specialized knowledge grew in the middle of the century, colleges began to adjust the proportion of required general education courses to those required for a particular major.
As University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum points out, standardized testing has placed more emphasis on honing technical knowledge, and its quantitative, multiple-choice nature prompts rote learning in the classroom. At the same time, humanistic concepts such as imagination and critical thinking, which cannot be tested by such methods, are disappearing from college curricula.
Thirty percent of college graduates in the United States are likely to eventually work in jobs that do not exist yet. Proponents of a liberal education therefore argue that a postsecondary education must prepare students for an increasingly complex labor market. Rather than provide narrowly designed technical courses, a liberal education would foster critical thinking and analytical skills that allow the student to adapt to a rapidly changing workforce. The movement towards career-oriented courses within a liberal education has begun at places like Dartmouth College, where a journalism course combines lessons on writing style with reading and analyzing historical journalism. An American survey of CEOs published in 1997 revealed that employers were more focused on the long-term outcomes of education, such as adaptability, than college students and their parents, who were more concerned with the short-term outcomes of getting a job.
Read more about this topic: Liberal Education
Famous quotes containing the words professional education, relationship with, relationship, professional and/or education:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“The belief that there are final and immutable answers, and that the professional expert has them, is one that mothers and professionals tend to reinforce in each other. They both have a need to believe it. They both seem to agree, too, that if the professional’s prescription doesn’t work it is probably because of the mother’s inadequacy.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)