What is Liberal Education?

Liberal Education is an approach to learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity, and change. It provides students with broad knowledge of the wider world (e.g. science, culture, and society) as well as in-depth study in a specific area of interest. A liberal education helps students develop a sense of social responsibility, as well as strong and transferable intellectual and practical skills such as communication, analytical and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings. The broad goals of liberal education have been enduring even as the courses and requirements that comprise a liberal education have changed over the years. Today, a liberal education usually includes a general education curriculum that provides broad learning in multiple disciplines and ways of knowing, along with more in-depth study in a major.

Essential Learning Outcomes

AAC&U's LEAP Campaign has defined a robust set of "Essential Learning Outcomes" that students develop during an excellent contemporary liberal education. Beginning in school, and continuing at successively higher levels across their college studies, students should prepare for twenty-first-century challenges by gaining all these outcomes. These outcomes prepare students both for work and for effective citizenship. For more information, see AAC&U's "economic case" on outcomes for professional success and "civic case" for information about outcomes for effective citizenship.

Often-Confused Terms
Liberal education Liberal Education is an approach to learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity, and change. It provides students with broad knowledge of the wider world (e.g., science, culture, and society) as well as in-depth study in a specific area of interest. A liberal education helps students develop a sense of social responsibility, as well as strong and transferable intellectual and practical skills such as communication, analytical and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings. Liberal arts Specific disciplines (the humanities, social sciences, and sciences). Liberal arts colleges A particular institutional typeoften small, often residentialthat facilitates close interaction between faculty and students, and has a strong focus on liberal arts disciplines.

Artes Liberales Historically, the basis for the modern liberal arts; the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) and the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric). General Education General Education: The part of a liberal education curriculum shared by all students. It provides broad learning in liberal arts and science disciplines, and forms the basis for developing important intellectual, civic, and practical capacities. General education can take many forms, and increasingly includes introductory, advanced, and integrative forms of learning.

The Changing Nature of Liberal Education

Liberal Education in the Twentieth Century intellectual and personal development an option for the fortunate

Liberal Education in the Twenty-First Century

What

intellectual and personal development a necessity for all students essential for success in a global economy and for informed citizenship through studies that emphasize the essential learning outcomes across the entire educational continuum from school through collegeat progressively higher levels of achievement (recommended) all schools, community colleges, colleges, and universities, as well as across all fields of study (recommended)

How

viewed as nonvocational through studies in arts and sciences disciplines (the major) and/or through general education in the initial years of college

Where

liberal arts colleges or colleges of arts and sciences in larger institutions

Adapted from College Learning for the New Global Century, Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2007, page 18, figure 5.

More on Liberal Education

In Historical Perspectives
"Those persons, whom nature has endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens; and . . . they should be called to that charge without regard to wealth, birth or other accidental condition or circumstance." --Thomas Jefferson, 1779 In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Morrill Act to set up a system of public colleges throughout the United States. The purpose of these land-grant colleges was, in part, to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life (emphasis added). "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education." --Woodrow Wilson, 1909 Education is by far the biggest and the most hopeful of the Nations enterprises. Long ago our people recognized that education for all is not only democracys obligation but its necessity. Education is the foundation of democratic liberties. Without an educated citizenry alert to preserve and extend freedom, it would not long endure. -- Truman Commission on Higher Education, 1947 (see "Higher Education for Democracy" for more details). "Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental." --W.E.B. DuBois, 1949 "When we ask about the relationship of a liberal education to citizenship, we are asking a question with a long history in the Western philosophical tradition. We are drawing on Socrates' concept of 'the examined life,' on Aristotle's notions of reflective citizenship, and above all on Greek and Roman Stoic notions of an education that is 'liberal' in that it liberates the mind from bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world." --Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, 1998

In the Twenty-first Century

"Education serves democracy best when it prepares us for just the kinds of questions we face now: questions about a wider world, about our own values, and about difficult choices we must make both as human beings and citizens. . . . The approach to higher learning that best serves individuals, our globally engaged democracy and an innovating economy is liberal education." --AAC&U Board of Directors, 2002 "The only education that prepares us for change is a liberal education. In periods of change, narrow specialization condemns us to inflexibility--precisely what we do not need. We need the flexible intellectual tools to be problem solvers, to be able to continue learning over time." --David Kearns, Xerox, 2002

"This approach to liberal education--already visible on many campuses--erases the artificial distinctions between studies deemed liberal (interpreted to mean that they are not related to job training) and those called practical (which are assumed to be). A liberal education is a practical education because it develops just those capacities needed by every thinking adult: analytical skills, effective communication, practical intelligence, ethical judgment, and social responsibility." --Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, AAC&U, 2002 "This division has not always existed. Both education and engineering have deep roots in our history as a nation. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, each in his own way, recognized that discovery and innovation are the twin pillars of a democratic society." --Joseph Bordogna, NSF, 2003 "Trends in post secondary education are moving in a very different direction. Not that there has been a policy debate about denying liberal education to some fraction of the college population. Rather, . . . liberal education [has moved] off the policy and public radar screen altogether." --Carol Schneider, Declining by Degrees, 2005

Statement on Liberal Learning

Read the Statement on Liberal Learning approved by the AAC&U board of directors (1998).

Other Publications on Liberal Education

College Learning for the New Global Century (LEAP Report) Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College Practicing Liberal Education