Reserve a place of pride for liberal arts courses
Studies have proved that such an education offers steady protection in the face of a changeable job marketplace
With the wide range of courses available at the undergraduate level these days, many students and parents are confused. About two decades ago, the preferred professions were engineering, medicine, banking or law. Most times, parents made these choices for their children. That is not true any longer. Liberal arts have emerged as the stream of choice in the last few years. We must ensure that our undergraduate education doesn’t produce trained technicians who are lessthan-educated in the broader sense of education. Undergraduate education must carry out some important responsibilities. It must create creative, critical and principled minds, which can balance multiple opinions and beliefs and make sound value judgments.
The globalised world is moving towards a knowledge economy and adopting workplace reforms and knowledge-driven occupations. Undergraduate education must be in sync with this. The way we teach domain specific knowledge must change too. We must sharpen our focus on learning outcomes, transferable skills and an interdisciplinary context so that the knowledge that is delivered to the students is not only technical, but also substantive. Eminent institutions such as Harvard and Stanford reserve a place of pride for their liberal arts programmes. Institutions in the US have taken the lead in launching programmes in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines that combine features of liberal arts education by including courses in humanities and social sciences in their curriculum as well as other attributes of the liberal arts model, such as a focus on imparting “essential skills”.
In India, the expression ‘liberal arts education’ is at times used incorrectly to refer to any or all of the performing-visual fine arts. At other times, it is used to mean programmes in humanities and social sciences. Although all of these subjects feature as areas of study in liberal arts programmes, a curriculum that focuses on one discipline alone, such as an honours degree curriculum, does not qualify as liberal arts education. A liberal arts programme, by definition, is multidisciplinary in nature. The apprehension that liberal arts graduates may fall behind graduates with technical training in respect of their earning potential and long-term career advancement does not have a factual basis. Employers prefer to hold on to a workforce with transferable skills, rather than continually reinvest in the human resource to top up individual talents. Many studies have proved that a liberal arts education provides a safety net of assignable skills that offer steady protection in the face of a changeable job marketplace.