DO WE REALLY NEED THE LIBERAL ARTS TODAY? </p>
<p>Why, one participant at the meeting
asked, should we be grounding a curriculum in
enduring ideas and values when the corporate
ethos, as described by author Peter Drucker, is
abandon yesterday!? The simplest answer may be
the human need for connections. In a world of
constant change, humans need to make connections
between past and future, between their own
experiences and the world they live in; they need a
frame of reference. One participant cited Eastern
Europe today as an example of spiritual disorientation,
societies adrift between abandoned yesterdays
and unknown tomorrows, lacking any shared system
of values to provide direction. In the view of
meeting participants, higher education has a
responsibility to prevent such disorientation by
providing graduates with the capacity to manage
change and shape their own futures and that of
human society consistent with enduring and shared
values.</p>
<p>Todays graduates, over their lifetimes, will experience
change at an unprecedented pace. They will
have not one career but perhaps many. To cope
with this kind of change, they will need self-confidence
and a sense of purpose coupled with adaptability
and a capacity for continuous learning. A
familiarity with the body of knowledge and methods
of inquiry and discovery of the arts and sciences
and a capacity to integrate knowledge across
experience and discipline may have far more lasting
value in such a changing world than specialized
techniques and training, which can quickly become
outmoded.</p>
<p>The information revolution and economic liberalization
together have unleashed productivity and
spurred innovation, great benefits that create new
challenges for individuals. In an informationbased,
technology-driven economy, all workers are
expected to be problem-solvers and communicators;
they must be able to assess situations and
make judgments on the spot. In the world of the
Internet, anyone can be a publisher, and anything
can be published. Users, therefore, need to learn
to assess information critically; they must be able
to select, and to evaluate, skills a liberal education
is designed to develop.</p>
<p>A free market economy not only expands opportunity,
it also demands individual responsibility.
Individuals in the United States today are expected
to manage their own careers, their health care,
their retirement; they can no longer rely on lifetime
employment, social safety nets, and authoritative
expertise. They need to be able to acquire, assess
and make judgments based on complex information,
all competencies developed through liberal education.
U.S. campuses have been trying to create learning
and living environments for culturally and racially
diverse student populations for a generation. Today,
a global economy and information technology are
combining to create a world without borders. In
such a world, multicultural skills understanding
ones own culture and other cultures and being able
to communicate across differences of language, culture,
race, and religion will be critically important.
Understood in this context, liberal arts has
become the essential education for all people living
in a global, technology-driven society.