Liberal Arts "Education"

I have been annoyed lately about the fact that a liberal arts education has, like so many other things, become simply a means to an end. So many employers these days like to see that a potential future employee is well rounded and is able to learn about many different things. I can certainly respect this outlook on the part of employers, but it bothers me that a liberal arts education has become so commonplace that it really means almost nothing now.

Now that a liberal arts education is almost expected from many employers and so many liberal arts colleges and university exist, the education itself seems to be much less impressive. Sure, we all still have to take a history class and a math class and a science class and an english class no matter what we majored in, but did anyone actually learn anything in those classes? It seems like the college curricula are now set up so that people can take the required classes, get through it with a descent grade, and still not really learn anything. What really bothers me about this is that people who do this get to claim they got the same liberal arts education that I did when, in fact, they didn't. I took all those classes and committed myself to getting as much out of them as I could. I actually did get a liberal arts education whereas many other people just get to say they did.

It also bothers me that we call the typical college education, an education. I know that this is being picky and most people will probably disagree with me, but this is my blog, not yours. :) What bothers me about the typical college experience being called an "education" is that it seems like the typical experience is really more of "technical training" than it is an "education."

Again, I know this is nit picking, but it seems an important distinction to me. When I think of "education" I think of people learning about something for the sake of learning about it rather than to meet some other end. The way college education is treated these days seems to be much more along the lines of technical training. People come out of college with a very specific set of knowledge based on what they want to do after graduation having either never really learned or at least not really caring about the other things they encountered during their education.

For the record, I have absolutely no idea what could or should be done to fix what I see as a problem with this terminology and such. I simply get annoyed about the way life is and the fact that nothing ever works out in an ideal manner. So many good ideas exist out in the world (like liberal arts education…….and communism) that never actually work in the real world (at least not long-term) because people find ways to corrupt everything good. Hmmm, this could probably move into being a rant about idealism and the corrupt fallen world we live in, but that's a subject for another day.

Basically, I hate it that I actually got a very well-rounded, liberal arts education and someone else can graduate and claim the same thing, when really all they got was technical training for their specific field of interest. (fyi, I haven't actually read the book shown at the right, but I like the title)