A liberal education ensures that a person becomes more than a specialist or technician. - file

It is quite fashionable for the new student just entering university to have the view that making lots of money is the imperative of education and so begins to focus on what he or she is to do, rather than who he or she is to become. A fixation on specialisation as the key to this end may cause that student to miss out on a real education. It may turn out that study gets in the way of education.

For the typical college student, a speciality such as accounting, computing, economics or marketing is pretty straightforward, but why bother with additional courses in literature, history, philosophy, psychology, etc.?

The challenge of liberal education

Seeing beyond mere specialisation is the challenge of liberal education. The view that the education process should develop the person not just as a businessman, farmer or physician - but as a human being - is easily sidelined, especially in the context of globalisation and in the case of Jamaica with the urgent need for belt-tightening measures even in education. For example, the prime minister just announced that the interest rate charged by the Student Loan Bureau to students in health and agriculture will be cut from 12 to four per cent. This is not surprising as resources are scarce and 'critical' areas must come first.

In lean times, the humanities come into question and so areas like languages, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion are usually hardest hit. The 'idealistic' notion that critical thinking, civics and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning - areas the humanities especially develop - are necessary for effective participation in a free democracy regardless of career choice, becomes sidelined for the 'urgent' and the 'now'.

And yet, the purpose of education must be to prepare the student to think, to adapt, to be creative, especially knowing that job skills learnt today soon become irrelevant. A liberal education is vital. A liberal education ensures that a person becomes more than a specialist or technician. It is education that takes the long-range view and so concentrates on what shapes a person's understanding and values, rather than on what he can use in one or two of the changing roles he might later play.

Because, by our very nature, human beings desire to know, the first task of liberal education is to fan the spark and ignite natural inquisitiveness. Arthur Holmes, in one of my favourite books on education, The Idea of a Christian College, explains that if the mind is to be formed, the imagination stretched, the vision enlarged, the intellectual powers sharpened, then courses in reading and writing are mandatory. With reading, he explains, comes the gaining of input, the fertilisation of imagination, conceptualisation, and evaluation. To write trains one to become articulate, to express, to expound, to argue, to explore relationships, to have a sense of the whole.

Friendships, marriage, family, work, recreation, political involvement, social action, technology, etc, require understanding and right values. These all need reflection informed not only by the natural and social sciences, but also by the insight and sensitivity about human affairs which the humanities cultivate.

Develop the human being

So values and facts must be taught together. The student must be exposed to ethics, to social problems, to aesthetics and to the logical structure of value judgments.

In the end, it is liberal education, steeped in the thinking that education should develop the human being as an entire person, that is best able to produce an educated person.

The educated person is widely read and alert to the issues of the day. He or she continues to read and to grow, aware that however large the circumference of his or her knowledge, just as large are the borders of his or her ignorance.

Dr Livingston Smith is associate professor in the Arts and Humanities Department of the University College of the Cayman Islands. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.