Liberal arts education

Of course, my task here is to help universities, one in particular, in their efforts to construct a general education program. One of the challenges is the "why" question--why a liberal arts education?

First, people don't ask why questions--they do what they are expected or told to do. I taught a workshop and had faculty describe the aims of their general ed courses and then a sentence on the significance of these aims to their students (the why?). The response of the faculty was--the significance question was not on the form, and I got the impression that they were not used to explaining to the students why this was important--translating for them the importance of what was being requested in classes. I think in an American context we are always asking this question--is this because we are utilitarian rather than authority driven? But then I always ask this question of faculty research and even though they struggle with articulating significance of their research questions, this is never questioned and in fact it is essential to building an argument for almost anything. In fact it seems like it would be essential to building a case for a course being in the GE core. I'm still processing this.


Talking with American faculty who teach at my university, they say that structure and purpose of the university system here is to train workers for employment in Hong Kong (not the world). In the past, all programs and their size had to be tied to local employment needs. And allowed numbers of majors in a programs were tied to employment demands in that particular area. This is changing because they find that students don't end up doing what they are trained to do (no surprise there). But this history means that the PURPOSE of higher education--the "why" of learning something doesn't have an ideology beyond employment. And the government told you what you needed. What is they "why" of such a liberal arts education? Certainly it is tied to creating life-long learners who can change careers by learning to learn. But also it has always included a sense of creating global citizens, adults who can contribute to civil society and the good of the whole. Tony Diekema talked about Calvin College and other such denominational colleges taking the role of doing the "heavy lifting" when it comes to intellectual thought for the church. Hong Kong needs the universities to take on the role of doing the heavy lifting when it comes to educating for citizenship. The vision of higher education has been so narrow that their imagination has been limited and thus their impact limited. How do you break open the possibilities?

And is this the result of colonialism or is it indigenous cultural values?