SEPTEMBER 10, 2017: DAILY SUN
Education makes a person perfect nourishing all human instincts and values. The aim of education should be the development of humane, moral and ethical values upholding supremacy of humanity over any type of prejudice. As a rational being humankind must give priority to upholding moral and ethical values at any cost without which there might be no difference between humankind and the wild animals.
A liberal education or liberal arts that consist of academic subjects like history, philosophy, literature, social sciences is a system or course of education suitable for the cultivation of a free human being who are free from provincialism, dogma, preconception, and ideology. They are deeply conscious of their opinions and judgments, reflective of their actions and aware of their place in the social and natural worlds. People who are liberally educated are trained to think for themselves rather than conform to higher authorities and big influences. According to the Association of American Colleges and Universities liberal education is “a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a stronger sense of values, ethics, and civic engagement characterised by challenging encounters with important issues, and more a way of studying than a specific course or field of study”. Usually we observe liberal education as very much global and pluralistic in scope. It can include a general education curriculum which provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and also can include learning strategies in addition to in-depth study in at least one academic area.
In his best selling book, titled “In Defense of Liberal Education” Fareed Zakaria, CNN host and best-selling author, the Washington Post columnist, argues favouring liberal education for a renewed commitment to the world’s most valuable educational tradition. According to him the liberal arts are under attack. Recently the governors of Texas, Florida, and North Carolina in the United States have announced that they will not spend taxpayer’ money subsidising the liberal arts. Former US president Barack Obama urged students during his second term in power to keep in mind that technical training could be more valuable than a degree in art history. Fareed Zakaria described that turning away from the liberal arts is a mistake.
A professional and vocational education prepares students for their careers. But a liberal education prepares students to utilise their leisure time properly navigating internal and external conflicts in life being self-conscious and aware of their actions and motivations. In this way an individual become more considerate for other beliefs and cultures. According to James Engel, the author of The Value of a Liberal Arts Education, “A liberal education provides the framework for an educated and thoughtful citizen.”
In today’s ICT-based world human civilization has reached at the highest pick of materialistic development with thriving innovation, invention and discoveries. People are running after maximisation of capital and multidimensional consumption. Demand is becoming unlimited and at the same time the demand and supply of various elements of physical comfort growing day by day. But basic human instinct moral and ethical values are disappearing from the society very sharply which is really very much alarming.
But why all of those are happening? Both hard labour and talent is the driving force of human civilisation. In order to fulfill our consumerist and materialistic demand we are focusing on job oriented education. In order to develop critical thinking for nourishing human values we need a certain number of philosophers and we should keep in mind that it is important to have a certain number of people who study history. But we are not currently creating a lot of jobs in those areas. But now they are going back to a college of technology to get a life skill to get a job. People have become very much pragmatic and materialistic. The difference between man and machine is reducing sharply. Artificial intelligence is going to replace human intelligence in the near future which could be disastrous for the existence of human civilisation as Stephen hawking expressed his great concern in this regard.
If we look into the history of educating and job of many countries, we would find that most of the meritorious student would prefer the subjects, like history, philosophy, literature and various social studies. But at present students are preferring job oriented, professional and vocational subjects.
Therefore, we are not getting a social scientists who could show the path to the welfare of the society, a political scientist who could redefine statesmanship and leadership, a philosopher who could interpret our faith and could redefine the meaning of life, a historian who could help us to learn lessons from the history so that we could take any crucial decision perfectly for the betterment of the society as well as for the whole mankind. Literature teaches us both history and humanity, but students are very much reluctant to study those subjects institutionally and personally.
Unfortunately most of the talents are utilising their brain, talents and wisdom just by learning programming language, coding, engineering and many other materialistic research and development. But as a rational being we must give more emphasis on various humanitarian and abstract faculties of human mind. We must keep in mind that human being is not a machine; they are the greatest creature on earth.
A liberal education teaches us how to write, how to speak our mind, and how to learn immensely valuable tools no matter what is our profession. In order to make our technical and vocational education more interesting, colourful, more meaningful, more humane we must go for liberal education. Technology and globalisation are actually making these skills even more valuable as routine mechanical and even computing tasks can be done by machines or workers in low-wage countries. More than just a path to a career, a liberal education is an exercise in freedom. Above all, it is an expression of the most basic urge of the human spirit to learn.
© Copyright: Reserved by the writer (Noore Alam Siddiqui)
