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Call it “the death of the humanities.” Over the last decade or so, majors in English and history are down by a third and humanities enrollment overall is down by almost a fifth. Now an initiative is working to revive liberal arts as a key part of the college experience. Jeffrey Brown reports from Purdue University for our series, Rethinking College.
This perception that community colleges are more oriented toward the trades than the liberal arts is still common, but it’s also outdated and false. The primary function of community colleges in our society has been steadily shifting away from technical and pre-professional education and toward liberal education for some time now. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the number of students who completed associate degrees in the liberal arts and humanities at community colleges has reliably…
College is a unique time in your life to discover just how much your mind can do. Capacities like an ear for poetry, a grasp of geometry or a keen moral imagination may not pay off financially (though you never know), but they are part of who you are. That makes them worth cultivating. Doing so requires a community of teachers and fellow learners. Above all, it requires time — time to allow your mind to branch out, grow and blossom…
Colleges need more programs where students of different backgrounds can wrestle together with the big questions posed by the humanities…
In the classroom, students cluster around desks in small groups, considering what Socrates is looking for when he asks Meno, as Plato describes in one of his dialogues, what the very being of virtue is, rather than its various manifestations. What is the thing in itself? The students wonder along with Meno, investigating what they think it means to be a good person while testing the opinions of their peers, guided by Socrates’ learning model of questions and dialogue. This is the sort of exploration you’ll find in this classroom, which is not on the campus of a private liberal arts college in New England but deep in the heart of Texas at Austin Community College (ACC)…
"Confronting these questions is not a luxury; it’s a necessity."
How one community college system discarded a cookie-cutter approach to education.
At Austin Community College (ACC), Ted Hadzi-Antich Jr. leads students in a course called Great Questions. It’s a humanities-based, student-centered discussion class, where classic texts are connected with the students' modern lives.
The Great Questions Foundation seeks to promote liberal education and core-text and discussion-based learning at the community college through supporting faculty development and course redesign and helping to establish and support core-text programs and courses.
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