Forbes – Thomas Ehrlich and Ernestine Fu
“These days, we often hear parents of prospective undergraduates ask why their children should bother with a liberal education. After all, they say, vocational fields like business and nursing are now a majority of all college majors. These parents want to be sure their children have a job on graduation, and they dismiss liberal learning as an optional extra on the road to being trained for work – not a necessity. We believe they are wrong. How do we define liberal learning? We mean three modes of thought – analytical thinking, multiple framing, and reflective exploration of meaning– along with the capacity to put them into practice, which we call practical reason. Naturally, college students should also gain knowledge and skills in a range of academic fields in the social sciences, the natural sciences, and the humanities. But here we focus on these key modes of thought and practical reason. Analytical thinking is the first mode, and it is needed to enable students to function effectively. Most entering college students require considerable help to gain the intellectual skills that analytic thinking entails. These skills play an important part not only in personal, social, and civic realms, but in vocational ones as well. Without clarity of thought and argument, without the ability to think critically and reason logically, people are captive to unexamined biases and unable to evaluate the validity of others’ claims or their own intuitions.”(more)