A glance at the current issue of "Peer Review":
Teaching the importance of a liberal education

Liberal education is undervalued, but graduate schools can help
change that, says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the
Association of American Colleges and Universities, which
publishes the journal.

"The 20th-century academy did not do a good job of helping the
public understand what a liberal education is all about," she
writes. "Too often, we insisted that liberal education was
valuable for its own sake, with the result that neither the
public nor, in many instances, our own graduates could explain
how liberal education mattered in the world at large."

While her organization and others remain committed to providing
"the advantages of a rigorous, public spirited, and
intellectually challenging liberal education to all college
students," she writes, those very ideas are coming under
increasing pressure from policy makers who "believe that liberal
education is a luxury rather than a necessity, and that the
right educational focus -- for most students and most of the
academy -- is career training and workforce development."

Graduate schools can help the next generation of faculty members
by offering courses that deal with liberal education as an
approach to undergraduate study, she says. Graduate students
should have the opportunity to explore how their disciplines
relate to society and to learn to teach intellectual skills.

"If liberal education is to survive this transitional period,"
she writes, "future faculty will need to leave graduate school
with a clear understanding of the larger educational
enterprise."

The article, "Changing Practices in Liberal Education: What
Future Faculty Need to Know," is online at
http://www.aacu-edu.org/peerreview/pr-sp04/pr-sp04feature1.cfm