Liberal Arts college
In the United States, a liberal arts college refers to an institution of higher learning which exclusively or mainly grants undergraduate degrees, such as the Bachelor of Arts (B. A.) and Bachelor of Sciences (B. S.), and which emphasizes a traditional general education rather than directly career-oriented specialties.
A university, in contrast, has one (or more) undergraduate "colleges," but also has "graduate schools" which require an undergraduate degree for entrance. A university might have a medical school, a law school, a business school, possibly schools of agriculture, music, veterinary medicine, divinity, etc.
The phrase "liberal" does not, of course, refer to political liberalism; if anything, the liberal arts somewhat aligned with traditional educational values and thus with political conservatism.
The phrase "liberal arts" was coined in classical times. It traditionally included the "trivium" of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the "quadrivium" of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. One dictionary definition of "liberal arts" is:
- Academic disciplines, such as languages, literature, history, philosophy, mathematics, and science, that provide information of general cultural concern.[1]
One liberal arts college expresses its modern meaning thus:
- A successful undergraduate education should primarily develop the essential skills of writing, researching, articulating and defending ideas, and working with others—the skills that prepare graduates for leadership in most any career.[2]
Famous liberal arts colleges include Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Wellesley, Middlebury, Carleton, Bowdoin, Pomona, Haverford, and Davidson.[3] The colleges of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC)[4] are called the "little Ivies" and are sometimes seen analogous to the universities of the Ivy League. Most of them were historically men's colleges. The "Seven Sisters," another famous group, were historically women's liberal arts colleges; of the original seven, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Barnard remain women's colleges; Wellesley and Vassar are coeducational; and Radcliffe no longer exists as an undergraduate college.[5]
St. John's College[6], with campuses in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a very unusual example of the liberal arts tradition. St. John's follows a "great books" curriculum, in which the entire course of study is based on the direct study of original source texts. Students literally learn geometry from Euclid's Elements, physics from Galileo's Two New Sciences, and political science from The Federalist papers. The works in the reading list[7] are read in their entirety. (The instructional environment ensures that students do emerge with an up-to-date understanding of scientific and other topics).
References
- ↑ Liberal arts, American Heritage Dictionary online
- ↑ Williams College: Academics, Williams College website
- ↑ Liberal Arts Colleges: Top Schools, U. S. News and World Report]
- ↑ NESCAC: Amherst, Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Hamilton, Middlebury, Trinity, Tufts, Wesleyan, Williams
- ↑ The Seven Sisters, Mount Holyoke's website
- ↑ Not to be confused with several other institutions of higher learning with similar names, such as St. John's University in New York. St. John's College is nominally a very venerable institution, founded in 1696, but not considered a "colonial college" because it was not chartered until 1784. However, it came close to closing in the 1930s and the present institution really dates back to the founding of the "new program" in 1937.
- ↑ Reading list, St. John's college
