Some schools will focus on the former while others highlight the latter. Those skills will never be replaced by employment trends or technological change.Ĭhristian liberal arts education exists to prepare students who are well-versed in those areas of learning that make us human and to integrate those studies with that knowledge of the Gospel that makes life truly worth living. #To be barked by the liberas how toHowever, a thoroughgoing liberal arts education that focuses on the whole student and the broader world can prepare graduates for career changes and technological changes by teaching them how to learn, how to adapt, and how to respond to the world around them. #To be barked by the liberas softwareThe information and the skills they provide are only as up-to-date as the last software update. #To be barked by the liberas professionalProfessional degrees alone cannot adequately prepare students for such continual change. To the detriment of our society, without the liberal arts we graduate legions of uneducated craftsmen, properly credentialed and improperly schooled.Įmployment specialists tell us that as the millennial generation ages, their profitable work years will be marked by repeated career, not job but career, changes, as many as five or six by some estimates. Moreover, in an age of ever-greater occupational specialization, we risk creating generations of one-dimensional automatons, students highly skilled in their chosen fields, and yet detached from the world around them. The liberal arts equip students to see the world and engage it in a meaningful fashion, regardless of their major. In the arts they find beauty and the words to express it. In ethics students begin to formulate their own value system based on a knowledge of the broader world rather than their narrow opinion. In philosophy they are taught how to think, not just what to think. In the great books they encounter people and places that inspire and challenge them to be better or different. The liberal arts introduce students to things that have changed the course of history, those ideas that transcend time and place, those concepts that shape the soul. While professional studies prepare the student to make a living, the liberal arts prepare the student for living. A true educational experience must be about more than the transferal of information. While some may argue that a liberal arts education is irrelevant, a distraction from more important studies that drive earning potential, Christian educators rightly argue to the contrary. A Christian liberal arts education provides the tools needed to answer that challenge. All along Christians have struggled with how to reconcile their faith with what the world calls knowledge. In the nearly two thousand years since Jesus’ day, those changes and challenges have accelerated. Jesus’ contemporaries were bombarded by secular thinking and challenges to the faith of their fathers. The Greeks, however, changed the way the world thought about the world. Various world powers had come, gone and had long since been forgotten. In the centuries between Moses and Jesus the world took many steps forward. Yet, Jesus chose to say that we are to love the Lord “with all mind.” God’s people are to love the Lord with their entire being, including the mind. Moses wrote, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Interestingly he summarized the content of the Law by expounding upon Moses’ intent. Jesus drew these words from the Law itself. When the Pharisees challenged Jesus on the meaning of the Law, Jesus responded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). It would seem that few understand the true value of a well-rounded Christian education. Some act as though my profession represents a quaint reminder of by-gone eras, an intellectual Mayberry forever trapped in the “good ol’ days.” Others assume that my vocation entails little more than rehashing tired Sunday School lessons with a healthy dose of mental steroids. When people learn that I am a professor at a Christian college their responses are varied.
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