Real-World Value of Liberal Arts and General Education

Real-World Value of Liberal Arts and General Education
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Real-World Value of Liberal Arts and General Education
There is a widespread belief that the United States (U.S.) higher education is unsustainable, with the public rapidly losing confidence in the whole system. The false-crisis narrative is primarily fueled by politicians who want the mainstream community to believe that liberal arts and general education are obsolete and do not demonstrate practicality within everyday life. This positioning cultivates the image that liberal arts and general education are irrelevant – an idea that has resulted in removing humanities programs, particularly in public education centers. Liberal arts and general education are valuable to the contemporary community because they support the graduates’ employability, contribute to understanding and solving social problems, and develop the learner holistically to fit in society.
While technical competencies are vital for many jobs, employers are increasingly emphasizing human skills. Liberal arts and general education emphasize cultivating critical human skills, including creativity, collaboration, comfort with ambiguity, integrity, initiative, critical thinking, and communication. These human skills complement technical skills and cannot be replicated directly by contemporary technological tools (Kumar et al., 2022). Therefore, liberal arts and general education are relevant to the work environment as they encourage students to cultivate creativity as well as interdisciplinary thinking to address significant challenges.
Liberal arts and general education adapt to the local environment as well as social needs within America. It influences learning and directly relates to the contemporary American community’s real-world challenges. For example, liberal arts and general education contribute insights central to supporting educational content congruent with the country’s social development. In this capacity, the subject strengthens professional education that responds to the actual pr...