Liberal Arts Education Should Matter Now, More Than Ever

If you do a Google search about STEM education,(science technology engineering and math,) you come up with over 69 million entries. It has become the educational mantra of our times.

Yet if one looks at the workforce, looks at the jobs of the future, looks at the needs business have and listen to the CEOs, we find that these STEM skills, while important, have become overrated and out of all proportion to our future.

I suppose everything in cyclical and the liberal arts, which certainly had its day, has gone into remission as the central pursuit of college students. It shouldn't have. Its focus on curiosity, the ongoing pursuit of knowledge, creativity, and what it means to be a good human being, make it essential if any of us are going to survive into the second half of the 21st century and beyond.

Forbes contributor George Anders looks at this in You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a "Useless" Liberal Arts Education.

My conversation with George Anders:

The Math Myth

If we examine why so many students don’t graduate High School, we find that failure to succeed at High School math is often at the core of the problem. Yet we are told almost every day that STEM and that math are the keys to the kingdom of success in the 21st Century.

The fact is that most jobs, even very good ones, don't require the geometry, the algebra, the trigonometry that we are forced to lean in High School. What they do require is a hi
gh degree of numeric literacy, critical and quantitative thinking and the ability to fully understand computation.

That’s not what we are teaching. Math Professor Andrew Hacker, took on this subject back in 2012 in a NY Times op ed pieces and the controversy hasn’t stopped.

Now he’s out with a book entitled The Math Myth: And Other STEM Delusions.

My conversation with Andrew Hacker

In Defense of Liberal Education

The rate of voter participation in America continues to decline. Yes, some of it is our politics today. But another part of it just may be a failure to embrace the true education for citizenship.

And it’s no wonder. Some of the fundamental ideas of what it means to be a citizen; the ability to reason, to analyze, and to articulate those views, has gone into remission.

In our education today, we are obsessed with what is call STEM. Science Technology, Engineering and Math. All very important. But Lost in this obsession is Writing, History, Rhetoric, and the Arts.

State Governors are defunding liberal arts programs in state universities, the President is putting down Art History, and educational institutions from K-12 to our universities, are responding to the pressures.

There seems to be no regard for the fact that today’s technology will be tomorrows nostalgia and the ability to learn, think and write is forever.

Taking up this cause of liberal education is Fareed Zakaria in his new book In Defense of a Liberal Education.

He is one of our premiere foreign policy analysts, the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN and a columnist for the Washington Post.

My conversation with Fareed Zakaria: