liberal education and the student's personal response

Most students are imprisoned to the mindset of only memorizing facts, theories and principles and only having the purpose of applying them for purely academics, to get a high score in an exam and to pass a course. But when the examination is over and a course is already passed, they still have the question, “what are these for?” So as a consequence, those who do not know the true significance and value of what they had memorized, tend to dispose of them. This already shows a weakness of liberal education. According to Simpson, any education that matters is liberal. But still, liberal education’s effectiveness depends on what the student does with it or the way it is treated.
A student is short-cutting himself by short-cutting humanities, as stated by Cousins. To avoid this, students must change first their outlook towards the sciences and humanities. I remember what John Ciardi said in his article, Another School Year- What for. He said that if one is not kept in touch with what the best human minds have thought or one does not have a time to have a basic look for philosophy; the community of the fine arts and for that lesson of man’s development we call history, then one has no business being in college. The real business in college is not only to train students but also to make them completely humans by nourishing their physical, intellectual, spiritual, moral and social aspects.

Liberal education is defined by the attitude of the mind towards the knowledge the mind explores and creates according to Giamatti. It means that liberal education’s effectiveness mainly depends on one’s outlook and attitude towards learning. If they treat the information they have stored as useless after an examination is over, as if they were unnecessary files that are needed to be thrown out to the bin, then that’s the way they insensitively define liberal education. And that’s not the way it should be.

If one’s outlook is successfully changed, the next thing to do is to act. Personal efforts are needed for liberal education to be effective. It is just like saying, anyone cannot help you if you do not help yourself first. One of these self-helping efforts is learning by heart, not by force. Another way of saying is learning with eagerness and motivation instead of considering it as just a mere requirement to pass and to graduate.

If they change their outlooks and this is what they do, then they can say that they have gone through college with making contact instead of college has gone through them. Thus, liberal education can be made effective.