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Engaging Today's Students with the Liberal Arts |
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Essays on Liberal Education Beloit College |
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The book project which culminated in the volume Ninety Percent Study and Ninety Percent Experience: Reflections on Liberal Arts Education began with an ACM grant received in the fall of 2003. The project team was composed of four faculty members who immediately began seeking essays from three groups: current students, alums and current faculty. We worked systematically with the alumni office to identify those alumni/ae who would be eager and able to write reflective essays about their liberal arts education. As for students, we ran a campus-wide contest from which we selected the five best essays from a pool of about twenty. We selected the faculty members ourselves from all three major divisions of study. The result is an anthology of essays about liberal arts education by writers ranging in age from under twenty to well over eighty years. The editor of the anthology organized the essays intuitively according to themes, as opposed for example to lumping all of the faculty, all of the alumni/ae, and all of the student essays under separate headings. The essays seemed in good part to be products of a conspiracy, for all of them in one way or another emphasized that liberal arts education had made them ravenously curious, incessantly creative, and habitually reflective and self-critical; it had helped them become clear writers and articulate citizens. Still, there were some differences in emphasis. The faculty members, for instance, tended to discuss how best to present the liberal arts, while the students were much more current-minded about its effects upon them now as young adults. Alums who were older said their education had helped them become wise; alums who were younger said it had helped them become autodidacts, capable of learning on their own, often a necessary condition in today's employment universe. Towards the end of the process of editing and producing, we decided to make the book pocket-sized for easy carrying-about and reading. We made the book a centerpiece of the 2004 Sophomore Retreat and are still mulling over future possibilities for its use. We plan to do something with it next fall in connection with our first-year students. We have lots of copies left and no end as yet of possibilities for future deployment. Tom McBride, Chair & Professor of English & Keefer Professor of Humanities
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