The Liberal Arts and Career Education: A Look at the Past and the Future. Monograph on Career Education Series

• Main Author: Olson, Paul A
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: 01.06.1975
• Subjects: Career Education; Educational History; Educational Needs; Educational Philosophy; Higher Education; Liberal Arts

The monograph provides a historical perspective on the role that liberal arts has played in preparing individuals for careers and examines the role it will have to play if the liberal arts are to remain a meaningful form of education. The argument has four parts. First, it examines recent definitions of career education as an education calculated to ask with particular clarity what a person's vocational and life purposes are. Second, it examines the history of liberal education from the twelfth through the eighteenth centuries as an education also calculated to refine people's vocational skills and shape their life purposes. Third, it examines deviant nineteenth century traditions which argue for the separation of education from the formation of vocational or life purposes in the interest of a pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Fourth, it displays how the older marketplace version of liberal education also persisted through the nineteenth century up to today and how effective modern versions of this sort of education have emerged which emphasize that a liberal arts education must be open to the real world. It concludes that the new career education and a reformed liberal arts study can and must support one another. (Author)