Lafayette College, with strong programs in engineering and the liberal arts, requires sophomore students to enroll in a “VaST” (Values and Science/Technology) course. These courses incorporate approaches from the engineering viewpoint and ideas from the social sciences and humanities. As a result of taking a VaST course, students should be better able to see and understand engineering and scien...

This paper first traces the historical and cultural roots of liberal learning in East Asian (Confucian) and Western traditions to show how they resemble each other and where they depart. It argues that despite the strikingly different legacies, liberal arts education in both East Asia and the West faces increasingly the same challenges as a result of globalization. In a context of new social fo...

With increased emphasis on encouraging students to pursue degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), there is a general concern that society is losing the benefits associated with liberal arts education. One possible approach to achieving the benefits of higher paying STEM degrees along with the social benefits of liberal arts training is to encourage double majoring among co...

Astonishingly, almost 25 years after the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” the clarion call for a radical overhaul of America’s education system, our Nation continues to find its students performing poorly on international exams in mathematics and sciences. In the spring of 2007, the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21 Century published the mos...

An undergraduate education in liberal arts is viewed by many, especially in North America, as a desirable preparation for medical school. In countries where such a pre-medicine curriculum is not available, an introduction of 'humanities in medicine' has recently been emphasized. Few, however, has entertained the idea that Medicine already possesses many elements of a liberal arts education. In ...

E arly in the fifteenth century, a figure known as La Pittura—literally, “the picture”—began to appear in Italian art (Fig. 280). As art historian Mary D. Garrard has noted, the emergence of the figure of La Pittura, the personification of painting, could be said to announce the cultural arrival of painting as an art. In the Middle Ages, painting was never included among the liberal arts—those ...