Liberal Education, And Paolo Freire

In Fareed Zakaria’s book in Defense of a Liberal Education, he debates that liberal education is more underestimated than it should be in today’s society. Zakaria presents an argument explaining the liberal strategies used to benefit an individual not only in a classroom but developing skills to help deliver intelligence for the real world. Zakaria counters the argument that liberal education is a frivolous decision made by today’s youth with little concern, for futuristic opportunities. Zakaria defends liberal education through explanations to excel by gaining knowledge, learning to think, and building leadership.

People begin their education from day one till the day they die. Therefore, every day, we always learn new things in different ways such as education, news, magazine, internet, etc. An ideologist, Paulo Freire, in his narrative essay, “The Banking Concept of Education,” present the modern concept of and approaches to education. Freire’s purpose is to compare the two educational systems, the “banking concept” and the “problem-posing concept”. Throughout his essay, he argues strongly to support his creative own and make his readers believe that problem-posing education is more efficient than the banking education.

Liberal arts and sciences differ in that it’s designed to understand human relationships to the social, cultural, and natural environment. In chapter three of the book, Zakaria hits on three of the ideas of a liberal education. To begin, he talks of the importance of learning how to think which is a critical skill in any field of higher education that a student pursues. His belief is that while a liberal education teaches one how to think, it does more so by teaching one how to write. Zakaria values “writing clearly, clearly and reasonably to be an invaluable skill.” The second advantage of a liberal education is that it teaches students how to speak. Zakaria believes that the ability to speak is just as important as writing clearly and with reason. He states this by saying “whether for public or private communication, the ability to articulate your thoughts clearly will prove to be a tremendous strength.” The third and possibly most influential strength of a liberal education is how it teaches students how to learn. Not only does it help students gain knowledge from studying but it helps students acquire knowledge on their own, for personal gain. Zakaria state that a liberal education helped him “how to read a book fast, search for new sources to find data, take notes and understand lectures.” These three values are continually stated in many articles or liberal education by both Zakaria and other professors who have wrote similar articles about a liberal

In the article The Liberal Arts Are Not Elitist written by Martha Nussbaum it was said that “Education is not just for citizenship. It prepares people for employment and for lives of rich significance.” That to me is what the goal of a liberal education is, to provide a basic knowledge in multiple areas of content such as: math, reading, writing, history, and science, with addition to preparing a person for global citizenship and to live a fulfilling life. To be a global citizen, means that the person needs to be aware of what is going on in the world around them, to contribute to society, understands how the world works, takes responsibility for their own actions and to be self-sufficient. I strongly believe to receive a true liberal

In William Cronon’s Only Connect, Cronon discusses what it means to be liberally educated and why it is a good thing. Cronon explains that he believes that liberal education helps human talent grow, therefore it states that he believes the main goals of getting a liberal education is freedom and growth.

I agree with the author because he makes some good points in the article stating that, "The disruptive potential of a liberal education is not so much that it has no practical use but that the end result for those who engage in its rigor is unpredictable". Which means that people can take this matter into three own hands and build something that can help the world in the future. As an example one of my classmates stated that people are using the liberal arts to help design something to help us win a war. Also I think the author has a point about how we should let the children learn what they want to learn and not always

A Liberal Arts education has helped people to lead a life of great circumstances. The message established in “The New Liberal Arts” by Sanford J. Ungar is clear. Throughout the article it talks about the misperceptions of going to a liberal arts school and how it affects the outcome of ones future. Throughout the passage Ungar states misperceptions of a liberal arts education and then after he gives his response on why he disagrees. When addressing “The New Liberal Arts” I agree with Ungar when he states the misperceptions throughout the article. The misperceptions are what society has developed about people who graduated from Liberal

Broadly speaking, a liberal arts education is concerned with the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself, rather than for the sake of acquiring skills targeted at a career. The liberal arts philosophy is traced to the Greek philosopher Socrates, who famously proclaimed that the “unexamined life is not worth living”. To that end, traditional liberal arts education emphasizes the scholarly, the gentlemanly and the liberating. However, contemporary liberal arts education is marked by the integration of liberal and practical education. Consequently, a Christian liberal arts education should provide knowledge and intellectual skills to help students become functional and capable of

First and foremost there needs to be an established understanding of what liberal arts are. In the article “Why Choose Liberal Arts?” Mark William Roche explains that liberal arts were originally intended for free men, those who weren’t being educated for the sole purpose of gaining a livelihood, but rather for the sake of being educated and included things like grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, music and astronomy. He then goes on to clarify the meaning of liberal arts today as “a general education that is a broad grounding in the diverse disciplines.” Furthermore, in his article, “The Liberal Arts Bubble” John Agresto writes that today liberal arts are still called liberal not

In Paulo Freire's essay "The Banking Concept of Education," he discusses the idea of the human mind and thinking. Specifically, he argues that education uses a system which limits the children from using their ability to think. This system is displayed in his idea of “The Banking Concept of Education. Freire’s main argument is that the way schools teach today is purely based on the idea of feeding information to the youth instead of allowing them to interpret it themselves.

Only in the end of his essay does Freire focus more on his own system, and explain its privileges without resorting to the faults of the currents system, but even then he uses the latter tactic several times. The essay ends on a political note, calling the new revolutionaries to realize what the name they call themselves means, and to change the current ways not only on the outside, as they have done before, but also internally to make radical changes to their philosophy and their ideas about education. This concluding device stirs up some doubts as to the point of the whole essay. It might seem from the author’s concluding point that the underlying purpose of the essay was not to expand on the more beneficial ways of education, but to criticize the ways of political leaders in his, or some other country. Nevertheless, the rest of the essay shows little evidence of such a plot, and this point is at best marginal.

Further immersed in this controversy, the word liberal in liberal arts has been embraced by both ends of the political spectrum, and can scarcely be uttered without turning the conversation into a verbal duel between conservative reformists on one side, and liberal traditionalist on the other. However clear we present the term, the thrust and parry continues as the nation's leading academia and political activists attempt to separate liberal education from an education that indoctrinates students in the values of political liberalism (Horowitz, In Defense, 3).

Throughout history, many men and women have made important contributions to the world of education. Amongst these is the Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire, whose influences on the world have been both broad and deep. A true believer in Marxist theory, his central ideas regarding education revolve around the concept that the experience and learning process of education are more important than the "facts" or concepts that are being taught. Consequently, traditional teaching methods (known as "Banking") train students to be passive, unthinking, and subservient to their superiors; instead, teachers should "free" their students by employing "problem-posing" techniques, where teachers not only present concepts for students to analyse, but

The value a liberal education has for me is almost immeasurable. I say this because I come from an immigrant family and will be the first to have completed college. Since I was a child my family always stressed how important a