As a new school year begins, and as I meet the new people I will live and work with for the next nine months, I begin to realize again how strangely rare it is here at Virginia Tech to find someone who is not resistant to getting a liberal education.
So when I tell them that I am a philosophy and history double major, and I am not studying to be a teacher, I get stares of amazement and that special look that says, "So what are you going to do with your life then?" And when I speak with my friends who are engineering and science majors, as I am destined to meet them here, I realize that few people at Tech are getting a liberal education. Most students seem to find a way around it, but do engineers really have a choice?
A liberal education is defined by the Association of American Colleges and Universities as "an approach to learning that empowers individuals and prepares them to deal with complexity, diversity and change. It provides students with broad knowledge of the wider world (e.g. science, culture and society) as well as in-depth study in a specific area of interest."
While Tech does make a strong attempt to widen students' views of the world by requiring them to take classes in all seven core areas, we still find a way to get out of the classes that we don't want to take. These are the hard classes, such as philosophy, history and English; classes that require one to write and state one's opinion in papers. These are classes that challenge what we believe and enlighten us on the implications of what we do. I find avoiding these classes to be a very unfortunate trend, because getting a liberal education is just as important as doing well in one's chosen major.
One of the most important aspects of getting a liberal education is widening one's view of the world to dispel ignorance and open our minds to new ideas. They are also meant to broaden understanding the social, political, environmental and other implications of what we do and learn.
While Tech requires us to take classes in these areas, such as Area 2 and Area 7, we still try to avoid them. Instead of spending a semester questioning if humans have free will or the ethical consequences of capital punishment, we take Music Theory or Introduction to Acting. We avoid classes that do not interest us or seem difficult, and while these classes may be challenging, they are for our benefit. They open our eyes to new ideas, traditions and methods of thinking. They are classes that will not necessarily help us learn what we will do at our future jobs, but they are the classes that teach us how to live.
These classes make us think long and hard about how what we do matters, as individuals and as a society. They make us search for the truth and then, once we think we have found it, question it.
I am not saying that engineering and the sciences are not vitally important to our society, and I do not know what I would do without their benefits.
However, many students from these majors do not realize the importance of receiving a liberal education. So, next time you have the option of taking a class that you can clearly blow off or a class that challenges what you believe - try the latter. You never know; you may even enjoy all that time you spend writing papers.