Liberal arts colleges were designed to cultivate a habit of critical thinking in students.
ACU seems to be making a consistent effort to keep critical thinking engrained in the curriculum for all majors. Yet, if it is necessary for critical thinking to be an element added into new things, like the CORE classes, then that must mean that the rest of the curriculum has gotten away from a focus on critical thinking.
If the point of a liberal arts education was to learn to think critically, then a focus on more technical and job-related skills in a college would mean that it is not really delivering a liberal arts education.
College today seems to be focused on giving students professional preparation for their chosen career fields. Students dive deep into their chosen field of studies and get relevant training and are loaded with information. This is fantastic in readying a workforce that is knowledgeable about their field and benefits students so they are not bewildered when they step into their first job.
However, that is more of a trade school structure. At some point, the focus on theory and critical thinking was lost in the core learning structure.
If all of the focus was on learning to think critically, how effective would colleges be in teaching students those skills? Diving deep into issues is not something you can specifically instruct a student on how to do, it is something that must be guided through assignments that require deeper analysis and questioning.
Students will not learn the practice of thinking critically unless they are pushed to their limits. If a student is pushed to the limits of their conventional knowledge, then critical thinking will come into play to push them to learn more.
The material presented in courses should be challenging in itself. Learning to question things requires deeper knowledge and understanding of subjects to fuel it to the next level. If students are presented with the training and information they need in their classes and also encouraged to apply critical thinking with the material, then they will benefit from both aspects of the learning.
Critical thinking is something that is best learned in a more focused setting within the field of study that a student is pursuing.
It is easier for a student to truly understand critical thinking when they are working on something they want to do, something they are interested in. If the critical thinking was incorporated into their major classes, then they would probably find that they have more interest in it and will be more willing to go deeper into it. If they are being forced to dive into things they feel no passion toward, as they might in a CORE class that is generic to all students, they have a higher chance of being uninterested and bored.
The meaning of a liberal arts education has changed over the years. Schools that keep a focus on critical thinking may set students back in technical job skills, and schools that take more of a trade school approach are not producing deep thinkers as they have in the past. It seems that the structure must change in one way or another to support the changing environment at colleges across the U.S. to help students acquire all the skills they need in the modern workforce.
