Kimball begins this essay by comparing the start of the "golden age" of liberal arts education as the period between about 1950 and 1975 when American higher education's revenue and enrollments of colleges and universities grew enormously. During the subsequent silver age of academe, ending in the Great Recession of 2008-2009,…

A review is presented of the differences between Matthew Arnold's and Thomas Huxley's views on liberal education. (CB)

The author argues that the graduate of the "artes liberales" (liberal arts) is the Roman orator, trained to defend persuasively the right and just, and not the person devoted to the Socratically-based introspective search for truth, as many contemporary academicians would maintain. (JMK)

Examines the content of THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS IN THE MIDDLE AGES (Wagner, 1983); FROM HUMANISM TO THE HUMANITIES (Grafton & Jardine, 1986); and CLASSICA AMERICANA: THE GREEK AND ROMAN HERITAGE IN THE UNITED STATES (Reinhold, 1984) to illustrate how the historiography of liberal education links debate about the undergraduate curriculum. (GEA)

Author claims that college admissions officers should deemphasize the need for a high school student taking all academic subjects in order to gain admission to college. (HS)

Liberal education in Japan, and specifically at Japan's Tenri University, is described. The conflicts between the society's need for well-rounded educated individuals versus well- educated specialists are noted. (CJ)

This book provides a study of the historical evolution of the idea of liberal education. The volume portrays this evolution as a struggle between two contending points of view--one oratorical and the other philosophical--that have interacted, often controversially, from antiquity to present. The study attempts to shed light on the meaning of the…

Suggests in Bruce Kimball's thesis that a pragmatic consensus was emerging about the understanding of liberal education offers that it might be best understood by comparing it to J. Rawl's idea of an "overlapping consensus." States that by comparing and contrasting these ideas that the emerging consensus is pragmatic in nature. (CMK)

Reviews the influence of liberal education upon legal education, studying the historical process according to which changes of emphasis within liberal education (from rhetoric to dialectic or the reverse) have been reflected in related changes in legal education. (AYC)

The history of liberal education is the story of a debate between orators, whose tradition stresses commitment to a body of civic knowledge derived from texts, and philosophers from whom our modern notion of formal science and specialized research originates. The story is very old--not only historically as it begins with Socrates and Plato--but…