Liberal Art Research Paper

The Importance of Liberal Art
Before the 1960’s, the laws and the civil right of many minority groups in the United States was very different from what we have today. There were many regulations that restricted the minorities from receiving equal treatment as the white people. Segregation played a major role to undermine and pressure the minorities from standing up for what they believed was right. In the 1950, when African-American families, who sought better environmental conditions, moved to Chicago to live in Berwyn and Cicero, they were attacked by mobs where the polices played a major role. African-American houses were burned and most of oppressed faced terror through physical abuse that sometimes resulted in death. Still, after all

the hardships and the injustice that African Americans faced, no one, from both sides of the group, bothered to object against the immorality and the corruption in society.

However, later in the years, there was a rise in educated black people, who were able to become great leaders and give the oppressed the voice they longed for. These great leaders used liberal art as a weapon to empower the minorities and persuade the oppressors. To them, liberal art was not something they were born with, but something they had to work hard to learn. It is because of liberal art that minorities were able to accomplish the Civil Right Act in 1964. In our time period, however, liberal arts is viewed insignificant. Many schools do not comprehend the effects of liberal arts on an individual’s life and in a community mostly because they concentrate mainly on the contemporary technologies and science. They fail to understand that, what enables technologies, science, politics and economics to progress is liberal art itself. It is for this reason that I strongly believe that college and university academies should center and invest on liberal art to

foster growth and progression.
Literal education is important to the growth and maturity of an individual’s character and attitude.

Now a days, it is commonly believed that college goals are to mainly teach and educate students to have a better job and a better future. However, that shouldn’t be the sole purpose of what college have to offer. William Cronan points out in one of his arguments that, liberal arts “is a way of living in the face of our own ignorance, a way of groping toward wisdom in full recognition of our own folly. A way of educating ourselves without any illusion that out education will ever be complete.” He states out that becoming a liberal educated person doesn’t necessarily have to do with what you are graded on or something that you can achieve. It centers around the our ability to communicate and learn from the people around us. Listening and respecting different perspectives and ideals “to educate ourselves by knowing opposite lives” (Andrew Delbanco, p. 104). As a freshmen, I can honestly say that I come bearing many life concerning questions seeking answers. However, they are not things that I would want teachers to give answers to. Rather, they are thing I would want to experience and find my own solution to. By becoming socially active and communicating with other people, I would be aware of things I did know and have a border mindset open to new information. I believe this is the significance of literal art; a way for student to learn from each other to better understand how

the world works.
Liberals education’s values are to nurture human talents in the hopes of achieving unconfined human freedom. Freedom can be described in many forms, some of which being the freedom for voice and speech. In the first paragraph, I talk about the oppression that many minorities faced all due to the inability to speak up against something they knew was wrong. What changed all this, however, is liberal art; the ability to read, write, communicate and persuade. William Cronan gives us a possibility of what liberal means. He states that Liberal and liberty are “so mired in controversy, embraced and reviled as they have been by the far ends of the political spectrum, that we scarcely know how to use them without turning them into slogans-but they can hardly be separated from this educational tradition.” The fact that liberty has close ties with the word liberal just gives liberal art the meaning of self-proclamation to speak what one wants to say. He gives a more descriptive characters of what a liberal educated person should have. Some of which would be the ability to listen, strive to learn as a way to seek truth, and empower those around them. These characters are what enabled great leaders of the civil right movement to make a mark in history. Thus, to nurture the current generation to become great, liberal art should be mandatory.