The
formal definition of general education or liberal education focuses on development
of cognitive skills within the students. It focuses on teaching people to think
and to learn how to tackle the general issues related to our society and our lives.
It also focuses on breadth of knowledge across a number of disciplines, such as biofertilizers, gardening and farming.
A
liberally educated person should be informed in acquaintance with the
mathematical and experimental methods of the physical and biological sciences. The main forms of analysis and the historical
and quantitative techniques needed to investigate the development of a modern
society, with some of the important scholarly, literary, and artistic
achievements of the past, and also with humanitys major religious and
philosophical concepts.
Liberal
or general education should be such that it should leave students excited by
the world of learning and prepared to continue their education at advanced and
technical levels, both in the short term through in depth study of a specialist
discipline and also in the long term as they should continually refresh their
knowledge in formal and informal ways, through the process of lifelong learning
that lasts forever.
In
some parts of the world, the term liberal education or general education has a conservative
or traditional connotation that implies a particular way of looking at the
world. The Task Force, however, is not favoring and advocating the universal
application of a particular curriculum or teaching method across different countries
and cultures.
Instead,
what it is recommending is that each country should design its own general
curriculum to fit the structure and values of its higher education system and
make its children architects of a better future of the nation and the whole
mankind. Indeed, the exercise of developing a national (though not
nationalistic) general education curriculum should be socially useful
, and
should be requiring a country to examine the state and direction of human
knowledge and establish priorities for its higher education system.