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Speech On Liberal Arts Education

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“What is this modern wish-wash of a Liberal Arts education?” “Studying all subjects? Bah! A Jack of all and Master of none! That is what our child will become!” “A complete wastage of time! After all, the phrase itself has the word ‘Arts’ in it.”
This is an essence of how most parents, teachers and even students in India react to the idea of a Liberal Arts Education. But this attitude is justified provided that a majority of Indian population is unaware of the deeper meaning and essence of Liberal Arts. And this attitude itself guarantees that in …show more content…

Only, during that time it was so natural to study subjects in relation with each other that there was no need to label this education as ‘Liberal Arts’. In the medieval ages, Philosophy and Arts went hand in hand with Science and Math, because scholars realized how deeply these subjects influenced each other. Leonardo Da Vinci (designed the working model of a helicopter, 400 years before any flying machine was invented) was an artist, polymath, architect, sculptor, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. Da Vinci wasn’t a genius just because he mastered these fields. He was a genius because he was a curious thinker who realized the important relationship between these subjects and thus mastered them all. He employed his engineering skills in his artistic work, his artistic skills in cartography and cartography in geology. Rene Descartes, who gave the theory of the Cartesian plane (no one knows what I’m talking about better than my fellow class 12th Math students), is also the Father of Modern Philosophy. So basically, the guy who added a couple of chapters in our Math books ever since secondary school also gave the ontological argument for the existence of God, which is one of the basics that we study in Philosophy. Did you know that Richard Arkwright, …show more content…

It is dire necessity! We need liberal arts so that students don’t just get a degree but also become capable of securing a job on the basis of what they have learnt. But in a deeper sense we need a liberal arts education, also to create a better, free-thinking and sensitive society – something that will help eradicate major societal evils like rape, gender and caste-based discrimination, violence, dowry system etc. Most of these exist due to narrow-mindedness and intolerance towards anything new or different. A liberal arts education creates a generation that is sensitive, open to ideas and questions injustice when they see

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