The primary purpose of a liberal education is to make one's mind a pleasant place in which to spend one's leisure.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The ability to recognize opportunities and move in new - and sometimes unexpected - directions will benefit you no matter your interests or aspirations. A liberal arts education is designed to equip students for just such flexibility and imagination.
Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word.
For some students, especially in the sciences, the knowledge gained in college may be directly relevant to graduate study. For almost all students, a liberal arts education works in subtle ways to create a web of knowledge that will illumine problems and enlighten judgment on innumerable occasions in later life.
My parents had an old-fashioned ideal of college, that four years at a liberal arts college should be a liberal arts education.
Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.
I do think that a general liberal arts education is very important, particularly in an uncertain changing world.
Liberals tend to stress how marvelous education is, in and of itself, and also adore it as a vessel for genuine equality. (That's me, by the way: Hell, I think we should be spending $50 billion a year to make college education free).
A liberal education... frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family and even his nation.
The role of a liberal arts college within a university is to be a genuine part of that university, giving and responding to the other parts.
A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.