well I have never heard the term, but if you go to college you will realize the first day you will have at least one professor try to force their (often liberal) views on you.

I had a profess ironically in a communications/broadcasting course that skipped over part of the book because it wasn’t something he believed in, and he also gave me a grade on agenda setting and bias of a C, normally I would take that, because hey I’m not a great student, but there was this other kid in the class that was late for his speech and didn’t fill the whole 10 minutes I believe it was, and then didn’t have the whole 12 pages for the paper, he got an A. I also got a quite from the actual author of the text book. I also ran into another guy from that class who agreed with me the professor is liberal but he wanted to pass so he never took him on. That was partly my fault I would roll my eyes and mumble stuff when he would go on his rants, and I mean rants about the President, in fact he claimed he said that because it was “how the majority of students felt” he never asked, and I know I wasn’t the only one who didn’t feel the same, couldn’t he have just tought the class, it WASN’T a poly-sci class

I also had a lawyer for a sociology class, she was going to discuss the war, this was when it started, and she brought out video’s and totally manipulated the facts, I heard from other people that they were upset with this as well.

That is an excellent question, and not an easy one to answer. I recently graduated from a very small liberal arts college in the midwest, and I am still debating if it was worth it. Colleges which offer a liberal arts education are likely to be smaller schools with smaller and more personal classes, which is a huge plus. However, I agree with the above postings, in that the education offered tends to be extremely one sided (Republican were an endagered species on my campus). I majored in one of the sciences, geology, and so was not heavily exposed to this bias. However, by the time I graduated, I was extremely sick of the lack of diversity I had to live with for four years.

But to answer your question, the ideal liberal education is an education which exposes you to ideas and theories which are explored in a small classroom with close interaction from the professor and other classmates. By being able to have these dicussions, you will be able to explore other peoples viewpoints.

The key word here is ideal. I have known professors who were amazing at this, and made a point of including ideas and opinions outside their own. Likewise, I have seen professors using their classes as a channel for spreading their beliefs, which were almost always inevitiably liberal.

If you are considering a liberal arts education, and by your question I will assume you are, think carefully about what you want to get out of it. These schools do have the benifit of smaller classes, making it easier to make connections with your professors, but at the same time they can be so small they are stifling. I was not very happy at my school, but despite that, I would not warn you away from this type of education. It ultimately comes down to what you want to get out of college.

It has nothing to do with politics. It comes from the “liberal arts” which were historically the skills than an educated free man would have. (Liberal having the same word root as liberty). These were grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy, historically. Gradually, the term has come to mean an education which is broad in scope, rather than training for a specific job.

An oxymoron. Liberal education is not education in the traditional sense. The aim of education is to teach you how to think and figure out problems for yourself. Liberal education is a form of brainwashing that teaches you to think the way your teachers want you to think and believe what they want you to believe. That’s one big reason why we have so many young people here on Y!A bashing our President when they haven’t the first clue about what it takes to run a country or defend a nation. They’re not free-thinkers — they’re simply spewing the rhetoric they have been taught by liberals.