<p>I am totally opposed to the notion that the aims of a liberal education are to prepare an individual for a job. I believe that short changes the student, it may canalize their interests and explorations in ways that sadly prevent them form coming in contact with the joy of being educated rather than trained. Andrew Abbott said it best:
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The reason for getting an education here—or anywhere else—is that it is better in and of itself. Not because it gets you something. Not because it is a means to some other end. It is better because it is better. Indeed this statement implies that the phrase “aims of education” is nonsensical; education is not a thing of which aims can be predicated. It has no aim other than itself.</p>
<p>...This argument rejects the common idea that the aim of education is to give you the skills to survive the rapid changes in the first-level materials of knowledge. That is because the skills change, too. Writing was a far more important skill a century or even half a century ago than it is today. We could move up yet another step by talking about formal education at a third level—education in skills of envisioning how to change skills. But every time we move up a level in this way, we are thinking less and less about the future and more and more about a kind of constant of intellectuality—a set of mental habits that are enduring qualities of a mind. To the extent that we escape the trap that historical change presents for concepts of education, we escape it by moving to a less and less temporally directed concept of education. We move from thinking about the future to thinking about an enduring quality of the present. Any serious concept of education seems inevitably to root itself in a state of being that endures—one based in the perpetual present of the self. </p>
<p>The problem of the steady change of ideas (or the perpetual need to imagine new ideas) also demolishes the notion that the essence of education consists in mastering certain contents or materials. You are not little birdies sitting in the nest with your mouths open to receive half-digested worms of knowledge regurgitated by the faculty. Education is not about content. It is not even about skills. It is a habit or stance of mind. It is not something you have. It is something you are.
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