General Education: Concept and Practice. ASHE Annual Meeting 1981 Paper.

Overview & Synopsis

The perceptions of faculty and administrators regarding the following issues were assessed: the distinction between general and liberal education; the supporting philosophical or conceptual bases of general education; its societal goals and intellectual orientation; the place within general education of interdisciplinarity; and the role of general education in the graduate and undergraduate curricula. Study group members were proponents of general education and curricular reform. Of the over 330 respondents, 60 percent believed that there are important conceptual, substantive, and procedural differences between general and liberal education, while 35 percent considered the terms interchangeable. However, when asked to give their perceptions of their institutions' perspectives, the opposite was true; nearly 61 percent believed that liberal and general education were seen as interchangeable terms, while 36 percent thought that the two were considered to be distinct from one another. Nearly all respondents considered general education a component of the undergraduate curriculum, while nearly one half thought that liberal education comprised the entire program. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents felt that liberal education should be a component of graduate study. The pattern of responses suggests that there was a good deal of agreement among respondents concerning the concept and practice of general education. A bibliography is appended. (SW)