The Art of Critical Thinking: Exploring Ideas in Liberal Arts

The Art of Critical Thinking: Exploring Ideas in Liberal Arts
Author: Rushikesh Balasaheb Mandlik
Publisher: Inkbound Publishers
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 8197058172

Enhance your critical thinking skills with an exploration of ideas in the liberal arts. This book encourages readers to engage with diverse perspectives and develop the analytical skills essential for intellectual growth and informed decision-making.

In Defense of a Liberal Education

In Defense of a Liberal Education
Author: Fareed Zakaria
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2015-03-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0393247694

CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria argues for a renewed commitment to the world’s most valuable educational tradition. The liberal arts are under attack. The governors of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have all pledged that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts, and they seem to have an unlikely ally in President Obama. While at a General Electric plant in early 2014, Obama remarked, "I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree." These messages are hitting home: majors like English and history, once very popular and highly respected, are in steep decline. "I get it," writes Fareed Zakaria, recalling the atmosphere in India where he grew up, which was even more obsessed with getting a skills-based education. However, the CNN host and best-selling author explains why this widely held view is mistaken and shortsighted. Zakaria eloquently expounds on the virtues of a liberal arts education—how to write clearly, how to express yourself convincingly, and how to think analytically. He turns our leaders' vocational argument on its head. American routine manufacturing jobs continue to get automated or outsourced, and specific vocational knowledge is often outdated within a few years. Engineering is a great profession, but key value-added skills you will also need are creativity, lateral thinking, design, communication, storytelling, and, more than anything, the ability to continually learn and enjoy learning—precisely the gifts of a liberal education. Zakaria argues that technology is transforming education, opening up access to the best courses and classes in a vast variety of subjects for millions around the world. We are at the dawn of the greatest expansion of the idea of a liberal education in human history.

Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be

Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be
Author: Frank Bruni
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2015-03-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 145553269X

Read award-winning journalist Frank Bruni's New York Times bestseller: an inspiring manifesto about everything wrong with today's frenzied college admissions process and how to make the most of your college years. Over the last few decades, Americans have turned college admissions into a terrifying and occasionally devastating process, preceded by test prep, tutors, all sorts of stratagems, all kinds of rankings, and a conviction among too many young people that their futures will be determined and their worth established by which schools say yes and which say no. In Where You Go is Not Who You'll Be, Frank Bruni explains why this mindset is wrong, giving students and their parents a new perspective on this brutal, deeply flawed competition and a path out of the anxiety that it provokes. Bruni, a bestselling author and a columnist for the New York Times, shows that the Ivy League has no monopoly on corner offices, governors' mansions, or the most prestigious academic and scientific grants. Through statistics, surveys, and the stories of hugely successful people, he demonstrates that many kinds of colleges serve as ideal springboards. And he illuminates how to make the most of them. What matters in the end are students' efforts in and out of the classroom, not the name on their diploma. Where you go isn't who you'll be. Americans need to hear that--and this indispensable manifesto says it with eloquence and respect for the real promise of higher education.

The Art of Critical Making

The Art of Critical Making
Author: Rosanne Somerson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2013-09-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 111876403X

Describes the world's leading approach to art and design taught at Rhode Island School of Design At Rhode Island School of Design students are immersed in a culture where making questions, ideas, and objects, using and inventing materials, and activating experience all serve to define a form of critical thinking—albeit with one's hands—i.e. "critical making." The Art of Critical Making, by RISD faculty and staff, describes fundamental aspects of RISD's approach to "critical making" and how this can lead to innovation. The process of making taught at RISD is deeply introspective, passionate, and often provocative. This book illuminates how RISD nurtures the creative process, from brief or prompt to outcome, along with guidance on the critical questions and research that enable making great works of art and design. Explores the conceptual process, idea research, critical questions, and iteration that RISD faculty employ to educate students to generate thoughtful work Authors are from the faculty and staff of the Rhode Island School of Design, which consistently ranks as the number one fine arts and design college in the United States The Art of Critical Making shows you how context, materials, thought processes, and self-evaluation are applied in this educational environment to prepare creative individuals to produce dynamic, memorable, and meaningful works.

Liberal Arts and Sciences

Liberal Arts and Sciences
Author: Christopher A. Ulloa Chaves ED.D
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2014-05-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1490737006

“Liberal Arts and Sciences ... should be read by those persons who wish to seek a higher level of critical, compassionate, and creative thinking, It is well-written, insightful, and is a fascinating examination of education...and significant traits such as honesty, creativity, ethical behavior, and wisdom—concepts that are sorely needed in today’s global world.” -US Review of Books Nominated for the American Association of Colleges & University's 2015 Frederic W. Ness Book Award. Nominated for the 2015 Eric Hoffer Book Award. “This book will help individuals become more open, courageous, and willing to engage in meaningful and constructive dialogue in their search for truth.” -Miriam Montano, undergraduate student in California This book will, first, move the reader through philosophy’s major conceptions as ideas that initiate and sustain educational and learning processes. The book will then provide an historical account of the key periods, development, and continuing contributions of the liberal arts enterprise. The book also includes three chapters on the application dimensions of the liberal arts model of higher learning, mainly its development of critical, creative, and ethical thinking competencies for effective citizenship and problem solving in the world.

Why Choose the Liberal Arts?

Why Choose the Liberal Arts?
Author: Mark William Roche
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2010-08-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0268091749

In a world where the value of a liberal arts education is no longer taken for granted, Mark William Roche lucidly and passionately argues for its essential importance. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience in higher education as a student, faculty member, and administrator, Roche deftly connects the broad theoretical perspective of educators to the practical needs and questions of students and their parents. Roche develops three overlapping arguments for a strong liberal arts education: first, the intrinsic value of learning for its own sake, including exploration of the profound questions that give meaning to life; second, the cultivation of intellectual virtues necessary for success beyond the academy; and third, the formative influence of the liberal arts on character and on the development of a sense of higher purpose and vocation. Together with his exploration of these three values—intrinsic, practical, and idealistic—Roche reflects on ways to integrate them, interweaving empirical data with personal experience. Why Choose the Liberal Arts? is an accessible and thought-provoking work of interest to students, parents, and administrators.

History of Illustration

History of Illustration
Author: Susan Doyle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2018-02-22
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1501342118

"Written by an international team of illustration historians, practitioners, and educators, History of Illustration covers image-making and print history from around the world, spanning from the prehistoric to the contemporary. With hundreds of color image, this book to contextualize the many types of illustrations within social, cultural, and technical parameters, presenting information in a flowing chronology. This essential guide is the first comprehensive history of illustration as its own discipline. Readers will gain an ability to critically analyze images from technical, cultural, and ideological standpoints in order to arrive at an appreciation of art form of both past and present illustration"--

Making Thinking Visible

Making Thinking Visible
Author: Ron Ritchhart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2011-05-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 047091551X

A proven program for enhancing students' thinking and comprehension abilities Visible Thinking is a research-based approach to teaching thinking, begun at Harvard's Project Zero, that develops students' thinking dispositions, while at the same time deepening their understanding of the topics they study. Rather than a set of fixed lessons, Visible Thinking is a varied collection of practices, including thinking routines?small sets of questions or a short sequence of steps?as well as the documentation of student thinking. Using this process thinking becomes visible as the students' different viewpoints are expressed, documented, discussed and reflected upon. Helps direct student thinking and structure classroom discussion Can be applied with students at all grade levels and in all content areas Includes easy-to-implement classroom strategies The book also comes with a DVD of video clips featuring Visible Thinking in practice in different classrooms.

Human Dignity, Education, and Political Society

Human Dignity, Education, and Political Society
Author: James Greenaway
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1793611017

A life of liberty and responsibility does not just happen, but requires a particular kind of education, one that aims at both a growth of the human soul and an enrichment of political society in justice and the common good. This we call a liberal education. Forgetfulness of liberty is also a forgetfulness of the multi-dimensional nature of the human person, and a diminution of political life. Keeping in mind what can be lost when liberal education is lost, this volume makes the case for recovering what is perennially noble and good in the liberal arts, and why the liberal arts always have a role to play in human flourishing. Each of the authors herein focuses on the connection of three primary themes: human dignity, liberal education, and political society. Intentionally rooted in the hub that joins the three themes, each author seeks to unfold the contemporary significance of that hub. As a whole, the volume explores how the three themes are crucial to each other: how they illuminate each other, how they need each other, and how the loss of one jeopardizes the wellbeing of the others. In individual chapters, the authors engage various relevant aspects of liberal education. As a result, the volume is organized into three parts: Liberal Education and a Life Well Lived; Thinkers on Dignity and Education in History; Contemporary Topics in Dignity and Education. As education is increasingly channeled into an ever more narrow focus on technical specialization, and measured against professional success, students themselves face a maelstrom of campus politics and competing political orthodoxies. These are among the issues that tend to militate against the operative liberty of the student to think and to speak as a person. This edited collection is offered as an invitation to think again about the liberal arts in order to recover the meaning of education as the authentic pursuit of the good life or eudemonia.

Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century

Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Robert E. Luckett Jr.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-05-28
Genre: Education
ISBN: 149683318X

Contributions by William D. Adams, Sarah Archino, Mario J. Azevedo, Katrina Byrd, Rico D. Chapman, Helen O. Chukwuma, Monica Flippin Wynn, Tatiana Glushko, Eric J. Griffin, Kathi R. Griffin, Yumi Park Huntington, Thomas M. Kersen, Robert E. Luckett Jr., Floyd W. Martin, Preselfannie W. McDaniels, Dawn Bishop McLin, Lauren Ashlee Messina, Byron D'Andra Orey, Kathy Root Pitts, Candis Pizzetta, Lawrence Sledge, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, Joseph Martin Stevenson, Seretha D. Williams, and Karen C. Wilson-Stevenson Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century delves into the essential nature of the liberal arts in America today. During a time when the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math dominate the narrative around the future of higher education, the liberal arts remain vital but frequently dismissed academic pursuits. While STEAM has emerged as a popular acronym, the arts get added to the discussion in a way that is often rhetorical at best. Written by scholars from a diversity of fields and institutions, the essays in this collection legitimize the liberal arts and offer visions for the role of these disciplines in the modern world. From the arts, pedagogy, and writing to social justice, the digital humanities, and the African American experience, the essays that comprise Redefining Liberal Arts Education in the Twenty-First Century bring attention to the vast array of ways in which the liberal arts continue to be fundamental parts of any education. In an increasingly transactional environment, in which students believe a degree must lead to a specific job and set income, colleges and universities should take heed of the advice from these scholars. The liberal arts do not lend themselves to the capacity to do a single job, but to do any job. The effective teaching of critical and analytical thinking, writing, and speaking creates educated citizens. In a divisive twenty-first-century world, such a citizenry holds the tools to maintain a free society, redefining the liberal arts in a manner that may be key to the American republic.