March 7, 2014

curious, thoughtful, and skeptical (2014)

The Chinese have come to believe the mantra of many American colleges that the best leaders are those with the broadest education in the liberal arts. The goal of a liberal education is not to train specialists but to educate the whole person to be curious, thoughtful, and skeptical. Today, all Peking University students, even in its Guanghua School of Management, take multiple courses in the liberal arts, including literature, philosophy, and history. The University also boasts an elite liberal arts curriculum . . . The most important revolution in Chinese higher education today may not be its size and scope but the fact that even under the leadership of engineers, top institutions have come to understand that an education in the absence of the humanities is incomplete.

Harvard Business Review (2014)