Opinion: Fake news, pandemic, evolving job market a liberal education is needed more than ever – Calgary Herald

Broad-based knowledge, integrated across multiple viewpoints and lenses and informed with critical thinking, is the foundation of the liberal education philosophy of teaching and learning.

The current generation of students comes to post-secondary education with two broad goals.

Firstly, they want training for careers: they want to study topics that interest them in order to obtain good jobs and build satisfying and productive work lives.

In recent years, evidence has been mounting about how quickly the job market is changing. COVID is exacerbating this. Many jobs that exist today may disappear tomorrow, and many of the jobs our students will apply for in 10 years dont even exist yet.

Most people will change not just jobs but careers multiple times over the coming decades. This means the emphasis of education should not only be on learning specific content or particular techniques, but in addition the ability to learn new concepts quickly and well, to look for ways to improve your work, and to be resourceful and resilient in a changing employment world.

Secondly, this generation of students also considers deeply the many problems with our world, and beyond job prospects they want to impact the world around them to help us live better lives. A recent CNN article reports the number of students applying to medical school in the U.S. has risen 18 per cent, in what is being called the Fauci effect. Here, at the University of Lethbridge, we have seen a strong increase in applications for public health, counselling psychology and therapeutic recreation programs, and I suspect other post-secondaries are seeing similar increases for their health-related offerings.

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Opinion: Fake news, pandemic, evolving job market a liberal education is needed more than ever - Calgary Herald