Adapting Liberal Education for an AEC and Global Era: A call for an ASEAN Liberal Educational College
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The context for this research paper is the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (2015) and an increasingly multicultural and globalized 4.0 type economy. Globalization is defined as accelerating interconnectivity in all realms. It has its dark (virus pandemic of 2020) and bright sides. Thus, the key research problem addressed in this paper is how can liberal education be revived and rethought to help higher education respond to these many highly disruptive forces. There is then a discussion of the evolution of liberal education. Multiple theoretical and conceptual frameworks guide this study including Borudieu’s forms of capital, Spence’s signaling theory, and Sen’s capabilities approach.The majormethodology for the study is comparative case studies. There are four case studies analyzed in this study, namely Visva-Bharati and Krea Universities in India, University of Central Asia, and Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Based on our findings, we propose an even more relevant and robust form of liberal education suitable for the AEC and rapidly globalizing era. There are four key elements of a rigorous robust liberal education, namely, critical thinking skills, communicative skills, soft skills, and intercultural competence. The last two elements have been added to the traditional model to make liberal education even more relevant and robust. The heart of a liberal education is, thus, to develop critical thinking, writing, speaking, and learning to learn skills. Also students are challenged to think about the big issues such as the meaning of life and paths of life and the road to happiness and well-being. Also informed by these four case studies, a model for a new ASEAN Liberal Education College is proposed. Students receiving a rigorous liberal education are particularly well prepared for the new economy (Roth, 2017). They have what Stross calls “protean mental ability” (Stross, 2017: 122). This provides them impressive intellectual versatility and adaptability and great potential for continual life-long learning.
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