ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

Liberal education has represented the ideal and standard form of education that contains the essential value of education. Liberal education values the exploration of knowledge that holds truth beyond life. This is because knowledge itself has an intrinsic value of being “liberal.” Nonetheless, how being “liberal” actually liberates human beings cannot be explained. This very characteristic of liberal education has been criticized for making knowledge a priori dogma and for distancing people from the fullness of real life. Liberal education, an elite education for liberal citizens, is known to be exclusive and removed from the reality of the working class. While it is concentrated on the input of knowledge, it shows a structural vulnerability that it neglects in the output. Therefore, the demand for a specific curriculum and observable consequences that would liberate humans was bound to appear constantly. Competence-based education grew against this backdrop, and liberal education gradually diminished in importance due to being seen as overly speculative, old fashioned, and disconnected from reality. As the social demand for professional education intensifies, liberal education is being used as a symbolic myth that grants rhetorical justification to vocational education. Efforts to transform liberal education into competency-oriented training may backfire and often weaken the originality of liberal education and produce self-negating outcomes. The cooperation between liberal education and competency-based education should begin again not by meeting half-way, but by acknowledging differences and recognizing potential elements of conflict.

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