UNE’s model of the liberal arts focuses on a broad education in hopes of creating well-rounded and worldly students. Under the Core Values Statement section it states, “Completing Core requirements provides a common learning experience through which students demonstrate application, synthesis, and integration of knowledge and skills central to a liberal arts education. By actively participating in service learning projects, campus events, and other extracurricular activities that reinforce Core themes, UNE students are prepared to act as informed, engaged citizens”. This essentially means that the school is hoping to prepare students to have the extensive knowledge a proper and smart citizen must possess. Scheuer believes that a good liberal arts education will do the same stating, “The liberal arts embody precisely the skills a democracy must cultivate to maintain its vital reservoir of active, thoughtful, humane, and productive citizens”. Both sources believe a more inclusive education such as the liberal arts will allow students to grow and develop their skills in order to further their understanding of themselves as well as the community they are a part of.

I am currently taking english composition and a science lab course and last semester I took math, intro to environmental issues and an explorations course. According to Appendix A the learning outcomes for english composition are, “1. Demonstrate the ability to approach writing as a recursive process that requires substantial revision of drafts for content, organization, and clarity (global revision), as well as editing and proofreading (local revision). 2. Integrate their ideas with those of others using summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis of relevant sources. 3. Employ techniques of active reading, critical reading, and informal reading response for inquiry, learning, and thinking. 4. Critique their own and others’ work by emphasizing global revision early in the writing process and local revision later in the process. 5. Document their work using appropriate conventions (MLA). 6. Control sentence-level error (grammar, punctuation, and spelling).” and the learning outcomes for a lab science are, “1. Demonstrate a functional understanding of the scientific method to make informed decisions based on scientific information. 2. Demonstrate conceptual and practical knowledge of course topics and describe ethical implications of human interactions with the natural world. 3. Demonstrate scientific literacy and the ability to communicate science-based information”. For the most part I can see how these outcomes are being taught in class however they seem more just generalized things that people learn and not so much in line with the goals of a liberal arts education. Of course they are good general skills to have, however I have been learning this stuff for years already. It seems as though some of them are a bit of a stretch to connect back to the overall liberal arts goals. For example one of the learning outcomes for a lab science is “Demonstrate conceptual and practical knowledge of course topics and describe ethical implications of human interactions with the natural world”. I have not learned anything new regarding human implications with the natural world that weren’t already common knowledge of things such as climate change or pollution. So while I can acknowledge that these are important skills I cannot say certainly that I have become a more readied citizen because of them.