What is the relation between liberal education and getting trained for a professional career? By definition, they are very different things. In fact, they are usually defined in opposition to each other. A programme of liberal study is a foundational engagement with a subject for the sake of advancing knowledge, without any specific job, vocation or career in mind. A professional programme is training for a specific kind of career. To be liberal, in the curricular sense of the term, is to be open to all possibilities, and not directed at just one; to be professional is not so much to study subjects for their own sake, but to do so with the structured goal tied to a specific kind of career.
The difference is not so much one of content, but of approach. Similar subjects can be a liberal or a professional subject, depending on how they are curricularised and/or taught: biology is a liberal art, but medicine is not; political science is a liberal art, but law is not; economics is a liberal art, while accountancy is not. The “art” of the...
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