1. This article could potentially be about how liberal arts colleges produce critical thinking students or vice versa. Liberal arts is the study of many different things but by the title it could mean how to teach students to think critically.1
  2. This first section is telling us what the liberal arts are. “Originally there were seven liberal arts: the trivium of classical antiquity, consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, combined with the medieval quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.” These seven original arts have developed in to many more and a way of learning. It has become the most renown way of learning in the US.
  3. The next section is about why we need liberal arts education. It seems like it’s necessary because it brings communities together and develops our society as a whole. “The overall goal is to foster vibrant and prosperous communities with broad and deep participation, in public conversations marked by fairness, inclusion, and (where critical thinking comes in) intellectual rigor.” It also focuses on fairness and inclusion which are becoming very relevant in todays world.
  4. Critical thinking is described as “the intellectual engine of a functional democracy: the set of mental practices that lends breadth, depth, clarity, and consistency to public discourse.” Theres a lot that goes into critical thinking and how it is developed. A couple things that comes from thinking critically is the ability to share to the public, develop higher education, and many more.
  5. “these concepts include truth, nature, value, causality, complexity, morality, freedom, excellence, and—as Wittgenstein understood—language itself, as the principal medium of thought.” The concepts talked about in the quote are the concepts that unify the liberal arts curriculum. Liberal arts is important for our democracy to run. We need problem solvers and team workers, which is what liberal arts is said to develop.