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Dr. Tuajuanda C. Jordan is president of St. Mary's College of Maryland, a small liberal arts school. Jordan was trained as a biochemist, but had a liberal arts education and was exposed to natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and the arts while attending college. This is a very articulate and clear essay on why liberal arts education matters, and how learning to question is its most valuable trait.

The author David Bach argues that business schools need to go in a different direction - more like liberal arts. Frame problems and get out of the way. "When people hear liberal arts, they - mistakenly - think of content, of literature, history or philosophy. They think of curricula without structure, of students mixing and matching courses from the arts and sciences without plan or direction. But liberal arts education is something more. "It's a way of looking at the world, a mode of inquiry. It is what Albert Einstein called "the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.""

Forbes, August 17, 2015 by George Anders on how Slack and other successful tech start-ups rely on those with a broader-based, or liberal arts education, to humanize and make apps and plug-ins more user-friendly and just plain friendly. The rebirth of the liberal arts education??

From The Next Web (TNW) News by Michael Redbord, the VP of Global Customer Support and Technical Services at HubSpot. Backs up what the Forbes, USNews, and other articles are saying about the ability of liberal arts majors to think, problem solve, see from different perspectives, and translate the technical into common language. Although geared towards recent grads, good advice for any job seekers on applying for jobs, a resume that tells your story, not your lists of accomplishments, and evidence of your investment in yourself.

from The Future of Work. Elizabeth Segran "For women in tech, a humanities background can be an added liability, since there is already a perception that they are less competent at science and math. Danielle Sheer says that when she joined Carbonite, her first impulse was to hide her lack of knowledge and retreat at meetings. However, she quickly changed strategy, deciding it was more important for her to ask questions to fully grasp the technology. She's spent hours tinkering with the software and working with engineering teams to learn about it. She says her colleagues are supportive, even if she sometimes slows them down. "By articulating complicated technical or strategic ideas in plain English, you'd be amazed at how much progress we've made solving problems," she says. "We've become very good at assuming that we don't have the same definition.""

blog post by Marilyn Achiron citing Tyler Cowen, economist at George Mason University in VA on teaching yourself to learn, July 29, 2015. We have cited Cowen in our blog posts at least once. He is a Uber fan and favors marketplace economics for settling competitive battles. He also embraces ongoing, online learning that people set up for themselves.

Thanks to Kemetia Foley, we have this great article from Huff Post College that appeared today. It's written by Nathan Holic who teachers at UCF Department of Writing and Rhetoric. It's pretty funny. "I'm 33, and feel like I'm living in a generational No Man's Land between digital dependency and digital illiteracy." Closing paragraph "Still, despite how amazing it sounds to live in the cloud, the digital uncluttering has become not liberating but exhausting. When the photos are scanned and the CDs are ripped, will I then spend full weekends "uncluttering my desktop," endlessly organizing folders on my devices, trying to make the digital information ever more accessible, editing "Easter '89" to perfection, searching for the most recent digital task-list that I commended myself for having typed on my phone...but which has long since disappeared into the haze of clutter obscuring the screens of my devices?

Get free online courses from the world's leading universities. This collection includes over 500 free courses in the liberal arts and sciences. Download these audio & video courses straight to your computer or mp3 player.

article by Christina Park on Forbes, 10/15/2014 on introverts