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Concepts Of Career And General Education, Paul A. Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This paper examines the distinctions between general education and education for a career, with a view to synthesizing the literature and presenting salient problems. General education can be defined in several ways. It is defined here as education that puts a person in touch with the main outlines of knowledge available to a historical period or a given culture. Theoretically, education is general if it has no one specific vocation as its end and no one specific discipline or partisan viewpoint as its specialty. By way of example, the medieval quadrivium and trivium can be viewed as "general education," in …