Giving Compass' Take: 

• The author explains that liberal arts education is grappling with technology-dependent students who also believe in the stigma that liberal arts won't help them get jobs. Engagement is getting to be more difficult for these schools. 

• How can liberal arts teachers engage students better? 

• Read about how other technology- specifically online learning- affects liberal arts education programs. 

A liberal arts education can be a transformative experience, but only if a student is awake to its nascent possibilities. And, being awake to education in this way is becoming increasingly difficult.

Students understand that they are making a major investment in education, often taking out loans that will require years to repay. But this understanding can quickly dissolve in the face of technology and its overwhelming call coming from our pocket, purse or desktop.

Teachers today are competing relentlessly for students’ attention, knowing full-well that without attention, there is no education. Remember, this generation of college students was just being born when the Columbine shooting occurred, they were not even in kindergarten on 9/11, and the great recession was in the air at about the time they began seriously considering their futures.

The liberal arts are not expensive self-help, and most professors are not trained therapists. But, study of the liberal arts brings us into contact with powerful examples of men and women who contended with life’s greatest difficulties — war, violence, fear, hopelessness, economic downturns — and brought back from those struggles riches that allow us to see our lives anew.

Instead of shrinking from the difficulties our students bring with them to college, we should trust that our curriculum — the liberal arts curriculum — is uniquely positioned to teach them how to live with those difficulties.

The lure of stupefaction through technology and substances is powerful,  and its roots are not trivial. Students cannot connect with the real resources of the liberal arts curriculum until they bring their attention to study, but they will not bring their attention to study unless they believe that doing so will matter.

Read the full article about liberal arts education is fighting technology by Jeff Frank at The Hechinger Report