Liberal Arts

Liberal Arts have evolved from the mediaeval trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) to the present broad spectrum of scholarly disciplines and sciences. The term suggests a rational basis for education, as opposed to professional training or highly specialized education in one discipline. Even if we cannot go back to the Renaissance ideal of the all knowing scholar, a liberal arts education is resolutely opposed to the production of "Fachidioten" or to the notorious 'one dimensional person' of Marcuse.

To put the above aims into practice, Vesalius College implements the following educational principles:

• Regardless of their chosen major, all students are required to take a liberal arts “core” that makes up one-third of their academic degree program and rounds out their general education. Five core courses in the first year develop language and numerical skills. Five other courses, spread over the next two years, . confront students with the approaches and working methods of the different major fields of human knowledge and with interdisciplinary thinking and problem-solving.

• All students are expected to perfect their knowledge of English. The required competence in English will cover both written and spoken expression. Throughout their college years, students' reports and papers will be judged on form as well as content.

• All students are expected to learn a foreign language. For this foreign language, different levels of competence are expected, depending upon students' previous experience and their course of study.

• Students are encouraged to confront different ideas during classes. There is an active dialogue between teacher and student. Students are expected to contribute investigative individual work, which is evaluated by the teacher.

• The teaching in a given subject covers not only current knowledge, but also its historical development, its application to other fields, its social implications, and its philosophical background.

• The study load allows sufficient time for individual work. This is, after all, the most important component of the educational programme.