Liberal Learning

Summer 2008--Special Announcement: HIS 300, The Vikings is offered during the Maymester (May 12 to May 29).  It counts as Social Change in Historical Persectives and satisfies the Global requirement.

TCNJ's redesigned curriculum means fewer, more intensive courses and more options for interdisciplinary study. This approach is central to the College's goal: to provide the best public undergraduate educational experience in the nation. The College's Liberal Learning program helps ensure that students learn fundamentals of reasoning, communicating, and living in today's world. The College of New Jersey aims to educate students for citizenship in a modern democracy.

Proceeding from the College's mission and its "Guiding Principles for Academic Work," liberal learning has three interdependent structural elements:

Intellectual and Scholarly Growth

The first sparks intellectual and scholarly growth characterized by students' increasing ability to pose intellectually challenging questions, confront significant problems, and apply focused rigor in seeking promising resolutions. This element ensures that learners gain habits of mind necessary to study and understand human knowledge and how it applies to complex problems.

Civic Responsibility

The second element enables students to relate beliefs, values, and intellectual habits to their civic role in society. Such vision requires deep understandings of ways race, ethnicity, and gender have shaped local and global communities.

Human Inquiry

The third element fosters familiarity with essential knowledge about broad sectors of human inquiry. Such familiarity enables students to be conversant in the broad range of intellectual discourse.