The purpose of a liberal arts education is to inform students about the nature of the world as we know it, to teach them ways of thinking about the world as we conceive it, to discipline them as critical thinkers, and at the same time to provide them with the intellectual equipment that will enable them to open their minds to new concepts and ideas. In all these areas, anthropology makes a critical contribution.
Anthropology is the study of humankind of ancient and modern peoples and their ways of living.
Few students who take anthropology courses will go on to become professional anthropologists, but their introduction to anthropology may well be the cornerstone in their liberal arts education. By specializing in the study of remote and foreign peoples, anthropology is an ideal vehicle for showing the amazing variety of ways of life, for understanding how traditional cultures evolve and diversified, and how and why modern cultures change or stay the same. Anthropology also reveals for students how culturally relative world views are, how each society accepts its own world view as truth, how damaging this perspective can be in a rapidly changing world, and how liberating it feels to free oneself from the bonds of such ethnocentric thinking. Moreover, the study of who we are and how we came to be this way provides students, through their understanding of other cultures, an edge in many careers in today s globally competitive world. In these times of narrow specializations, anthropological study is refreshingly broad.