As you talk to your student over the winter break and catch up with them on everything they’ve been doing this past semester and hope to be doing with the coming spring semester, I wanted to offer a few reflections on the distinctiveness of F&M’s curriculum and academic experiences – the liberal arts. 

Whether they’re finishing their first semester or about to plunge into their last semester, every F&M student is engaged in the common task of a liberal arts education. So when you ask about classes, think about the broader ways these subjects are meant to connect with one another and build on the foundations of an F&M education. Naturally, you want to hear how the chemistry final went, or what they learned from their anthropology project, and they may want to share the new literary discoveries they made this term. But also prompt them to tell you how they think their biology course was influenced by ideas that come from women’s studies, about the ways their courses in Italian and sociology and economics all help them better understand fundamental questions in their communities, about the resonances between the research paper they wrote in their history course and the “Reacting to the Past” module in their American studies course. 

The essence of a liberal arts education consists of the interwoven threads of knowledge and critical thinking that come in every course and are the bedrock of every assignment. These transcend subject areas and majors and make the F&M curriculum as a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. As you mark the waning of the year and help your student relax and reflect on what they’ve experienced and what’s to come, don’t overlook the most remarkable aspect of an F&M education – its holistic capacity to spark discovery through the entirety of the liberal arts.

How F&M Does the Liberal Arts

A liberal arts education focuses on exploring a wide range of fields while building skills in reading, writing, thinking, analyzing, debating and active listening. At F&M, it means recognizing and forming connections between things that at first don’t seem to go together.

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