How Traveling Can Aid Your Liberal Studies Degree

There isn’t a time when traveling doesn’t broaden your horizons, giving you a better world view but when studying for a master of liberal arts online, every place you visit gives you a firsthand look into the people and cultures you are learning about. Liberal arts isn’t all about a single culture and a single people but rather a way of understanding how everything fits together into a pattern we choose to call humanity.

Liberal studies puts everything into perspective from an interdisciplinary approach and what better way to find all the pieces of the puzzle than to go on a cultural treasure hunt? Just look at what an online masters of liberal arts program focuses on and you’ll see how travelling fits the curriculum perfectly.

A People as Seen through Their Art

One of the things an archeologist looks at, for example, is the artwork primitive people leave behind. Some left renditions of life in their time on cave walls and others patterned their lives into jewelry or vases, pots and even weapons. Native American art left infinite stories behind in totems and pottery and from every relic found, a new part of a story emerges.

Traveling the world is one way to get an up-close look at the lands where these people walked, from Stonehenge in England to the Ancient Pyramids of Egypt, there’s a story everywhere. With your knowledge of cultures and a personal view of the artwork you’ve studied, you can almost ‘feel’ the culture as it evolves over the ages.

The Ultimate Goal of Liberal Studies

The ultimate goal of a liberal arts degree is to put bits of life into perspective from an interdisciplinary approach. Therefore, the humanities, the arts, languages, music and even literature all help to paint a picture of a culture as it is and as it was. Traveling the world is one way to see how people are living today while giving the student a chance to tour museums, historical sites, national landmarks and also participate in festivals and events in each locale.

What better way to gain perspective than to ‘walk the walk’ with the people of a culture? What better way to learn linguistic nuances than to speak dialects with people in various regions within a country? If the goal of liberal arts is to give perspective with an interdisciplinary approach, there is no better way to get perspective than to live it even if only for a short while.

Touring World Wonders

Think about all the wonders of the world you can see by traveling as you study? Yes, Stonehenge and the Pyramids should be on every student’s bucket list, but what about the Badlands Guardian in Alberta, Canada that is a completely natural rock formation or the ancient Incan Machu Picchu that was built somewhere in the 15^th Century and abandoned within a hundred year period. Looking at an aerial view there is really no way to determine what it once was but speculation is extreme.

These are the things you can see while studying for an online masters in philosophy, the things that will give you a better look at what people did that may lead to a philosophical understanding of the ‘why.’ You can look at what people did and then postulate how that fit their culture within a timeframe. That’s what liberal studies are all about and why at some point in every student’s academic career he or she should take to the road – an education in itself.