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which rests on literacy, shared values, common understandings, an appreciation for diverse
points of views and respect for traditions. As a curricular schema, the liberal arts have since
been reconceptualized as the relationship between disciplinary and integrated studies for
those who want to more fully understand their world and their place in it. With the ever
greater specialization of the disciplines, this effort at connection and integration comes to be
called, in many contexts, “General Education”. In a nutshell, Cohen & Brawer (1987) contend
that “General Education was the conversion of the liberal arts to something practical” (p.11),
a definition that is particularly pertinent in relationship to professional and technical training.
The Report of the Task Force on General Education at Harvard University (2007), for example,
defines “Liberal education” as “an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry undertaken
without concern for topical relevance or vocational utility”. Instead of focusing on what to
learn as noted in the liberal arts discourse, liberal education is defended as a philosophy of
academic pursuit and a type of pedagogical approach. In contrast to professional training
that emphasizes conformity to the professional community under study, the aim of liberal
education is to unsettle presumptions and induce self-reflection by “teaching students to think
critically and analytically, by exposing them to the sense of alienation produced by encounters
with radically different historical moments and cultural formations and with phenomena that
exceed their and even our own [teachers’] capacity fully to understand” (p.2).
GE is defined as one distinct component of liberal education that “is taught in a distinctive
way and in the service of distinctive goals” with the objective of helping students “understand
and appreciate the complexities of the world and their role in it” (Harvard Report, 2007).
Consistent with the account given by Cohen & Brawer (1987), GE is the public face of liberal
education that serves the goals of preparing students for civic engagement, acculturation,
transformative capacity to change and ethical deliberations. Based on these articulated goals,
the Task Force proposed the subjects constituting the GE curriculum for Harvard students
(2007). With the launch of the GE initiative at the dawn of the undergraduate curricular reform
in Hong Kong, it is noteworthy that the relationship between the concepts of liberal education
and General Education is articulated along the same line of thinking (Xing & Ng, 2013).

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