General education is usually understood as a well-rounded education that provides students with a certain level of general knowledge across the spectrum of academic disciplines and trains them in reasoning and communication skills. Often, general education is also described in terms of students’ personal development, enabling them to learn citizenship, attain moral grounding, and develop critical thinking ability and the habit of learning. Typically, general education is described as having a dual aim: preparing students both for informed, active citizenship, and for further academic studies. In this sense, general education is often seen in contrast to specialized training for a particular profession or career.
Often the term general education is used to describe a particular element of college education in the United States. Other educational systems internationally contain similar elements, but they are often affiliated with the secondary rather than tertiary level of education and referred to by different names, such as Allgemeinbildung in the German-speaking world. This entry provides an overview of general education, then explores general education in a higher education context, both in the United States and Europe.