Education that turns learners, the subjects of education, into ready-made products will be lonely education and make learners lonely. Liberal arts education in junior colleges should be emphasized from an existentialist perspective. It should move beyond focusing solely on connecting technology and people and pursue connecting people and people and the world. Unlike major education directly related to employment, liberal arts education should not passively accept vocational skills and listed information, but should move in the direction of pursuing a reciprocal relationship with me, you, and the world through encounters with people. Buber's philosophy of encounter can provide meaningful directions for students' subjectivity in learning. Uniform education that is vertically enforced by instructors cannot foster students' subjectivity. Through pedagogical encounters, educators should also become beings who help students grow as subjects and live actively in the world, rather than being educators who are knowledge transfer workers so that they can recognize their own existence and live. Learners at junior colleges are made into technicians or professionals, but rather than being ‘technologists’ or ‘professional’ human-being, they are technicians and professional ‘human-being’. As social beings, humans must develop the ability to judge what is good, good, right, and beautiful in the world. To do so, education that encounters rather than education that creates is required. Liberal arts education at junior colleges requires a cooperative identity that pursues encounters between independent people, rather than a dogmatic identity that only pursues individual technical acquisition and encourages competition with others. Through liberal arts education as encounter education, we can find meaning in loving ourselves, respecting others, and recognizing the world as a place of encounter and living.
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