The staff and faculty members of Kyushu University are united in their endeavors to provide education that meets the university's goal of "producing personnel who can play an active role as leaders in a variety of fields around the world". Society faces a multitude of diverse challenges, and in order to respond to its expectations and needs regarding university education, while cultivating personnel who can play an active role as true leaders in the international community, the university must provide increasingly wide-ranging, high-quality education in a systematic manner. As such, the university decided to carry out a restructuring process to create an integrated educational system with seamless transitions from the first year of education to specialist education and from specialist education to graduate school education. To this end, it established the Faculty of Arts and Science in October 2011.

The goal of KIKAN Education, which was launched in the 2014 academic year, is to create opportunities for learning that provide students who have only just entered the university with a variety of options before they embark on their specialist education, thereby cultivating wide-ranging knowledge and broad horizons, while at the same time fostering the basic attitudes required to "learn how to learn" and "learn how to think" as active learners who will continue to learn autonomously throughout their lives.

The Faculty of Arts and Science is the organization tasked with delivering KIKAN Education. In such areas as aligning its curriculum, the Faculty of Arts and Science will form organic partnerships with schools and graduate schools, playing a managerial role in enhancing basic learning. Moreover, unlike the former School of Liberal Arts, the Faculty of Arts and Science will be managed with the participation of faculty members from throughout Kyushu University (a university-wide mobilization system). Accordingly, students will be able to come into contact with numerous faculty members with wide-ranging knowledge, diverse experience, and unique ideas from an early stage in their university education.

KIKAN Education consists of a learning program that provides first-years with basic learning techniques and core experiences, and a learning program that reinforces students’ abilities in their major fields while they pursue their specialist research from the second year onwards.