I am sitting at my desk on a sunny (!!) afternoon, contemplating the start of a new semester and reconnecting with the gang at FIT. There is a desire to start a new semester with something startling, not just the same old, same old, and I have a lot to choose from that is inspiring though not startling...I am still working on that. But a colleague and friend sent this Ted.com video to me, and I would encourage you to watch it. Liz Coleman is confronting some of the major issues in education now, something that should matter to those of us who are faculty, but also to our students.
She is reflecting on the shape of the college curriculum in an age of change and danger. She is reflecting on the role of the liberal arts in "fixing" the environmental and social problems that are at the base of our conversation about sustainability. In too many cases, the liberal arts are relegated to a backwater of what is known as "Gen Ed" referring to the core courses that all students must take to make them socially "literate." Increasingly we are seeing that these courses are both critical and that they are failing to make a literate, critical thinking, socially just and socially responsible public. In fact, she is talking about the power of the liberal arts to make us citizens, in the old fashioned sense, responsible for equity and environment and social justice.
There are many take-aways from this video; in fact so many that I need to read the transcript, but here's a few for starters:
"In truth liberal arts education.. no longer exists in this country. We have professionalized liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century, the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment...The progression of today's college student is to jettison every interest except one. And within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less; this despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things."
"Questions such as, 'What kind of a world are we making? What kind of a world should we be making? What kind of a world can we be making? are treated with more and more skepticism, and move off the table."
"This brew--oversimplification of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of academic integrity-is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good, between intellectual integrity and human freedom..."
"Our public education, once a model for the world, has become most noteworthy for its failures. Mastery of basic skills and a bare minimum of cultural literacy eludes vast numbers of our students."
"..[The fact is that] no one was drawing any connections between what was happening to the body politic, and what is happening in our leading educational institutions...Jefferson knew what he was talking about when he said, 'If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of covilization, it expects what never was and never will be.'
This betrayal of our principles, our decency, our hope, made it impossible for me to avoid the question, 'What will I say, years from now, when people ask, 'Where were you?'"
"Being overwhelmed is the first step toward dealing with difficult
issues at a scale which makes a difference. When you're overwhelmed, you have
two things: your mind, and other people. Use them both, and change the
world."
I feel slightly torn about all of this. I myself am the product of a liberal arts education, with a degree in Sociology/Anthropology (note the generic term and not one of the innumerable specializations listed in her talk) from Carleton College - an old-school, don't declare your major until the end of sophomore year and even then you won't have to take more than one class in your major per term on average so you're free to take Science Fiction Film or Introduction to Screenwriting or Anarchy 101 (yes, seriously). The opportunity to take drawing and printmaking and an independent study in photography is a huge part of the reason that I'm an interior designer today - even though my BA falls officially within the social sciences.
ReplyDeleteSo part of me certainly understands her desire to create a new liberal arts curriculum full of interconnectedness between issues of integrity, environmental responsibility, technology and the like - especially one which would give students the freedom to explore ideas and interests without having to frame them as belonging exclusively to some arcane specialty. On the other hand, the one thing that Carleton did not do, even remotely well, was prepare me for what everyone ensconced in their protective undergraduate liberal arts shell must eventually face: the "real world."
It was only those fellow classmates who continued directly into graduate programs - and who mostly went on to become teachers themselves - who had any kind of handle on what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. If there is a failing of modern liberal arts education, and of course I can only speak from my own experience, it's that it doesn't adequately prepare students in the gaining of a career. Which is often what a specialty can offer.
So maybe I'm missing the point entirely. But while I don't disagree with much if any of what she's saying, I don't really see this as a consequence of liberal arts education. Maybe university education, certainly a lot of graduate-level education, but not in my little corner of the educational world. It was the interdisciplinary nature of the SIE program which drew me to it, and I can draw a fairly bold and uninterrupted line between it and my experiences at Carleton.