The larger and nobler goal of liberal education is that even as we engage students with everything from economic geography to biology to literature, they would begin to use these to figure out for themselves the good life they would want to lead and the good and just society in which they would like to live. And, thus, contribute to making the world a better place for all of us.
We accomplish that by questioning, especially within ourselves.
Thus, when students' essays include comments that reflect that internal inquiry, I get excited. I am not referring to any youthful and anarchic dismissive statements, but constructive exercises. While thinking about the economic transformation over the past couple of centuries, a student writes in an assignment:
Instead of taking advantage of what people before us did, we sit and watch television all day. ... I went home with a different mindset and started appreciating all the time I had to do homework, and when I thought I was getting bored I would just think of other activities to do because I should value the free time I have.Even if the student has already forgotten this and has gone back to the old ways, isn't it fantastic that the light shone brightly for those couple of days?
Another student notes in the context of the complex web of interdependent economic interactions in the world:
A lot goes into making our world livable, but many don't understand or think about these conveniences. Everyone should take an economic geography class so they too can understand how even small things are actually a big part of our world.BTW, such opportunities to examine life won't be possible in a typical "test" scenario, especially when students have to merely bubble in their responses, right? All the way from the K-12 system and into the undergraduate studies, our fascination with testing is simply killing learning.
I worry that students who have been brought up in a standardized testing environment will find it even more difficult to become thinkers and creative people. I am quite convinced that I am beginning to see that already in my classes.
The gap in what students are expected to know between high school and college is often thought to be vast. A newly released survey quantifies just how wide it is.Even as I worry about all those, a few students like these easily convince me that the future will be in safe hands. A future that, in a democratic society, will depend on citizens thinking about many, many important issues:
Eighty-nine percent of high-school instructors described the students who had completed their courses as "well" or "very well" prepared for first-year, college-level work in their discipline. But only about one-quarter of college faculty members said the same thing about their incoming students. The gap was similar when the survey was last conducted, in 2009.
“When we ask about the relationship of a liberal education to citizenship, we are asking a question with a long history in the Western philosophical tradition. We are drawing on Socrates’ concept of ‘the examined life,’ on Aristotle’s notions of reflective citizenship, and above all on Greek and Roman Stoic notions of an education that is ‘liberal’ in that it liberates the mind from bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world.” –Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, 1998We don't need fancy buildings with climbing walls to achieve these goals, right?
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| At the college where I did my undergrad No liberal education there! |
4 comments:
Perfectly said. But that's a little harsh on CIT - in their own way, each step of education made us what we are, even though on the face of it the lecturer may have droned on from a textbook. W elearn the lessons of life in many ways , don't we.
True ... we learn many, many lessons of life in many, many ways. CIT did provide me with plenty of lessons in its own way. And, yes, perhaps I am a tad harsh on CIT. But then I am harsh on my own college where I work too, and so am I even about our good ol' JHSS ... I think in these issues, my critical examination is an occupational hazard ;)
Right now the state and its testing partner states are working on "Common Core" standards. They are working on the role that Social Studies (right there may be the problem of k-12 we are forced to call it studies instead of the science that it is). It is a prudent time to make an appeal for more Social Science in the curriculum. Please consider drafting a letter from your department to Oregon Dept of Education to help protect what little we have. Did you know that we are supposed to teach the fundamental problem of scarcity to 5th graders, yet my 12th graders have never heard of it? It no doubt got pushed aside, like most of our discipline, by a teacher who has forced to focus on reading and math test scores.
Yes, that "Common Core" and teaching to the test is what the commentary that I had linked to was also about. It is crazy!
I grew up in an educational culture that placed a great deal of emphasis on testing. Now, I did very well--I am not complaining because I didn't do well on tests. But, I could never understand that emphasis on tests.
It was interesting when we had our 30-year reunion. If one were to measure a person by their professional success in life, then it was clear that all that testing didn't do anything good. If one were to measure a person by how happy people are in life, the testing was an even worse predictor. And, typically these are the two goals of education we work with, right: employment and economic productivity, and living a good life beyond economic parameters.
We then have to ask ourselves what is testing for, and what is education itself for? Oh, but these are the most controversial questions that one can ever raise in educational settings whether it is in India or here in the US.
Solutions to problems--at mundane everyday instances or the world's problems--require a lot more capacity than mere test-taking skills. While I don't have formal academic research to offer as evidence, my intuitive understanding has always been that the dominance of the US in the intellectual and artistic spheres (which then get reflected in the economic and military as well) was largely because of a system that in the past did not emphasize testing and that too standardized testing. Yet, we want to rapidly ditch that because testing has the appeal of greater economic efficiency--it is efficiency in the short-run, yes. But, my worry is that it is highly inefficient in the long run.
No point writing letters to the powers-that-be on these issues. As I have noted in my blog, it is not what you say as much as who you are when you say what you say. I, like most people, am a nobody when it comes to such issues ... But, in a Quixotic approach of tilting at windmills, I have been writing op-eds for nearly 20 years, including on education. I know that many among the powers-that-be read those op-eds. The (now former) Dean of the College of Education at my university more than a couple of times remarked about my education-related opeds. She is now the second in command at the state-wide level on education policy ... but, ...
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