New Definition for Liberal Education

katonahmom · January 11, 2007, 12:32pm

"College Learning for the New Global Century", a report released Wednesday by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, praises the program for freshmen at Wagner College because its aim is to move beyond counting class hours or community service hour to see all of the connections between disciplines, and between disciplines and the real world. "This approach to liberal education is based, in part, on learning communities, in which students take a pair of courses together and then work in a local community that relates to the courses."

According to Inside Higher Ed, "the report outlines curricular goals for all colleges, but they are not of the two semesters of science, two courses in writing variety. Instead they are four broad essential learning outcomes,? with the idea that different kinds of institutions would assure these outcomes in different ways. Generally, the outcomes would encourage rigor of preparation, interdisciplinary and team learning, and links between experiences in and out of the classroom."

The report also lauds Bard College,for doing away with traditional majors and having students focus on broad, multidisciplinary topics, leading to a senior project, Richland College of the Dallas Community College District for developing academic enrichment programs, on themes such as global studies, that students may take on top of traditional majors and The University of Rochester, for adopting a series of programs to make entrepreneurship a skill that is reflected throughout the curriculum.

"The general theme is that there is far too little of the sort of college education that is needed. Carol Geary Schneider, president of the AAC&U, termed it a ?stunning shortfall? in what students do in college and said that only a very small minority of students are benefiting from this type of education. Colleges need to be providing students with ?a compass? for learning, rather than ?narrow training programs,? she said.

Schneider and others who spoke at a briefing on the report stressed the extent to which their ideas were consistent with what business leaders want from college graduates. And they released poll data to back up that assertion. While there are certain subject matters about which employers polled want to see colleges stress more (science and global issues), most of the areas on which they want more emphasis relate more broadly to team work, the ability to think critically, and problem solving skills.

Asked to identify areas on which colleges should place more or less emphasis, business leaders didn?t name a single area for less emphasis. The following table shows areas on which they wanted more emphasis.

Proportion of Employers Seeking More Emphasis From Colleges on Various Skills:

Skill % Seeking More Emphasis

Concepts and developments in science and technology 82%

Teamwork and collaboration 76%

Applying knowledge to real world settings 73%

Effective oral and written communication 73%

Critical thinking and analytic reasoning 73%

Understanding global issues and their impact 72%

Ability to locate, organize and evaluate information from multiple sources 70%

Ability to be innovative and think creatively 70%

Ability to solve complex problems 64%

Ability to work with numbers and understand statistics 60%

Understanding the role of the United States in the world 60%

Integrity and ethics 56%

Understanding cultural values and traditions 53%

Civic knowledge and participation, and community engagement 48%

Proficiency in a foreign language 46%

Knowledge of democracy and government 42%

A companion poll of recent college graduates found a high degree of overlap in their priorities as well.

Schneider and others involved with the new report said that keys to achieving these goals were engagement of students with faculty members and a move away from the approach of focusing only on one subject area at a time..."

<a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/11/aacu%5B/url%5D">http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/11/aacu</a>

originaloog · January 11, 2007, 1:39pm

Education is littered with experiments which are touted in jargon filled articles but fail to deliver in the classroom. Two prime examples today are learning communities and interdisciplinary curricula. Color me skeptical.

dadofsam · January 11, 2007, 2:11pm

I love it! Businsses want the colleges to emphasize teamwork training, creative thinking skills, problem-solving skills and "concepts and developments in science and technology" (whatever that is) way above ethics and way way above knowledge of democracy and our goverment.

Just produce those those drudges ready to work in teams. They don't need to know any subject (maybe it's better if their minds aren't cluttered with anything, especially useless stuff like history or sociology - leaves 'em freer to think creatively). And think of all the cost savings in fees to consultants who teach these skills now.

Better except engineers and the like from this list, though. They actually have to be able to do something when they're hired out of college.

hereshoping · January 11, 2007, 3:14pm

Bravo, dadofsam! This is the same "outcome based" education which has been the scourge of secondary public ed; renamed "peformance based" education when people started catching on to it; and currently renamed "standards based" education. So it's now being pushed up into higher ed and maybe even overseen by Margaret Spellings and the DOE in the future! Unbelievable that people continue to fall for this stuff.

MarathonMan88 · January 11, 2007, 3:18pm

A couple of things struck me:

with the possible exception of "teamwork and collaboration," you could take all of the areas singled out by business (and by extension by the report) for emphasis, string them together, and you'd have a pretty reasonable paraphrase of the "educational precepts" of nearly any liberal arts college written 20-30 years ago.

As Dadofsam points out, the most conspicuous omission from the list is one that's been central to liberal education: in depth knowledge of at least one discipline (and this includes not only its subject matter, but also its modes of thought and discourse).

Finally, most of the departments and programs that have been added to colleges and universities in the recent past are interdisciplinary by their very nature. Things like global/international studies, environmental science, area studies, women's studies, etc. are often departments of specialists from different disciplines.

I'm not so sure I see much new in this "new definition."

MarathonMan88 · January 11, 2007, 8:39pm

Just by chance, I came across references to revisions in Bates College's curriculum; at least at first blush, they seem very much along the lines suggested in the report in the OP.

<a href="http://www.bates.edu/bates-ed-legislation-introduction.xml%5B/url%5D">http://www.bates.edu/bates-ed-legislation-introduction.xml</a>

<a href="http://www.bates.edu/bates-ed-legislation-brief.xml%5B/url%5D">http://www.bates.edu/bates-ed-legislation-brief.xml</a>

The cruxes of the curricular changes, at least as far as I can tell from the web site are:

<ol>
<li>a requirement for two "concentrations" outside the major. Concentations resemble, but are not the same as minors, since they consist of only 4 courses, there are two of them instead of the more conventional one minor, and more significantly, because the four "courses" can include non-classroom experiences like volunteering, playing in the orchestra, etc.</li>
<li>a quantitative requirement (math) with real teeth</li>
<li>more required science courses, though still only 2, including a lab science. not exactly unusual among peer institutions</li>
<li>3 writing intensive courses (up from a freshman writing course requirement if I read correctly between the lines?)</li>
</ol>

Much of this, and the thinking behind it, seems interesting and thoughtful, though hardly radical. I would love to hear from any Bates folks with their take on this curriculum and the process that led to it. (I will cross post on the Bate forum.)

katonahmom · January 12, 2007, 7:57am

Marathonman, interesting points and reference to the curriculum changes at Bates.

Btw, the pdf version of the report is quite long but makes fascinating reading. Familiar names in higher ed. are involved in this project - such as Derek Bok of Harvard. The gist of it all is a call for a common framework and remapping of liberal education such that "students will still concentrate in selected fields because, while not sufficient, studies in depth are important. They will certainly need a rich mix of arts and sciences courses in order to learn about the wider world." The report goes on to clarify this point "Because competence is always related to context, students need to work on the liberal education outcomes in their major field(s) as well as their precollegiate and general studies. This report does not recommend teaching ?skills? apart from content and context. This report is a call to ensure that students have every opportunity to really develop these essential capabilities, whatever they study and wherever they go to college."

Here are a few passages from the report:

"Movement toward this needed remapping has already begun. The long-standing boundaries between the professional fields and the arts and sciences have started to blur. Engineering and technology fields have forged the way. The Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology now looks for evidence that programs are teaching students to integrate their liberal arts competencies with their technical studies. Similar developments are emerging across many professional fields, and on many campuses. Simultaneously, many arts and sciences departments are placing new emphasis on ?practical experience? and ?applied learning? through internships, service learning, student projects, and community-based research. Many campuses also are inventing a ?vertical? or four-year framework for general education, with the explicit goal of fostering new connections between students? specialized studies and their broader learning about science, cultures, and society.
Students themselves are adding to this remapping by choosing double majors or majors and minors that freely span the ?liberal arts/ professional? divide. These forward steps notwithstanding, many of the most imaginative efforts to forge new connections between the liberal arts and sciences and professional studies still hover on the margins. Higher education needs new leadership and new determination to move these promising developments from the margins to the center.

Engaging Twenty-First-Century Realities
Breaking out of the academic silos is a good beginning, but much more needs to be done in order to align teaching and learning practices with the realities of the new global century. In the twentieth century, both school and college studies were organized, reflecting the sensibilities of the industrial age, in terms of modular parts: disciplines, subjects, courses, credit hours. But this modular curriculum, organized a century ago and still largely intact, has become increasingly dysfunctional. The disciplines are taught as ends in themselves, and so too are most courses. Yet students are taking courses in many different disciplines, and often at two or more institutions. For many, the result is a fragmented and incoherent educational experience rather than
steady progress toward deeper and more integrated understandings and capacities.

"Because of these inherited
dividing lines, millions of
college students are routinely
compelled to choose either
a liberal arts and sciences
pathway or a professional
pathway just to fill out their
college applications."

The expected curriculum is usually defined, often with enabling state regulation, in terms of specific ?core? subjects in school and specific general education categories in college (see fig. 6). State ?distribution? requirements for students? general education courses are the far-reaching legacy of the mid-twentieth-century view that equated liberal education with general education, and assigned it to the first two years of college.

But the frontiers of knowledge, both in scholarship and the world of work, now call for cross-disciplinary inquiry, analysis, and application. The major issues and problems of our time?from ensuring global sustainability to negotiating international markets to expanding human freedom?transcend individual disciplines. The core subjects provide a necessary foundation, but they should not be taught as ends in themselves. From school through college, students
also need rich opportunities to explore ?big questions? through multifaceted perspectives drawn from multiple disciplines. Even in terms of the old modular curriculum, where each subject has been implicitly defined as a self-contained area of learning, the curricular pathways from school to college have become chaotic and redundant. Thanks to the vigorous promotion of Advanced Placement courses and dual enrollment (college courses for high school students), as many as three million students are already taking ?college-level?
courses before finishing the twelfth grade. At the same time, because of
the shortcomings of school preparation, at least 40 percent of all college
students have to take at least one remedial course in college, essentially
revisiting material that they should have learned in high school. Calls for aligning high school outcomes with college-level skills abound. But the learning students need for this new global era cannot be achieved simply by rearranging the existing patchwork of ?core courses? at the school level and ?general education requirements? at the college level. To help students achieve the essential learning outcomes, it will be necessary to spend time, across all levels of school and college education, revisiting the larger purposes of education and rethinking the kinds of connections across disciplines and levels of learning that will best prepare graduates for a complex and fast-paced world.

Key Questions to guide School?College Planning
The following questions, keyed to twenty-first-century challenges, are intended to spark the needed school?college dialogues?among educators, across disciplines, with employers and policy leaders, and with the wider public. Ultimately, these questions call for the mapping of more purposeful curricular pathways, from school through college and across the disciplines...

Liberal Education & America?s Promise | AAC&U
Global integration is now our shared context. The potential benefits of global interdependence are extraordinary, but so too are the challenges. Wealth, income, and social power are dramatically unequal within and across international boundaries. We are reminded daily of the clash of cultures, histories, and worldviews. The globe itself is fragile and vulnerable as are our shared civic spaces. These global challenges will be with us for the foreseeable future. Yet today, less than 10 percent of four-year graduates are leaving college globally prepared.30 The United States is a world power. But it provides most of its students with a parochial education...

"American college students already know that they want a degree.
The challenge is to help students become highly intentional about
the forms of learning and accomplishment that the degree should
represent.

In today?s academy, many students are not following any comprehensive academic plan at all. Rather, many are working to cobble together a sufficient number of courses that will enable them to meet the required number of credits?typically 60 at the associate?s level and 120 at the bachelor?s level?necessary to earn a degree. Setting goals for educational accomplishment based on the essential learning outcomes can change this haphazard approach to academic study. Each student will know what is expected, and each student can construct a plan of study that simultaneously addresses his or her own interests and assures achievement in the essential learning outcomes. Students will know before they enter college, for example, that they are expected to bring their communication skills?written and oral?to a high level of demonstrated accomplishment. As they work with mentors to plan a course of study, they will learn to seek out,
rather than avoid, courses in which extensive writing and/or oral presentations are required. The same principle applies to all the outcomes. By clarifying the intended forms of learning and their significance, and by helping students connect these broad outcomes with their own individual goals and areas of study, educators will help all students become more intentional about their learning and more likely to reach high levels of accomplishment.

The National Leadership Council recommends that the essential
learning outcomes be used to guide each student?s plan of study and
cumulative learning and, further, that their achievement be the shared
focus of both school and college.

Students should begin intensive work in each of these areas of learning?knowledge, skills, responsibilities, and integrative learning ?as early as middle school. And they should understand that they will be expected?wherever they enroll, whatever their intended career,
and no matter how far they go in college?to attain progressively higher levels of competence in each of these key areas. Teachers, faculty members, and student life professionals should work together to help students understand why these outcomes are important, and how they are applied in work settings, civil society, and students? own lives."

<a href="http://www.aacu.org/advocacy/leap/documents/GlobalCentury_final.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.aacu.org/advocacy/leap/documents/GlobalCentury_final.pdf</a>

Interesting to note that Smith College is singled out as a pioneer "in integrating engineering education within a liberal arts education." Smith's Picker Engineering Program encourages students "to set their engineering studies in a larger social and global context" while emphasizing the "social, ethical, and professional responsibilities essential to successful practice in the field". The students bring this all together in a senior design project aimed to challenge them to use their societal as well as technical skills.

MarathonMan88 · January 12, 2007, 10:14am

Thanks, Katonahmom, for the great summary and link to the full report. Reading the full text really does cast this in a different light. The use of the term "learning outcomes" in the report is perhaps unfortunate, since that term has been tainted with guilt by association with standards-based testing and the No Child Left Behind Act. This report is really talking about something different, more like educational ideals or precepts, most of which seem relatively uncontroversial.

One of the main strands of the report, which is loaded with ideas, seemed to me to be an educational model that borrows the best aspects of both the liberal arts and pre-professional/vocational models. The report never frames it quite this baldly, but in a nutshell: make liberal arts studies more practical, and less theoretical, abstract, or "ivory tower"; and orient pre-professional education more toward high-level thinking and less toward specific skills. As you get to the specific ways of implementing these ideals, though, it's clear which way the authors are tilting. The experiences that they advocate are:

Freshman seminars, common intellectual experiences, learning communities (meaning course clusters on a common theme taught by profs. in different disciplines), writing-intensive courses, diversity/global courses and programs, service learning, internships, capstone experiences (like senior theses, seminars, etc.)

For those who don't want to wade through the whole 76-page, report, here's a link to a readable executive summary:

<a href="http://www.aacu.org/advocacy/leap/exec_summary.cfm%5B/url%5D">http://www.aacu.org/advocacy/leap/exec_summary.cfm</a>

dadofsam · January 12, 2007, 1:34pm

Reading the later posts makes me feel a slight degree better. The fact is that, even in the sciences, the borders between so-called disciplines ae being blurred and even totally obliterated, and everyone agrees that's good except for people who are flexibility disadvantaged.

However, I want to say that, as one who has worked in corporations for a few decades and taken a number of training courses, while I think that teaching college students teamwork skills and the like could be a good thing for a number of reasons, college faculty are for the most part totally unqualified to effectively teach or even attempt to impart such subjects (and may not want to be qualified).

When my then-current employer moved into the teamwork concept somewhat over ten years ago, every employee had to take one or two full weeks of solid teamwork training classes, and lots of followup was needed for the concepts and practices to take actual hold on behaviors (if they took hold at all). College professors have no training whatsoever in teaching this subject. From what I have heard, they may feel that they have accomplished this by requiring students to work on projects in groups rather than submit individual work. Well, let me tell you that this isn't teaching anyone to do anything except find ways to accommodate others so that the work gets turned in on time - but that's only a very small part of teamwork.

Likewise, professors are not equipped to teach creative thinking, except for a few who do it naturally.

And on top of that, unless businesses are prepared to help with efforts to teach students these skills - say by funding qualified teaching staff or courses - then these wish lists will go largely unfufilled except by accident and the businesses will continue to gripe that college graduates just don't have the necessary skills for today's jobs [and outsource work to countries with low labor costs where nobody cares about whether or not teamwork or creative thinking is taking place].

idad · January 12, 2007, 2:52pm

I am totally opposed to the notion that the aims of a liberal education are to prepare an individual for a job. I believe that short changes the student, it may canalize their interests and explorations in ways that sadly prevent them form coming in contact with the joy of being educated rather than trained. Andrew Abbott said it best:
[quote]
The reason for getting an education here—or anywhere else—is that it is better in and of itself. Not because it gets you something. Not because it is a means to some other end. It is better because it is better. Indeed this statement implies that the phrase “aims of education” is nonsensical; education is not a thing of which aims can be predicated. It has no aim other than itself.

...This argument rejects the common idea that the aim of education is to give you the skills to survive the rapid changes in the first-level materials of knowledge. That is because the skills change, too. Writing was a far more important skill a century or even half a century ago than it is today. We could move up yet another step by talking about formal education at a third level—education in skills of envisioning how to change skills. But every time we move up a level in this way, we are thinking less and less about the future and more and more about a kind of constant of intellectuality—a set of mental habits that are enduring qualities of a mind. To the extent that we escape the trap that historical change presents for concepts of education, we escape it by moving to a less and less temporally directed concept of education. We move from thinking about the future to thinking about an enduring quality of the present. Any serious concept of education seems inevitably to root itself in a state of being that endures—one based in the perpetual present of the self.

The problem of the steady change of ideas (or the perpetual need to imagine new ideas) also demolishes the notion that the essence of education consists in mastering certain contents or materials. You are not little birdies sitting in the nest with your mouths open to receive half-digested worms of knowledge regurgitated by the faculty. Education is not about content. It is not even about skills. It is a habit or stance of mind. It is not something you have. It is something you are.

[/quote]

<a href="http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0310/features/zen.shtml%5B/url%5D">http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0310/features/zen.shtml</a>

garland · January 12, 2007, 3:02pm

I couldn't agree more, idad!!!

MarathonMan88 · January 12, 2007, 5:24pm

I certainly agree, but if anything, the thrust of this report, as I read it, is the reverse, namely that even students in pre-professional tracks should receive a "liberal" education, broadly conceived. Here's a key passage from the summary:

[quote]
But it [the stark division between professional degrees and liberal arts ed] is especially injurious to first-generation students who, the evidence shows, are the most likely to enroll in narrower programs that provide job training but do not emphasize the broader outcomes of a twenty-first-century education. To serve American society well, colleges, universities, and community colleges must take active steps to make liberal education inclusive.

[/quote]

katonahmom · January 13, 2007, 7:21am

idad, simply superb post that strikes to the heart of controversial issues embedded in this report, and others like it that attempt to grapple with the thorny public policy issues related to "the aim of a college education" and "what really matters in regard to a liberal education (to wit - George Leef's policy papers that I have posted in other threads). The joy of learning and rewards of critical thinking espoused by Abbot - and the need for a core curriculum that embodies these qualities are indeed what "successful" higher education is all about. This report touches directly on Abbot's assertion that education is not about content or skills but is a habit or stance of mind. Yes, indeed, but it seems to me that this report wants us to see content and skills as indivisible from habit and stance of mind.

This fundamental notion of liberal education is evident in the short snippet MarathonMan's quoted in his last post. The call here is to bolster a broad liberal education precisely because only this approach to higher education can prepare a student to confront a world in which work skills and pragmatic demands are constantly changing - a position that all in all does not at all contradict the U. of Chicago's philosophy.

These passages are from the full pdf version of the report:

"The world around us is being dramatically reshaped by scientific and technological innovations, global interdependence, cross-cultural encounters, and changes in the balance of economic and political power. Only a few years ago, Americans envisioned a future in which this nation would be the world?s only superpower. Today it is clear that the United States?and individual
Americans?will be challenged to engage in unprecedented ways with the global community, collaboratively and competitively. These seismic waves of dislocating change will only intensify. The world in which today?s students will make choices and compose lives is one of disruption rather than certainty, and of interdependence rather than insularity. To succeed in a chaotic environment, graduates will need to be intellectually resilient, cross-culturally and scientifically literate, technologically adept, ethically anchored, and fully prepared for a future of continuous and cross-disciplinary learning. Learning
about cultures and social structures dramatically different from one?s own is no longer a matter just for specialists. Intercultural learning is already one of the new basics in a contemporary liberal education, because it is essential for work, civil society, and social life. Scientific and technological learning are equally fundamental and may well determine the difference between those who are prepared to deal with change and those who are buffeted by it.
narrow Learning Is not Enough The general public?and many college students?continue to believe that choosing a ?marketable? college major is the key to future economic opportunity. Guided by this conviction, many students see study in their major field as the main point of college, and actively resist academic requirements that push them toward a broader education.

Many policy makers hold a similar view of career preparation, evidenced by their support for occupational colleges and programs that promise initial job readiness but not much else. Those who endorse narrow learning are blind to the realities of the new global economy. Careers themselves have become volatile.

"The world in which today?s
students will make choices
and compose lives is one
of disruption rather than
certainty, and of interdependence
rather than insularity."

From the American Century to the Global Century

Studies already show that Americans change jobs ten times in the
two decades following college, with such changes even more frequent
for younger workers.19 Moreover, employers are calling with new
urgency for graduates who are broadly prepared and who also possess
the analytical and practical skills that are essential both for innovation
and for organizational effectiveness:
? ?Employers do not want, and have not advocated for, students
prepared for narrow workforce specialties. . . . Virtually all
occupational endeavors require a working appreciation of
the historical, cultural, ethical, and global environments that
surround the application of skilled work.? (Roberts T. Jones,
president, Education Workforce Policy, LLC)20
? ?Intel Corp. Chairman Craig Barrett has said that 90 percent of
the products his company delivers on the final day of each year
did not exist on the first day of the same year. To succeed in that
kind of marketplace, U.S. firms need employees who are flexible,
knowledgeable, and scientifically and mathematically literate.?
(Norman R. Augustine, retired chairman and chief executive of
Lockheed Martin Corporation)21
? ?[The] curriculum needs to help students develop . . . leadership,
teamwork, problem solving, time management, communication
and analytical thinking.? (Business-Higher Education Forum)22
? ?[Business leaders are] frustrated with their inability to find ?360
degree people?. . . .? (Findings from 2006 focus groups among
business executives)23
? ?Integrated capabilities are the key to this industry?s future.?
(Keith Peden, senior vice president of human resources,
Raytheon Company, 2006)24

Using a business rather than an academic vocabulary, employers are
urging more?and better?liberal education, not less. Because employers
view innovation as their most important comparative advantage,
they seek to hire graduates who can think beyond the routine, and
who have the ability not just to adapt to change, but to help create it.
Responding to employer concerns, the engineering community is
already pioneering the approach to a twenty-first-century liberal education
recommended in this report. The engineers? goal is to graduate
what some are calling ?T-shaped students,? with the vertical part of the
?T? representing the traditional parts of an engineering degree, and
the crossbar pointing to competencies traditionally identified with the
?liberal arts??including ethics, global knowledge, intercultural literacy,
and strong communication and collaborative skills (see fig. 4). The ?T?
itself shows that these different capabilities need to be integrated so that
students can apply them in work and community settings.
Humanists may see similar potential in the letter ?H,? where the
crossbar represents field-specific knowledge and skills and the vertical
bars represent capacities related to context and community. Whatever
the model, the message to students is the same. Employers do not want
?toothpick? graduates who have learned only the technical skills...

EMPLOYERS? VIEWS
?At State Farm, only 50 percent of high school and college graduates who apply for a job pass the employment exam?. Our exam does not test applicants on their knowledge of finance or the insurance business but it does require them to demonstrate critical thinking skills and the ability to calculate and think logically. These skills plus the ability to read for information, to communicate and write effectively, and to have an understanding of global integration need to be demonstrated. This isn?t just what employers want; it?s also what employees need if they are to be successful in navigating the workplace.?
?Edward B. Rust Jr., chairman and CEO,
State Farm Insurance Companies

?To be successful in global companies like Siemens, business managers must
be able to navigate local market differences, seek opportunities for collaboration between businesses, and promote cooperation across functions. A solid foundation in the liberal arts and sciences is necessary for those who
want to be corporate leaders.?
?George C. Nolen, president and CEO,
Siemens Corporation, New York

"Using a business rather than an academic vocabulary, employers are urging
more?and better?liberal education, not less.? "

originaloog · January 13, 2007, 9:47am

idad, that sounds good but sounds like poppycock to my ears. The difference between being educated and being trained is largely in the mind of the student in most instances. And some professions require base level competencies to produce able professionals. In my field of engineering if the students do not learn these skills our buildings may collapse, roads will be unsafe, our gadgets will be unreliable and our aircraft will be more likely to fall out of the sky.

I do not consider any of my engineering students to be any less educated than their peers in the College of Liberal Arts. Why should having an understanding existencialism be considered superior to understanding the theory of indeterminant structures and compressible laminar flow, knowledge which keeps the plane you fly up in the sky? They certainly are different but one is not superior to the other in my mind.

Are some of my students better writers and communicators that most of their LAC peers? Of course. And many students improve these skills during college by completing both some of the engineering and gen elective course work. In fact I suspect that most engineering student have an opportunity to develop team project commication/cooperative capabilities than their LAC counterparts.

I am not anti-LAC by any stretch of the imagination, encouraging my son to apply to more LAC's than research universities(4 vs 3) even though he was leaning towards a compsci major. And I agree that their curricula provide their students with a wonderful education.

What I find objectionable is the snobbery which some, not all, LAC proponents exhibit when they consider that education in the liberal arts is somehow superior to other academic endeavors. And the disproportionate numbers of LA students majoring in economics and the bio sciences is indicative that their training, er education, has one eye firmly fixed on a post graduate professional objective.

idad · January 13, 2007, 1:16pm

I don't see where the study of engineering, or any major for that matter, somehow prevents one from experiencing what Abbott is talking about. What prevents it is a hard to describe campus culture and careerist mindset that minimizes broad education and focuses either on the on the job or simply the next objective "on the way up." It is not simply a matter of taking a Core or being in this or that course; students can be in the same courses and have widely differing experiences. It is about the culture: the expectations (and practices) of the school, faculty, peers, and ultimately society of what being educated is and its value.

I would always tell my kids that they knew "education" was happening when they looked at a flower, a sunset, an catch in the outfield... and had thoughts about it in ways they never had before and found themselves as intrigued by those thoughts (questions, observations, etc.) as they were about what the object that occasioned them in the first place. The more this happened at plays, movies, walks in the forrest, concerts, science museums, sporting events, etc. the broader their education was becoming. The purpose of school was to have thoughts about the world around them that they would not, or could not, have without going to school, or more precisely being educated. I think this is what Abbott is talking about and to what other posters have alluded in advocating a liberal education. I have no trouble envisioning an engineer or anyone else doing this.

Training is for graduate or professional school. For my kids, the blessed four years of undergraduate life I want to be about education.

garland · January 13, 2007, 6:29pm

Idad: I get what you are saying, and again, I agree with you.

As soon as one starts saying "well, business leaders want such and such" I don't care what it is they want. It's changed by being presented as an education to fit a role, no matter how nicely that's couched.

I don't give a flying fig what any business leader wants to see in my kid's education. That's not why we're sending him there; that's not why he wants to be there.

I recently read a beautiful commencement speech about the meaning of what it means to be being educated, as given by the novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College:

<a href="http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html</a>

A small quote that doesn't really sum up the beauty of the speech, but kind of summarizes what he's getting at about education:

[quote]
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts clich? about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

[/quote]

interesteddad · January 14, 2007, 1:33am

[quote]
As soon as one starts saying "well, business leaders want such and such" I don't care what it is they want. It's changed by being presented as an education to fit a role, no matter how nicely that's couched.

[/quote]

In fairness, I think the survey businesspeople were expressing the same desire for college educations as you are. That list was decidedly non-vocational in focus.

originaloog · January 15, 2007, 12:31am

"let them eat cake' Even if MA never uttered these words they are indicative if an important truth.

We need to admit that the Asia and the subcontinent is producing engineers, mathematicians, chemists, physicists and computer sciencetists in far greater numbers than American colleges and univesities. In the common vocabulary they are eating our lunch!

In the global world in which we live is the generalist liberal arts education neccessarily superior to the "carreer track" of the engineers, doctors, scientists populating our colleges and universities? Perhaps we could categorize them as having their lunch eaten.

Most of my students go on to be active, high level participants in local, regional, state, and national life. Perhaps they may not be able to appreciate a sunrise or sunset as poetically as a LAC grad BUT they are able to compete with an engineer in Seoul or Mumbai. And I would wish them to be able to be inspired by that sunrise or sunset.

But in order to survive as an economic power, we need to admit that it is as important to educate engineers as it is to educate philosohhers. It is important to educate prospective mathmaticians as it is to educate classicists.

They are all important but neither is inferior or superior to the other.

dadofsam · January 16, 2007, 3:57pm

Katonahmom's post included these quotes

[quote]
To succeed in a chaotic environment, graduates will need to be intellectually resilient, cross-culturally and scientifically literate, technologically adept, ethically anchored, and fully prepared for a future of continuous and cross-disciplinary learning.

Moreover, employers are calling with new urgency for graduates who are broadly prepared and who also possess the analytical and practical skills that are essential both for innovation and for organizational effectiveness:
Employers do not want, and have not advocated for, students prepared for narrow workforce specialties. Virtually all occupational endeavors require a working appreciation of the historical, cultural, ethical, and global environments that surround the application of skilled work.... To succeed in that kind of marketplace, U.S. firms need employees who are flexible, knowledgeable, and scientifically and mathematically literate… [The] curriculum needs to help students develop . . . leadership, teamwork, problem solving, time management, communication and analytical thinking. [Business leaders are] frustrated with their inability to find "360 degree people".

[/quote]

As I wrote, it's all well and good for businesses to want this type of college graduate, but there are two little difficulties. The first is that many people, including many college students, have a little bit of a difficult time attaining these rather high abilities. The second is that for the most part, college faculty, who are in the first place not necessarily trained to be top-quality teachers in general, do not know how to teach these particular skills. One of my acquaintances, a professor of industrial psychology, may have this ability, but to expect it from faculty in literature and other liberal arts, who are educated in their specialty is a bit much.

Unfortunately this situation can give some business leaders the chance to bemoan that current graduates of American colleges can't make their companies competitive enough in the global marketplace and use that as an excuse for various actions.

katonahmom · January 19, 2007, 7:50am

To quote from dadofsam's well-taken post: "... it's all well and good for businesses to want this type of college graduate, but there are two little difficulties. The first is that many people, including many college students, have a little bit of a difficult time attaining these rather high abilities. The second is that for the most part, college faculty, who are in the first place not necessarily trained to be top-quality teachers in general, do not know how to teach these particular skills."

This Inside Higher Ed piece takes a look at what is going on at Vassar and Bard, and, at the same time, seems to speak directly to Dadofsam's post re: team teaching:

"When talking about teaching and the curriculum, a major theme of the professors, deans and provosts involved in the Association of American Colleges and Universities is that it is time to shift attention away from debating whether students should take X semesters of the humanities and Y years of science, and to focus instead on qualities of learning that students need. By focusing on those qualities, instead of fighting over numbers, the theory goes, colleges will be improving education.

For students to have both the rigor of critical thinking and the substance they need for the changing world, the AAC&U argues in various reports, students also need exposure to multidisciplinary approaches to learning — that don’t sacrifice on subject matter, but that promote “integrative” education, combining disciplines, combining academic and non-academic experiences, and so forth.

As association members gathered in New Orleans this week for the group’s annual meeting, much of the discussion revolved around ways to promote such education — acknowledging that the realities of campus politics (and budgets) can pose obstacles.

One session focused on how team teaching could move beyond typical models and could grow generally. Stuart L. Belli, a professor of chemistry at Vassar College, spoke about the importance of having course content that explores both the science and the policy issues at deep levels. He said that in his training, right through graduate school, such perspective wasn’t provided. “What went on in a beaker, I completely understood,” he said. But if science students today are similarly limited — or if social science students don’t get anything about science — they will have been given an inadequate education.

Team teaching is one obvious answer, he said, but participants at the meeting noted some of the tougher questions that approach raises. For the team to be a true team, both professors should be involved in every class, even if in some of the classes the instructors are more akin to students. When deans are drawing up budgets, however, they may not want two tenured professors to have one of their class assignments be teaching a seminar of 15 together.

One solution being tried at Vassar is the “course intersection,” in which two courses might merge for two weeks. Belli teaches analytic chemistry. A colleague teaches urban studies. A two-week period of both courses, planned in advance, might focus on lead poisoning issues, with the chemistry professor teaching the science and an urban studies colleague focused on policy. Students’ assignments would force the non-science students to do some serious science, while the chemistry students would focus more than they might otherwise on the policy implications of scientific findings.

Similarly, Vassar has created the Multidisciplinary Team Enhanced Teaching Method, in which various professors agree to participate in other courses, sometimes briefly and sometimes for more significant periods. This approach could involve two professors or five or more.

Hal L. Holladay, a professor of English at Simon’s Rock College, of Bard College, offered another way to encourage cross-disciplinary teaching. Simon’s Rock has changed the capstone course concept — in which seniors take an in-depth seminar — so that these courses involve two professors from different disciplines. In one such course, a philosophy professor and a mathematics professor explored the impact of mathematics on political theory. In another, a psychologist and biologist examined biology debates at the start of the millennium.

Students learn in part by seeing professors learn from other professors, Holladay said. “We model ignorance,” he said. “When I teach with a physicist, I show what I don’t know.”

While all of this creates more work for professors, Holladay said it was essential for students. Disciplines “are not representative of the world or of nature,” he said.

Also at the meeting Thursday, AAC&U and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching released a joint report, “Integrative Learning: Opportunities to Connect,” which examined how 10 colleges have focused on encouraging students to be more deliberate and ambitious in their learning, outside of traditional categories of classes and disciplines.

“The undergraduate experience is often a fragmented landscape of general education, concentration, electives, co-curricular activities, and for many students ‘the real world’ beyond campus,” said Mary Huber, a senior scholar with the Carnegie Foundation who co-directed the project. “An emphasis on integrated learning can help undergraduates find ways to put the pieces together and develop habits of mind that will prepare them to make informed judgments in the conduct of personal, professional and civic life.""

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