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Higher education is in a transitional state right now. The big changes that are happening often seem unguided, chaotic, even misguided. Outsiders may see "progress"; insiders—especially the well-educated—see cluelessness and folly.
Here are three recent pieces related to our benighted transition.THREE WISE WOMEN AND A FISH. Stanley Fish’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times (A Classical Education: Back to the Future) discusses three new books about higher education and what it should be. The impressive authors of these books each recommend a classical or traditional education—and seem inclined to dismiss or ignore the new technologies and recent education reform philosophies (stressing endless testing, maximizing idiotically defined “outcomes,” etc.).
Martha Nussbaum, philosopher, classicist, ethicist and law professor, starts from the same place. She critiques the current emphasis on “science and technology” and the “applied skills suited to profit making” and she argues that the “humanistic aspects of science and social science — the imaginative and creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought — are . . . losing ground” as the humanities and the arts “are being cut away” and dismissed as “useless frills” in the context of an overriding imperative “to stay competitive in the global market.” The result, she complains, is that “abilities crucial to the health of any democracy” are being lost, especially the ability to “think critically,” the ability, that is, “to probe, to evaluate evidence, to write papers with well-structured arguments, and to analyze the arguments presented to them in other texts.”
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For Nussbaum, human development means the development of the capacity to transcend the local prejudices of one’s immediate (even national) context and become a responsible citizen of the world. Students should be brought “to see themselves as members of a heterogeneous nation . . . and a still more heterogeneous world, and to understand something of this history of the diverse groups that inhabit it.” Developing intelligent world citizenship is an enormous task that can not even begin to be accomplished without the humanities and arts that “cultivate capacities for play and empathy,” encourage thinking that is “flexible, open and creative” and work against the provincialism that too often leads us to see those who are different as demonized others.
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[Diane Ravitch’s] conclusions, backed up by exhaustive research and an encyclopedic knowledge both of the literature and of situations on the ground, are devastating. The mantra of choice produced a “do your own thing” proliferation of educational schemes, “each with its own curriculum, and methods, each with its own private management, all competing for . . . public dollars” rather than laboring to discover “better ways of educating hard-to-educate students.” The emphasis on testing produced students who could “master test taking methods, but not the subject itself,” with the consequence that the progress claimed on the basis of test scores was an “illusion”: “The scores had gone up, but the students were not better educated.” A faith in markets produced gamesmanship, entrepreneurial maneuvering and outright cheating, very little reflection on “what children should know” and very little thought about the nature of the curriculum. [The third author is Leigh A. Bortins.]DEFENDING THE HUMANITIES: ACCOUNTING FOR THE "BIG SHAGGY." Be sure to check out David Brooks’ brief and eccentric defense of the Humanities (History for Dollars) also in yesterday’s New York Times. Excerpt:
But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.
The Big Shaggy? Well, read Brooks.
…E-textbooks might be the most-talked about and least-used learning tools in traditional higher education. Campus libraries and e-reader manufacturers are betting on electronic learning materials to overtake traditional textbooks in the foreseeable future, but very few students at traditional institutions are currently using e-textbooks, according to recent surveys.
Not so in the world of for-profit online education. Online for-profits such as American Public University System and the University of Phoenix have for years strategically steered students toward e-textbooks in an attempt to shave costs and ensure a more reliable delivery method that, in the context of online education, might seem to make more sense. At Kaplan University's law school, digital texts account for around 80 percent of assigned reading. At Capella University, e-textbooks are an available and accepted option in nearly all 1,250 courses. In for-profit higher education, more than any other sector, the traditional book is becoming obsolete….
One reason, of course, that the for-profits can manage to embrace e-textbooks is their top-down philosophy and reliance on vulnerable adjuncts. They can simply command that instructors use a particular book, an e-book.And that is that.
Observe our benighted future. Another unpromising, confused unintended experiment.
