Welcome to the AT LAST Blog ...
Our first posting for your consideration is a review of the recent book by Kevin Carey titled "The End of College". Here is a link to the review for your consideration. I strongly encourage you to consider checking out the book and reading it for yourself.
Most of the key observations Carey makes about college can be applied to secondary schools as well ... especially in this day when high schools are looking more and more like colleges [or perhaps it is the other way around] with fancy facilities, social scenes and big-time sports ... with what Carey claims is "limited or no learning".
Although Carey is looking very broadly at the attributes of colleges that will be places for real learning in the future, it is apparent that he sees real value in a liberal arts education at a college that functions on a "human scale" providing an "authentic community" that is consciously focused on a single goal ... learning.
As parents facing questions about our children's education, we tend to look forward just "far enough" to get us to the next corner ... but that is not "far enough". Carey challenges us to look to the "end" of formal learning to understand more of what lies ahead. If we will follow his advice, then we can "work backwards" to the very beginning [elementary school] ... so we can prepare each step of the way towards accomplishing our educational goals.
Remember the purpose of AT LAST is to bring together schools at all the various stages along the educational journey ... the learning chain ... so that each can better understand and perform its own specific role ... the specific links it must forge ... with the schools that precede it and with those that will follow it ... so that the student can experience the steady, sequential learning steps that make the destination of a low cost, high quality liberal arts education possible for everyone !!
So think it thru ... then share your thoughts ... and help us forge the links for liberal arts learning ... at last.
tandem [Latin for ... finally ... or ... it's about time],
Chaerephon
ReplyDeleteBecky ElderSeptember 11, 2015 at 7:18 AM
I had a wonderful moment yesterday to report. I have been a long time fan of Oliver Sachs, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and "Awakenings", the wonderful story of the post WWI encephalitis epidemic victims awakened by Sachs discoveries in NY around 1950. His legacy of stories about the brain and the personalities that give context to those brains has been shouldered by a '60's rocker, turned neurologist named Daniel Levitin. His science is what Sachs' stories could not include lacking contemporary scientific tools. Together they begin to show us the vitalizing, truth-producing methodology, over time, of the liberal arts applied in language and science. History is recording an event for posterity. Science is the ability to observe, repeat and quantify the event. Both disciplines require the skills of the trivium to do their different but integrating work of making sense of the world around us.
Daniel Levitin was on the radio yesterday during a time I was able to listen and get on the phone to ask a question of him during the program. His topic was the effect of our condition of information overload on the brain and what kind of brains it is beginning to produce. His explanation is that we are becoming less and less able to work at our industry or humanity. Change is required. Small is a place to alleviate the bombardment. My question was about the development of children who are in the throes of this overload. I did mention that we run an school in the preface to my question and his quick reply is that the forms of school need change and that subjects are not as essential as how to learn.
I was encouraged that this renown scientists response meets where we as the AT LAST Consortium find ourselves now, rethinking forms and content in training children so that cultural renewal is the outcome. Forms that are small and local, content that is limit and emphasizing how to learn not expecting to learn everything at once and helping families to produce, as they are designed to do, the good fruit of thoughtful people who must, necessarily, deal with the myriad of problems life will send their way.
It is good to hear echoes. There are many. It would be enough to hear them from antiquity and divinity but to hear them on the radio was heartening.
My next post will be, when time permits, on the changes in form and funding of schools to accomplish the task of cultural renewal, especially my interest in charter schools and current legislation including an education panel that has been formed for the 2016 legislative session. This is not I place I enjoy, but it is a reality in our work to find the resources that we need. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteWhy College Is Not a Commodity
By Gary Gutting
What is college for? We typically answer this question by citing a variety of purposes, of which liberal education is only one. Most other goals — marketable skills, moral and social development, learning how to learn — are tied to the demands of employers. Yes, young people need all of those qualities. But, apart from liberal education, our best colleges — say, the top 100 major research universities and the 50 best four-year colleges, which are our models of undergraduate education — aren’t an efficient way to provide them.
These institutions are built around their faculties: the remarkable array of physicists, biologists, economists, psychologists, philosophers, historians, literary scholars, poets, and artists who do cutting-edge, highly specialized scholarly and creative work. Such scholars may be superb as teachers, but they are far from a cost-effective source of job training. Even if we include liberal education as a goal, colleges do not need such high-powered faculties to teach undergraduates. People dedicated entirely to teaching, with no special interest in research but with master’s degrees in their subjects, could do an excellent job.
Given the role and the nature of its faculty, the only plausible raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture: a world of ideas dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically. In our society, this world is populated mainly by members of college faculties. Law, medicine, and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as "learned professions," deploying practical skills that are nonetheless rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding.
Support for our current system of higher education makes sense, therefore, only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential. Otherwise we could provide job training and basic social and moral formation for young adults far more efficiently and cheaply. There would be no need to support, at great expense, the highly specialized interests of tenured academics. Colleges and universities have no distinctive purpose if we do not value highly the knowledge and understanding to which their faculties are dedicated.
Many colleges — for example, branches of state universities and some liberal-arts colleges — participate in this project to a lesser though still significant extent. Others, like community colleges, have quite different goals, more akin to the job training provided by high schools and trade schools. But recognizing the diverse goals of various colleges does not affect the central role of intellectual culture in our premier institutions of higher education.
There have been societies that sustained intellectual culture without universities (ancient Greece and Rome are clear examples). But most of our scientific research and almost all work in the humanities takes place in colleges; and increasingly, colleges are where poets, novelists, artists, and musicians are trained and employed. For us, the tie between intellectual culture and university life is so close that separation would destroy both.
Further, centering intellectual culture in colleges has a distinctive advantage. Specialists need contact with intelligent and challenging nonexperts. Otherwise, submerged in the complexities of their advanced research, they will lose sight of the general human significance of what they are doing. This is the wisdom of making universities not just research institutions but also centers of undergraduate education.
The rest of this article is available through me by e-mail, only. The defense is for the cost of schools that try to offer "everything" instead of schools that offer tools to learn about everything. My oldest son, an American History professor at a well known liberal arts college, is at the heart of this debate. We might be on different sides, at this time. However, what is true in his perception or mine is not important, finally, change is underway. We will all watch and do the work required in the form that settles in.
ReplyDeleteContact me for the entire article.