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Losing the idea of liberal education
It has become commonplace to lament the decline of liberal education in the United States. We criticize colleges for abandoning their mission, for becoming excessively corporate, on the one hand, and for pandering to students with inflated grades, country club-like amenities, and dumbed down, unfocussed curricula, on the other. We also criticize students for approaching their college years with a strong careerist instinct and little else--increasingly, college students seem more interested in gaming the system than in getting an education, more concerned with engineering a transcript and a resume that will open doors for them, than with broadening their intellectual horizons and discovering what it means to be a thinking adult citizen of the world.
The Association of American Colleges and Universities has been fighting this trend for a decade now, devoting a great deal of time and energy to a campaign it calls "Liberal Education and America's Promise: Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College." As part of that campaign, the AACU studied the attitudes of high school and college students toward higher education.
The disturbing but ultimately unsurprising results are summarized in The Chronicle of Higher Education. They are worth quoting at length:
Today's high-school students are largely uninformed about the college curriculum and uncertain about its demands, while the resources available to guide their preparation for college life are very limited. Students do not regard high-school guidance counselors or colleges themselves as trusted sources of information. Operating in a vacuum, they have little understanding of the kinds of learning that either their future employers or their faculty members see as important. While some believe that the college degree is little more than a "piece of paper," most students do recognize that something important goes on during the college years. The problem is they don't really know what that "something" is or ought to be.We asked our focus groups to examine a list of college outcomes and identify which are the most and least important to them. The rankings produced across the groups are remarkably consistent. What students most value is their own preparation for professional success. They believe that such things as maturity, work habits, self-discipline, and time management are what they need to achieve in college. A few of the college juniors and seniors also recognize the importance of communication, problem solving, and critical thinking. Whether they rank those outcomes high or low, however, none of the students we interviewed identify specific courses, assignments, or activities that help prepare them to meet those outcomes.
The most alarming finding has to do with what both current and prospective students consider the least important outcomes of a college education: values and ethics, an appreciation of cultural diversity, global awareness, and civic responsibility. When we further asked students about the importance of deepening their knowledge of American culture and history, of cultures outside the United States, and of scientific knowledge and its importance in the world -- three staples of a strong liberal education -- each ranked at the bottom of desired outcomes.
Today's students understand that college is important to their success in the work force, but they do not recognize its role in preparing them as citizens, community participants, and thoughtful people. They do not expect college to enable them to better understand the wider world; they view college as a private rather than a public good.
As a result, they also seem to believe that learning is mostly about individual development and simple information transfer. That is why they tend to think that if they have already studied a topic in high school (for example, American history or science), there is no logical reason to ever study it again. Moreover, we found little difference between the outcomes valued by high-school seniors and those valued by college students. That suggests that colleges are not conveying the importance of liberal education to their students.
Indeed, our focus-group findings indicate a profound lack of understanding about the tradition of liberal education. We found that high-school students are almost entirely unfamiliar with the term "liberal education" and that college students are only somewhat familiar with it. Some of those who have heard the term tend to associate it only with traditional liberal arts and sciences, rather than with a broader philosophy of education important for all students, whatever their chosen field of study. Some think it occurs only in the arts and humanities, rather than in the sciences. Among those students who associate liberal education with learning critical thinking, almost all see it only as something that happens in those parts of the curriculum considered "general education," rather than in detailed studies in particular fields.
The confusion goes on. For some students, a liberal education is one that is politically skewed to the left. As one college student put it, it is "education directed toward alternative methods, most often political in nature." Another college student remarked, "Initially, I thought and heard of 'liberal' as in Democrats and politics. I am conservative, so my initial reaction was to brace myself, set up a defense of my values."
As speculation mounts regarding what Margaret Spellings' commission will actually do, the AACU study stands as an important document about the present state of higher education in this country. Spellings justified her decision to form the commission in part by citing concern about America's ability to compete with other countries. The AACU report suggests that one reason American students are less rounded and less prepared for life after college is, ironically, that all they really do in college is try to prime themselves for life in the global economy. The intellectual impoverishment of that approach to undergraduate education, which increasingly sees college as a time for resume building, networking, and personal advancement, is taking its toll on a generation of young people who emerge from their undergraduate years well versed in gamesmanship but not particularly knowledgeable about anything else.
Will the Spellings commission focus exclusively on bottom lines--costs, rising enrollment numbers, the need to prepare a globally savvy workforce--or will it take a broader, longer, less quantifiable view of what American higher education needs? Whatever the commission does, it will be telling, indicative of the national mood and, possibly, of a national willingness to abandon the core principles of a style of learning, and a kind of education, that is clearly disappearing from this country.
Posted by acta online on September 21, 2005 at September 21, 2005 10:07 AM
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Erin O'Connor is onto something in her discussion of this week's Chronicle of Higher Ed article reporting a study of college student's career orientation and lack of interest in a liberal education, and how a liberal education may well be at odds with ... [Read More]
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Comments
All too obviously the cost of a liberal education causes most students to leave school with a substantial debt. There was a time in California in which schools had little or no tuition. Sure we have a different societ and different expectations for ourselves, but what a difference it would make if we had a society that showed how it values education by making it much less expensive.
Posted by: J Fergus at September 25, 2005 01:39 PM
It seems to me that one very obvious reason why college students discount the importance of learning "values and ethics, an appreciation of cultural diversity, global awareness, and civic responsibility..." is that they are sick of the attempts at brainwashing by professors who live in some alternate reality and therefore simply shut them out, except insofar as they must complete class assignments. In this age of 24/7 media coverage and instant communication, college students aren't as naive as they once were; they can no longer be easily persuaded by the left-wing polemics of their teachers.
I do think it's sad that there is not more intellectual energy on campus, but I think that love of learning is pretty much completely extinguished in most students by the end of high school due to extreme standardized test fatigue.
In trying to leave no child behind, American education is heading toward leaving them all behind--except for a few lucky students in elite private schools who are exempt from state tests and can therefore be taught in an interesting and enlightened way.
Posted by: carly at September 25, 2005 02:07 PM
Carly, no student who belongs in a university ought accurately be described as a victim of attempted brainwashing. Nowhere in our system of higher education is anything resembling "brainwashing" attempted, much less accomplished, and attempts by the right to portray education as the brutal imposition of ideology on fundamentally passive students is beyond slander. Conversely, despite what you read at ACTA and elsewhere, reports of left-wing polemics are greatly exaggerated. Most university professors, whether they skew left or right, are well acquainted with professional responsibilities and are for the most part interested in dialogue, engagement, criticism (both ways) and argument. That we seem to see less and less of it means that an argument that never should have won the day--that college education is an extended exercise in brainwashing--has become accepted wisdom. The perceived dangerousness of a "liberal arts" education has always been a problem--it is impious and has always risked impiety, it is criticial of established ideas as a matter of course, it is often at odds with received notions of who we are and of the good. The radical right would apparently quell all this impiety and turn Universities into little reform schools. Well, I say let's put the "liberal" back in "Liberal Arts" and keep it there.
Posted by: bp at October 4, 2005 11:41 AM
Never mind all that, bp or Carly.
When nobody tells undergrads til they *get* to college that, for liberal arts majors, most work in one's field requires one to go to grad school (as seems depressingly the case as I scan "careers" pages), well...
No, in that case, we could care less about such things as you argue about.
We're back on the hamster wheel we were in high school attempting to reach college, chasing grades, GPA, and class rank so that we can make it to grad school (in this case), as American colleges and universities produce way, way, way more undergrads than the field one's major would indicate could possibly accommodate in graduate schools or the rare jobs that don't require graduate degrees.
Which, personally, I could take...If I had been told this would be my lot *before* I came to school, instead of finding out long *after* the fact. Instead, I was told that the hamster wheel only lasted through high school; that, in college, I could afford to risk taking courses I might not score well at.
Posted by: Penta at October 6, 2005 05:46 PM