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Core values
When the Spellings commission issued its report on the future of American higher education last year, ACTA criticized it for failing to address the question of what college students should know. "The report stresses the need to ensure that students graduate with the skills they need to function in an increasingly competitive global economy--but fails to address the fact that students don't graduate with those skills because the undergraduate curriculum is not designed to ensure that they acquire them," ACTA president Anne D. Neal wrote. "The report also fails to note that today's truly educated American needs more than skills--he or she also needs a strong grasp of what democracy is, what citizenship means, and why they matter."
Emphasizing access and accountability to the exclusion of curricular content, the report sidestepped an absolutely pivotal--and deeply controversial--piece of the puzzle. And, as such, the report perpetuated rather than resolved one of the defining problems of our era: our collective inability to decide what higher education is for.
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard computer science professor Harry Lewis agrees:
We have not come to agreement--indeed we have had little discussion--about the purpose of higher education. In the absence of any big concept about what college is supposed to do for students, both students and faculty members prefer the freedom of choice that comes with the elective curriculum. We would each rather do our own thing than embrace our collective responsibility for the common good. But the argument that students have nothing in common is false, and the conclusion that a college education should have no core is wrong.
Lewis reviews the usual arguments against core curricula--that it's impossible to implement one meaningfully, that students are too diverse to be brought together within a common educational program, that knowledge is expanding so rapidly that it is futile to try to distill what all students need to know into a set series of courses. Finding those explanations profoundly wanting, Lewis sees them less as good reasons for preserving the current model of diffuse, consumer-oriented distribution requirements than as transparent excuses for our national failure to maintain a strong sense of educational purpose.
"I stoutly oppose federal interference in the content of college curricula," Lewis writes. "But institutions of higher education have a social contract with America, and we are not holding up our end of the deal." More to the point, he adds, "We owe it to the country to teach our students how democracy works."
Citing Losing America's Memory, ACTA's study of American college students’ historical illiteracy, Lewis notes that our colleges and universities are failing to ensure that today's undergraduates understand what democracy is and what democratic citizenship entails:
More is at issue here than the dates in American history. Students need to develop a feeling for the preciousness of human freedom and self-determination, and the responsibility of citizens to act for the good of their country and not only in their personal self-interest. In college, they should learn how America's foundational ideas, of liberty and equality under the law, apply to the difficult problems with which it is struggling today. They need to learn that as citizens we have no one but ourselves to blame for our elected officials and their actions.
The basic point is made eloquently in Harvard's classic curricular report, General Education in a Free Society, written just after World War II, when civilization itself seemed nearly to have perished. Education, the report says, had to create "the common ground of training and outlook on which any society depends." The report states elsewhere, "a successful democracy (successful, that is, not merely as a system of government but, as democracy must be, in part as a spiritual ideal) demands that these traits and outlooks be shared so far as possible among all the people."
Of all forms of government, democracy most demands an educated, thoughtful citizenry. Our country is based on a concept, not on kinship. Poles will continue to be Polish as long as there is a Poland, but nothing holds America together except our intellectual legacy of democratic principles. If universities don't honor that legacy, our children will not inherit our nationhood genetically. They can receive it only through learning.
A former dean of Harvard College and the author of Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?, Lewis knows whereof he speaks. He writes from experience when he observes that while undergraduates are hungry for civics and U.S. history courses, faculty often are reluctant to teach such courses because they "are not trendy enough" and so don't have adequate professional cachet. He also witnessed Harvard's recent reworking of its general education program, a "difficult and thankless" process that resulted in a "striking effort to define a core."
As a result, Lewis observes, Harvard may mark the beginning of an important national reinvestment in core civics education. Thanks to those who believed in the importance of anchoring Harvard's curriculum more firmly in specific content, there is reason to hope that the new requirements will begin to fill the civic vacuum created by the previous system of broad, cafeteria-style distribution requirements. "Harvard's recently voted curriculum expects all students to study American institutions to prepare them for 'civic engagement,'" he writes; "It is too soon to know what courses will fulfill that requirement. But I cautiously hope that we are stepping back from our relentless relativism and indifference to civic responsibility."
For more on what core curricula are, why they matter, and where one can find them, see ACTA's The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum.
Posted by acta online at September 11, 2007 02:51 PM
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