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Navigating the curriculum
Metaphors abound for the problems with undergraduate education today--and they tell us a lot about both what's wrong and what we need to do to improve. For example, a consensus is emerging around the idea that the system of broad distribution requirements is fundamentally flawed--and that consensus is visible in the imagery used to critique that system. ACTA, for example, frequently describes curricula that privilege choice over content and cater to niche interests at the expense of comprehensive and coherent coverage as "cafeteria-style" systems. The American Association of Colleges and Universities has done the same. And while ACTA and the AAC&U may disagree about the best way to resolve the problem, their common language shows that they are essentially agreed about the nature of the problem. Such agreement in turn speaks volumes about how far we have come in our discussion about what college education in the twenty-first century should be.
So how do we create a curriculum that is more meaningful and coherent than the non-curriculum embodied in endless, equivalent choice? And what kinds of metaphors can we adopt to help us imagine a workable solution? Writing at the Wall Street Journal, GMU law professor Peter Berkowitz offers answers to both questions. In "Our Compassless Colleges," Berkowitz argues that what higher education needs is direction, a sense of mission. And, in introducing the image of the compass, he offers us a guiding metaphor for the kind of guidance colleges and universities ought to begin providing.
Noting that the "veneer of structure" offered by broad distribution requirements really just "reinforces the lesson that our universities have little of substance to say about the essential knowledge possessed by an educated person," Berkowitz makes a strong case for a return to core curricula based on shared, essential, cumulatively acquired content. He's dissatisfied, for instance, with Harvard's recent reworking of its curriculum because it does not do enough to ensure that students receive a genuinely liberal education.
"The new requirements add up to little more than an attractively packaged evasion of the university's responsibility to provide a coherent core for undergraduate education," he argues; "Harvard's general education reform will allow students to graduate without ever having read the same book or studied the same material. Students may take away much of interest, but it is the little in common they learn that will be of lasting significance. For they will absorb the implicit teaching of the new college curriculum -- same as the old one -- that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know."
What bothers Berkowitz about Harvard's new core is that it recreates the problems it was ostensibly crafted to resolve. Under the new system, students still have more choice than direction, and they will still focus their energies on minute study of specialized areas at the expense of acquiring a broad, solid understanding of the disciplines. And such systems, Berkowitz believes, are not only irresponsible, but positively harmful in their encouragement of sloppy habits of reasoning.
Berkowitz is at his most eloquent when he describes why liberal education matters, and why only a firm core curriculum shaped around shared, defined content is adequate to the mission of liberal education. His words are worth quoting at length, since they are behind a subscription wall:
... properly conceived, a liberal education provides invaluable benefits for students and the nation. For most students, it offers the last chance, perhaps until retirement, to read widely and deeply, to acquire knowledge of the opinions and events that formed them and the nation in which they live, and to study other peoples and cultures. A proper liberal education liberalizes in the old-fashioned and still most relevant sense: It forms individuals fit for freedom.
The nation benefits as well, because a liberal democracy presupposes an informed citizenry capable of distinguishing the public interest from private interest, evaluating consequences, and discerning the claims of justice and the opportunities for -- and limits to -- realizing it in politics. Indeed, a sprawling liberal democracy whose citizens practice different religions and no religion at all, in which individuals have family heritages that can be traced to every continent, and in which the nation's foreign affairs are increasingly bound up with local politics in countries around the world is particularly dependent on citizens acquiring a liberal education.
Crafting a core consistent with the imperatives of a liberal education will involve both a substantial break with today's university curriculum and a long overdue alignment of higher education with common sense. Such a core would, for example, require all students to take semester courses surveying Greek and Roman history, European history, and American history. It would require all students to take a semester course in classic works of European literature, and one in classic works of American literature. It would require all students to take a semester course in biology and one in physics. It would require all students to take a semester course in the principles of American government; one in economics; and one in the history of political philosophy. It would require all students to take a semester course comparing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It would require all students to take a semester course of their choice in the history, literature or religion of a non-Western civilization. And it would require all students to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language of their choice by carrying on a casual conversation and accurately reading a newspaper in the language, a level of proficiency usually obtainable after two years of college study, or four semester courses.
Such a core is at best an introduction to liberal education. Still, students who meet its requirements will acquire a common intellectual foundation that enables them to debate morals and politics responsibly, enhances their understanding of whatever specialization they choose, and enriches their appreciation of the multiple dimensions of the delightful and dangerous world in which we live.
Such a core, Berkowitz observes, still leaves plenty of room for students to complete majors and to explore other interests through electives. So the argument that core curricula cannot be implemented without overloading students' schedules is a non-starter. The real issue, he notes, is faculty and administrators who object to core curricula because, at bottom, they are less fun for professors to teach. Core courses require faculty to function as generalists, and they also reduce their opportunities to teach courses on the specialized material closest to their hearts. Still, that's no argument at all when one considers that the purpose of college is not to please teachers, but to prepare students for life.
So who is in a position to effect change, when those who set the curriculum have a vested interest in keeping it the way it is? Not parents and students, Berkowitz admits. But brave presidents with vision and spine are, and so are trustees who are committed to student-centered reform. The trick is for the public to make it clear to higher education leaders that they know how directionless higher education has become--and to insist that our colleges and universities learn to use a compass.
Posted by acta online on September 11, 2007 at September 11, 2007 02:17 PM
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