 |
| If this doesn't say "institution", what does? |
Right now, I am receiving a “liberal arts” education, but what
what is that exactly? The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) defines a liberal arts education as one that
“prepares [students] to deal with complexity,
diversity, and change . . . provides students with broad knowledge of
the wider world . . . [and] helps students develop a sense of social
responsibility”. But is the use of “liberal” used in the
purely liberalistic sense (I don't even want to know what the word
art is doing in there)? No, in fact I would argue the “liberal”
education I receive at my esteemed university would be much better
classified as a “conservative” education. We love to throw
around the words learning institution
quite
a bit, but if Michigan is really an institution, doesn't that mean my
university is trying to preserve rather than innovate?
The
fact is, I am still assessed in a very similar way to those before
me; I write essays, do problems, read articles and books, and take
tests. These are the very same things that my parents and my
parent's parents did when they attended college. If technology,
science and the world around us is changing so much, why isn't the
way that I am educated changing as well? This class has taken a stab
at innovation, by using a game structure, but it's mostly a facade
behind which hides the same content and assessment as an introductory
political science course at any other university. All of this simply
raises the question, what does innovation look like?
Take,
for example, the movie Accepted. The basic plot line is a senior
named Bartleby is rejected by all traditional universities, so he
creates his own fake one to please his father. Everyone who applies
is accepted and students get to make up their own classes.
Imagination rules the day at the South Harmon Institute of
Technology. The movie climaxes at an accreditation hearing where
Bartleby laments the traditions and stagnancy of the traditional
institution, and supports South Harmon's creative approach.
This
is a truly liberal education; the students get to do whatever they
want, and end up loving what they do. Obviously I am not advocating
that the University of Michigan, or any university at all adopts this
education scheme, but it does raise some interesting ideas. In the
first piece we read for this course, Louis Menand writes that
“independence
of mind is tolerated in college, and even honored, but students have
to master the accepted ways of doing things before they are permitted
to deviate”.
It seems to me like this deviation comes in graduate school when
students get to pick their own topic, with nearly no restrictions, to
research. Certainly we get freedoms here and there, I got to write
this blog post on whatever I wanted for example, but to graduate I
have to take a very specific set of classes in one particular field.
There
are certainly problems with some sort of open educational system like
that in Accepted. The idea of regulation comes to mind; currently
our university certifies that we do indeed know something.
However, that certification could easily fall onto business who hire
individuals through technical interviews and such. The media keeps
telling us that America doesn't have enough STEM workers, but I'd
wager that many students are turned off of these degrees because the
rigors of going through the current education system. Much of what
we “learn” today in school is knowledge held by computers that we
could access whenever we needed it, and all the numbers could be
crunched by a computer much more efficiently than we can by hand.
Day after day I see students struggling in the university's Math Lab
doing problems that they will never need to know how to do, because
computers have obsoleted 99% of any math that a non-math major will
need to do. Conrad Wolfram (I'm sure anyone who has taken a math course recently is familiar with the name) puts it well in his TED talk about this
subject.
In
the end, I think the current education system handicaps students by
forcing them to learn things simply because “that is how it has
always been done”. That kind of “liberal” arts education
destroys the individual in favor of a classical system and I believe
underutilizes the power of technology. We need to stop being forced
to learn what is unimportant and be allowed to harness the full power
of technology.
I had not really thought about the higher education system in that way, but now that I do I agree with your points about our system facilitating tradition rather than innovation. It does seem odd that teaching methods have not changed much in recent history. But I am not sure how a college in which we are able to harness the full power of technology would work.
ReplyDeleteBy more fully utilizing the technology around us we would be creating a situation in which technology could work independent of humans. For instance, if technology advances enough to supersede our abilities as humans then what good will we be? We will merely be button pushers and allow the computers to do everything.
I agree with you, Christopher, when you say that we are being forced to learn things because "that is how it has always been done." When we first talked about Menand, I definitely thought of Accepted as well. It really does show a liberal education because you, yourself, are free to learn what you want, in whatever way you want. I think this is sometimes a better way of going about learning because every person is different in how they learn. Some are visual, some need to write things down, some need to hear things repetitively. I don't think most, or any, higher institutions really measure up to the word liberal when it comes to their liberal arts degrees. The problem with all of this is that in society today, the majority of people can only get a job if they have a degree from a higher institution. And now it's gone even farther where we need not only an undergraduate degree, but a masters or other graduate degree. It does make sense that some regulation is needed, and I think making a change and figuring out how to give students more freedom while still maintaining some sort of regulation is difficult. Lots of people just don't like the idea of change. It would also be difficult to change how universities are because there are so many of them.
ReplyDeleteChristopher,
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point that the way our colleges teach us change very little over the years. You made a great point about this class, that although it is constructed like a video game, we still have aspects found in every other class such as essays, reading quizzes, and structured group projects. The blogging aspect is relatively new, but even now many classes at Michigan incorporate blogging. I think the idea of a liberal arts education holds true to its name however. While the way we learn things may not change over time, this could be simply because this is an effective method of education. The things we are being taught fit the liberal arts label because we are learning things "liberally" in that we discuss things that they wouldn't have even just 30 years ago. Take for example, the piece by Ira Young profiling gender roles. This is something that would not have been studied in many colleges 30 to 40 years ago. I agree that our learning methods are stagnant, but the educations themselves are forever evolving.