General education – a new direction
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- General education – a new direction
- Creator
- French, Sidney J.
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1968
- Rights
-
- Abstract
- From The Journal of General Education.
- Fulltext
- GENERAL EDUCATION - A NEW DIRECTION It has always puzzled me to try to understand our aca demic mentality. Ideally, we agree that general and special education should supplement each other. Practically, we find ourselves in verbal con flict, in which general edu cation usually comes our second-best. Tradition is not on its side, nor is prestige. Today a teacher’s value is too often measured by the num ber of grants he brings to the institution and the smallness of the time he devotes to teaching. Certainly general education must take some of the respon sibility for its present uneasy position. We have not done a very good job; we have not lived up to promises. We have put things to gether in a kind of crazy quilt fashion. We have denounced survey courses as superficial but in effect have gone right on using them. We have set up thousands of high-sound ing objectives for our courses while paying little or no at tention to the real residues the student may carry away from them. Frightened by the bogy of standards, we have made our courses diffi cult instead of challenging and interesting. Like the rest of higher education, we have spoonfed our students with well organized lectures, con trolled their supposedly im mature minds in class discus sion, and given them little or no chance to discover the joy of learning for themselves or creating vital ideas of their own. I am more convinced than ever that we can produce better learning by doing less so-called teaching. As David Riesman puts it, “There is the paradoxical possibility that teachers are now too erudite and capable, for their students are given to feel that there is little left to discover for themselves... There is hardly any room in Panorama which students can outflank (their teachers) and gain the feeling of independence that comes in this way.” In a natural sciences, for example, the teachers have been too devoted to their subject matter to do a good job for the nonscientist. I have about come to the con clusion that this job in science for the nonscientist might be better done by a philosopher — or by a scientist-philoso pher-historian team. Gra duate preparation of all kinds of college teachers, narrowly specialized as it is, gets in our way and keeps us from breathing life and meaning into liberal education. General education is not merely the victim of change; it is,also the victim of its own blundering, philandering, and of its efforts to gain academic erudition. But let us not over look its successes. It has opened the doors to experi mentation, to better ways of dealing with the vastness of accelerating knowledge, and to better teaching. It has pro duced many fine programs and kept hopes alive for teaching more vital goals. Lt has by no means com pleted its mission, nor has it failed in its mission. Those who strangle it to provide more time for specialization are focusing merely on a brief moment of the present. Yes, we need technicians and spe cialists. We also need in these same human beings those who can see, think, and evaluate the possibilities of the future in terms of the swift-moving present. Our pressing problems are not technical; they are human. When we are willing to take a close look at the needs of our college product, when we are willing to quit build ing curriculums for the con venience of faculties and turn our attention to the student — how he learns, and .what we can do to help him help himself — when we recognize that we as teachers have only a humble place in the learn ing process as the starters and promoters of self-discovery and self-achievement, we will not need to worry longer about any conflict between breadth and depth. It will take care of itself. We can achieve this by doing less teaching, thus providing op May 196S portunity for more learning. At this moment, one can see ahead only a hazy continua tion of the present trend. There is only the mad drive for specialization and more education, whatever its na ture. Continuing down this oath indefinitely can lead on ly to debasing the academic currency. General education needs to take a new direction. It has spent too much time revising and tinkering with curricu lums and too little effort sti mulating and inspiring stu dents. Our curriculums must relate more closely to life, to change, and to students. I have said many times that general education curriculums should be torn up and thrown awav even five years. Only in this way can they retain vitality. We need to reduce and sim plify our objectives and bring them closer to life. The stu dent today is merely jumping through hoops to get that co veted degree. Yet we think we are providing him with an education. If it is true that students no longer trust any one over 30, we need to take a long hard look at what is wrong with us and our system. They have good reason to distrust us. Both the curri culums and the teaching of today are highly seasoned with nineteenth-century fla vor. Yet, conceptually, acce leration has carried civiliza tion well into the twentyfirst century. We have long needed more meaningful preparation of college teachers, not only for general education but for all fields. It is not enough today to be able to talk and to know one’s subject well. This kind of handout teaching reaches the lowest level of efficiency if we are talking about real education. Most desperately we need experimentation in new ways of teaching as reflected in student learning, which is after all, the only reason for teaching. We need a few institutions willing to go all out in experimenting, with the focus on the learning teaching process and not the teaching-learning process, in an honest and sustained ef fort to release all students from our present stupid sys tem of credit accounting and the debased state of class 10 Panorama room-handout bondage. Stu dent independence and free dom to learn, even if the pro cess is slow and painful, must be the major objectives. I am convinced that there is private-venture capital avail able to any institutions will ing to strike out boldly in this direction. Tt is time for this kind of experimentation on a major scale. The place for it is in general education, where what we cover is of much less importance than what the student does with his own mind. We have all the accessorv apparatus for moving rapidly ahead, such as teach ing machines, workbooks, textbooks, and audiovisual tapes to- provide essential handout learning of facts. The teacher must be free for the ‘critical job — to raise Questions (but not to answer them to guide, prod, lead, r’-ovoke, and counsel as need ed. This, in my judgment, is the essential direction general education must take — to lead the way up and out of an educational stalemate with massive efforts to blast a new road toward intellectual free dom. A former speech teach er, now an eminent states man-leader, said recently: “Most of all we need an edu cation that will create the educated mind — not simply a repository of information and skills, but a source of creative skepticism, charac terised. by a willingness to challenge and be challeng ed. ... Jt means a funda mental improvement in the quality of our education.” But there is no wav to im prove the quality of Amer ican education without seek ing ne'v directions. We have come close to the end of con ventional improvements — better lectures, better discus sions, better textbooks, better facilities. Experiment after experiment has shown us that students learn about the same amount of subject matter whether they are in large classes or small classes, lec tures or discussions, before living teachers or viewing audiovisual tapes, before machines or using workbooks. We have juggled with such experiments long enough. Our job should be to set students free, not to tighten covalent bonds to teachers. May 1968 11 We have preached this for years; now it is beyond high time for the action phase. We need a few courageous institutions willing to take this kind of risk, not to in troduce safe independent honors programs for the selected few, but to go all out for freedom from tradi tion and bondage — fpr all. Team teaching, with its strong counseling segment and its emphasis on the stu dent, provides an ideal starting/place. The situation indicates the need for a sharp change in direction. Someone must make the change boldly; someone must support it generously; someone must produce this minor miracle quickly. The alternative for general education is gentle demise. The alternative for all of higher education is a half-life of useless residue. There is already a wide-open door — through well con ceived existing programs of general education, and some willing leaders. — Sidney J. French in The Journal of General Education. THE ABLE RULER “No man is fit to govern great societies who hesi tates about disobliging the few who have access to him for the sake of the many whom he will never see.” — Thomas Babington Macaulay 12 Panorama