General Education for the Information Society

The general education curriculum as we know it today is a product of the Industrial Revolution and evolved through most of the twentieth century as society evolved in response to industrialization, the two World Wars, and the Cold War.  Today, we are a generation into another revolution, the Information Revolution, which is again changing many aspects of the society.  Once again, higher education is facing a challenge:  how to prepare graduates to be successful not only in their professions but as citizens of a dramatically changed society.

In The Meaning of General Education (1988), I tracked the history of the idea of general education curriculum from its origins in the Industrial Revolution, through twentieth century innovations in response to the World Wars and the Cold War.  Thirty years later, the innovations that defined the Information Revolution are causing changes to society that are perhaps even more profound than those of the industrial era.  This piece will look at how we might best articulate the role of general education in the new global information society.

Looking Back:  General Education in the Industrial Era

      Before the Industrial Revolution, the American college served mainly to produce ministers and civic leaders.  Its curriculum was based in the classical liberal arts, what the Yale faculty in their famous 1828 report called “the discipline and furniture of the mind.”  Early on, innovations in this area were stimulated by the nation’s fascination with democracy itself.  Thomas Jefferson’s vision of democracy influenced the curriculum at the new University of Virginia, founded in 1824.  The Rockfish Gap Commission, on which Jefferson served, identified these goals for the curriculum: “To expound the principles and structure of government . . . To harmonize and promote the interest of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce . . . To develop the reasoning faculties of our youth . . .  To enlighten them with mathematical and physical sciences. . . And generally to form them to habits of reflection and correct action” (Rockfish Cap Commission, 1818/1961, pp. 194-195).  The Commission required all students to study law and politics but also encouraged students to choose courses among the eight schools.  At Harvard, George Ticknor, who had studied in Europe with a letter of introduction from Jefferson and who became one of the first four Americans to receive a Ph.D. from a German university, advocated a free elective system like that in Europe, eliminating any prescribed courses.

However, as the Industrial Revolution matured American higher education responded in several ways: 

·      American academics began to go to German research-oriented universities to earn their doctorates and returned with new interests in research, which stimulated interest in new disciplines. 

·      New interests in specialized areas of knowledge led to the growth of academic libraries. 

·      The Industrial Revolution created a demand for professionals in new field—engineering, business management, for instance—and universities responded by creating undergraduate and graduate programs in these new areas. 

·      New industries stimulated a dramatic increase in immigration to the U.S.; the federal government responded by funding new higher education institutions—normal schools—to train teachers to serve the children of these new citizens. 

·      Rapid urbanization also created a concern that the nation’s farmers would not be able to feed the growing urban population.  In response, the federal government funded new agricultural research and education programs, further diversifying the curriculum and creating new clientele for university research knowledge fostering the development of Agricultural Extension Services in the new land grant colleges.

·      The experience of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization stimulated the development of new research arenas—sociology and social psychology, for example—which also stimulated the diversification of the university’s research mission, new public institutions, and, in the process, new curricula. 

As higher education developed around new research and professional disciplines, general education evolved as well.  While general education maintained some of the elements of the old liberal education, it increasingly became the “breadth” component of an undergraduate degree that was focused increasingly on a wide range of professional and research majors.  The goal was to introduce students to the broad array of knowledge, helping them make a final choice of major and providing some “furniture of the mind” for their role as members of the broader society. 

The result was the “distribution” approach to the undergraduate curriculum, with the traditional humanities-based liberal education being taught largely through a series of introductory courses in literature, history, and philosophy.

The first half of the 20^th century saw experiments that took several different approaches to the humanities.  I discussed several of these in detail in The Meaning of General Education.  Here are some snapshots: 

*  Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University began as a response to the state of society at the end of World War I.  Its purpose, as stated in the 1920-21catalog, was to enable the student “to understand the civilization of his own day and to participate effectively in it” (p. 36). 

*The Experimental College, created by Alexander Meiklejohn at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s, with the goal, as Meiklejohn described it, of “the building up of self-direction . . . trying to create or cultivate intelligence, capable of being applied in any field of scholarly work.”  The primary task, he wrote, was “the education of common men . . .in terms of the kind of thinking which all men are called upon to do in the enduring relations of life” (p. 45).  The freshman year curriculum focused on ancient Greece, the foundation of classical humanism, while the sophomore year focused on 19^th century (and, later, 20^th century) American culture, with the idea that the program would help students understand how different people in different times approached similar problems.  One can argue that problem solving was the underlying goal of the curriculum.

*The Great Books Program evolved out of what John Maynard Hutchins described as a “permanent studies” program based on the idea that “it is impossible to understand any subject or to comprehend the contemporary world” without understanding the ideas contained in the great books of western civilization (p. 53).

The Cold War Response  By the 1950s—when the nation was fully engaged in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a contest that would be punctuated by the launch of Sputnik and the ensuing space race, and the first glimmers of the coming Information Revolution—the Truman Commission on Higher Education identified eleven principles or goals that summed up key characteristics of an educated person on the eve of the new era:

·      An ethical code of behavior

·      Informed and responsible citizen solving problem skills

·      Understanding global interdependence

·      Habits of scientific thought in personal and civic problems

·      Understanding others and expressing one’s self

·      Enjoyment and understanding of literature and the arts

·      The ability to create a satisfying family life

·      The ability to choose a useful and satisfying vocation

·      Developing critical and constructive thinking habits

These were ways in which higher education was expected to contribute to the quality of life in American society that went beyond simple preparation for a career (Kennedy, 1952, pp. 25-30).

The Nature of the Information Revolution

By the time the Truman Commission had finished its work, the roots of the Information Revolution had already taken hold.  While the Industrial Revolution began as a transportation revolution—steam-powered ships and railroads—the Information Revolution began as a communication revolution.  The first television station went on the air as early as 1928, and the first computer came in 1938.  However, the real revolution was sparked by the ability to network media.  The Soviet Union launched Sputnik—an experimental communications satellite that sent radio signals back to earth—in 1957; cable television, which first emerged in 1950, had moved to microwave networks by the early 1970s; public television and other national media networks moved to satellite in 1979.  When Mosaic, the first web browser, was developed at the University of Illinois in 1992, the old industrial society was transformed into a global information society.

            In 2000, Thomas Friedman published an expanded paperback edition of his 1998 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which looked at the ways in which globalization was replacing the Cold War as the dominant organizing principal of international politics, economics, and culture.   Writing two decades ago, Friedman described a new world order.  “Globalization,” he wrote, “is not just some economic fad, and it is not just a passing trend.  It is an international system—the dominant international system that replaced the Cold War system after the fall of the Berlin Wall” (p. 7).  Friedman defined “globalization” this way: 

“. . . it is the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before—in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into individuals, corporations and nation-states farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before” (p. 9).

            Globalization is different from the old Cold War era in several ways.  Friedman noted that, while the most frequent question in the Cold War era was “Whose side are you on?” the most frequently asked question in the global world is, “To what extent are you connected to everyone?” (p. 10).  Innovation replaces tradition.  The present/future replaces the past. 
“Nothing matters so much as what will come next, and what will come next can only arrive if what is here now gets overturned” (p. 11). 

            Notably, Friedman paraphrased German political theorist Carl Schmitt, writing, “the Cold War was a war of ‘friends’ and ‘enemies.’ The globalization world, by contrast, tends to turn all friends and enemies into ‘competitors’” (p. 12).  In the Cold War, influence and security were based on the power of the nation state.  In this new age, however, the power of nation states has been replaced by the power of association.  Friedman argued that the new society was powered by three “balances:” 

·      The traditional balance of power between nation states.

·      The balance between nation states and global markets.

·      The balance between individuals and nation states.

As Friedman noted, the last of these balances is key:

“Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, and because it has simultaneously wired the world into networks, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any time in history” (p. 14).

Almost two decades later, Friedman took a fresh look at the ongoing social revolution.  In 2016’s Thank You for Being Late, he explored how society had changed since the 1990s.  He described two kinds of change:  technological and social.  He observed that technological change evolves rapidly, doubling its power and reach every few years.  Imagine, for instance, what has happened technologically and socially in the two decades since the first web browser was launched in 1992 and compare that innovation with today’s cloud computing.  The result is “a tremendous release of energy into the hands of human beings to compete, design, think, imagine, connect, and collaborate with anyone anywhere” (p. 83).  This same force has greatly multiplied the power of one person to change society, but it is also amplifying what Friedman called “the power of many.”  “Human beings,” he reported, “as a collective are not just a part of nature; they have become a force of nature—a force that is disturbing and changing the climate and our planet’s ecosystems at a space and scope never before seen in human history” (p. 87).  However, Friedman also noted that social change takes place at a much slower pace than technological change.  At some point, the speed of technological change outpaces our ability to adapt to it, creating social disruption and leaving some people behind as others race to catch up.

Redefining Community The Information Revolution also has eliminated geography as a limitation in human interactions.  The web allows us to interact simultaneously with our next-door neighbor and colleagues around the world.   In the process, it has redefined how we think about “community.”  This has broad implications not only for how individuals relate to each other and their work, but to our ideas about fundamental aspects of how we relate to others.  Wendell Berry has made that question the focus of his work for many years; in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, he described the idea of community this way: “…community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature” (p. 120).  In It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lectures and Other Essays, he delved deeper into the role of community in the lives of individuals:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it.  To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it.  By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it.  By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place.  By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of pre-emptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world.  As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection.  And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy. (pp. 13-14)

Clearly, the relationship of individuals to their communities is a key to our ability to be successful citizens and professionals.  The Information Revolution, by removing locality as a defining element of our individual identities, has created a new challenge for one’s sense of belonging to a community.  This, in turn, has a significant impact on how we think about general education.  How, in this global economy, can we create affection—a “pre-emptive sympathy” – for our local community and the neighbors who live in it with us?  How do we appropriately interact with non-local communities?  How should we imagine our “place” as individuals, professionals, and members of both virtual and location-based communities in this new environment? 

One way to think about the role of community in our lives is the “expanding communities” model of social development.  It assumes that, over the history of human existence, humans have had to expand their understanding of their relationship with the world.  It is a cultural process that mirrors what we all go through as we mature.  As small children, our immediate family is our community.  As we grow, that expands to our neighborhood, our school, our town, and, eventually, we become part of broader communities—our state, our nation, our region, etc.  With each step, we assume a broader public identity and personalize or privatize the older identity.  This is a central issue in preparing individuals to be effective citizens in a globalized information society. 

A New Relationship with Time  Just as the Information Revolution eliminated space as a limitation to communication, it is dramatically changing our relationship to time.  For instance, the Internet gives individuals increased control over when and how we respond to communications.  Conversations can be “synchronous” or “asynchronous.”  In Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff notes that, when we use smart phones and other hand-held devices for email, “we turn a potentially empowering asynchronous technology into a falsely synchronous one” (p. 99).   This reinforces the idea of “multi-tasking,” even though research suggests the “the basic fact that human beings cannot do more than one thing at a time” (p. 123).  He adds:

Yet the more we use the Internet to conduct our work and lives, the more compelled we are to adopt its processors’ underlying strategy.  The more choices are on offer, the more windows remain open, and the more options lie waiting” (p. 124).

Re-Imagining Democracy   In 1970, Alvin Toffler looked at the changes that were already looming as the Information Age reached its first maturity.  He wrote in Future Shock, “As interdependency grows, smaller and smaller groups within society achieve greater and greater power for critical disruption,” adding:

To master change, we shall therefore need both a clarification of important long-range social goals and a democratization of the way in which we arrive at them.  And this means nothing less than the next political revolution in the techno-societies—a breathtaking affirmation of popular democracy” (p. 477).

Four decades further into the Information Age, Douglas Rushkoff observed in Present Shock (2013) that, in this new environment, “thinking is no longer a personal activity, but a collective one” –something he called “the shared consciousness” (p. 204).  

Acceleration  It became apparent early on that accelerating change was a characteristic of the new age.  “Acceleration,” Toffler wrote in Future Shock, “is one of the most important and least understood of all social forces” (p. 32).  For Toffler, acceleration was not just a technological or social force, but a psychological force.  “The rising rate of change in the world around us,” he wrote, “disturbs our inner equilibrium, altering the very way in which we experience life.  Acceleration without translates into acceleration within” (ibid.).   Noting that the faster rate of change creates a new kind of information system in society—one that gives smaller groups more power to affect change—Toffler argued that “to master change, we shall therefore need both a clarification of important long-range social goals and a democratization of the way in which we arrive at them” (pp. 476-77).

            As Friedman noted, the gap between technological change and social adaptation to that change is always increasing.  In order to keep pace with technology-related change, he argued, we need to innovate “in everything other than technology.”  That involves a dramatic re-thinking of the social environment:

“It is reimagining and redesigning your society’s workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community—in ways that will enable more citizens on more days in more ways to keep pace with how these accelerations are reshaping their lives and generate more stability as we shoot through these rapids” (p. 199).

Friedman went on to argue that “our very notion of ‘community’ has to expand to the boundaries of the planet.”  He quoted author and businessman Dov Seidman, that the goal must be “. . .  to forge healthy, deep, and enduring interdependencies—in our relationships, in our communities, between businesses, between countries—so that we rise, and not fall, together” (p. 352).

            These changes have created a new social context for higher education.  Increasingly, the goal is to prepare individuals to function as citizens and professionals in an increasingly diverse environment in which their local community and social organization must operate within the context of international interdependency.  We see it in the international supply chain for both manufactured and agricultural products.  We see it in the increasing migration of people for both environmental and political reasons, whether it be refugees from Latin America to the United States or from the Middle East to European nations.  We see it in the increasing demand for innovation in technology, medicine, and other fields that drive changes in both research and professional education.  We see it in the demand for lifelong access to continuing higher education as adults try to keep pace with innovation in their professions.  In this age of acceleration, the question of how we prepare individuals to function in society has become urgent. 

Educational Innovation  Higher education is also being affected by other aspects of acceleration that could have an impact on how it plans curricula.  One example is the gradually growing demand for universal K-14 education.  Just as the Industrial Revolution raised the educational norm to make high school graduation a general expectation by early in the twentieth century, the twenty-first century is seeing growing pressure that all young people should take at least two years beyond high school.  In 2017, New York State responded to this with the Excelsior Scholarship, which funds the costs of the first two years tuition in public colleges and universities for New York residents who live in households that earn less than $125,000 per year. As Gary Rivlin noted in the New York Times Magazine:

Finishing high school might once have provided enough education to find employment that pays well. But globalization and automation are decimating those jobs. Even manufacturing work that remains in (or returns) to America requires knowing how to operate the computers that run today’s factory floors, at least if you expect to earn anything close to a living wage. . .  Making 14th grade the new 12th grade might be essential if the United States is to maintain its status as an economic powerhouse.

            A similar need has driven the “dual enrollment” movement, in which a student’s participation in a course simultaneously earns college credit as well as high school graduation credit.  One driver in this movement to re-align curricula is the accelerating power of technology.  In recent years, institutions have begun to create—and, more importantly, to share—a wide variety of online course materials, from lectures and demonstrations to full textbooks as open educational resources.  OERs have become an international movement that have brought institutions together to share instructional materials.  At the same time, we’ve seen the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that give students worldwide free access to complete college courses.

Understanding General Education in the Information Society

            In The Meaning of General Education (1988), I arrived at the following description of the concept as it had evolved during the Industrial Revolution:

General education is a comprehensive, self-consciously developed and maintained program that develops in individual students the attitude of inquiry; the skills of problem solving; the individual and community values associated with a democratic society; and the knowledge needed to apply these attitudes, skills, and values so that the students may maintain the learning process over a lifetime and function as self-fulfilled individuals and full participants in a society committed to change through democratic processes.  As such, it is marked by its comprehensive scope, by its emphasis on specific and real problems and issues of immediate concern to students and society, by its concern with the needs of the future, and by the application of democratic principles in the methods and procedures of education as well as the goals of education (p. 5).

General education has long been seen as a problem area in the Information Age.  As early as 1977, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching declared it a “disaster area” (Gaff, 1994).   By the 1980s—when the impact of the Information Revolution on daily life was beginning to be felt—several national reports decried the disarray in the undergraduate curriculum.  One, sponsored by the National Institutes on Education, argued that excessive vocationalism had weakened the ability of a baccalaureate degree to “foster the shared values and knowledge that bind us together as a society” (Scully, 1984, p. 1). 

In 1994, the American Association of Colleges sponsored a Project on Strong Foundations for General Education.  Project Director Dr. Jerry Gaff noted,

The term “general education” used throughout this monograph admits of no simple—or single—definition. A heuristic one offered by an earlier report (Task Group on General Education, 1988, 1) is “the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that all of us use and live by during most of our lives—whether as parents, citizens, lovers, travelers, participants in the arts, leaders, volunteers, or good Samaritans.” While avoiding advocacy of any particular content, this definition has the advantage of inviting individuals into a conversation, so that a group, such as a college faculty, can determine what are the essential knowledge, skills, and attitudes for students to acquire. If agreement can be reached, then the group can assess the adequacy of a curriculum to cultivate such qualities, or devise a curriculum that would more intentionally nurture those attributes. (p. 1-2)

The AACU report goes on to describe six principles that should guide institutions as they create general education in the new environment:

Principle #1: Strong general education programs explicitly answer the question, “What is the point of General Education?”

Principle #2: Strong general education programs embody institutional mission.

Principle #3: Strong general education programs continuously strive for educational coherence.

Principle #4: Strong general education programs are self-consciously value-based and teach social responsibility.

Principle #5: Strong general education programs attend carefully to student experience.

Principle #6: Strong general education programs are consciously designed so that they will continue to evolve.

Writing in the Washington Post in 2011, Kathleen Parker noted a study, “Academically Adrift:  Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Jospia Roksa.  Arum and Roksa reported that “Gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills are either ‘exceeding small or nonexistent’ for a larger proportion of students” and that “thirty-six percent of students experience no significant improvement in learning (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) over four years of higher education.”  Part of the problem, Parker suggested, is the erosion of the core curriculum.  That suggests that the problem is not simply that the core subjects are no longer being taught, but that, when they are taught, they are taught out of context—as simply introductions to the disciplines—rather than as skills one needs to be successful as an individual and as a citizen. 

As the AACU report suggests, the key to improving the curriculum is not simply to focus more on the major areas of study, but to examine the total experience and to develop a unique General Education curriculum that prepares students to be socially responsible professionals and citizens.  A new approach to pedagogy is part of the solution.  A new approach to the economics of undergraduate education that will allow for a more integrated general education curriculum to be organized beyond the traditional disciplines may also be needed.  It is well-past time for the re-envisioning of General Education to be treated as an institution-wide issue.

Civic Engagement as a Goal  In 2012, The Crucible Moment:  College Learning and Democracy’s Future, a report of The Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement National Task Force, cited the Truman Commission in making its case for re-committing higher education to a curriculum that ensures a  “socially cohesive and economically vibrant U.S. democracy and a viable, just global community.”  This goal, notes the report, “will require that civic learning and democratic engagement not be sidelined but central, not an afterthought but an anticipated and integral part of K-12 and college education” (p. 20).

Crucible Moment defines civic-minded campuses as having four characteristics:

“. . . such campuses are distinguished by a civic ethos governing campus life, civic literacy as a goal for every graduate, civic inquiry integrated within majors, general education, and technical training, and informed civic action done in concert with others as lifelong practice” (p. 31).

Collaboration as a Basic Social Skill The rapidity of change in a global economy is also changing how we work.  Increasingly, work tends to get done by teams. Often, these are virtual teams with members at multiple locations.  This work environment puts greater emphasis on collaboration rather than individual competition.  Similarly, rapid changes in knowledge require an environment of continual, bottom-up innovation.   Collaboration and innovation are both professional and civic skills that need to be taught.   Even on the most informal level—as evidenced by Facebook and Twitter today—students need to develop a social ethos to guide how they interact with social networks so that they can develop and sustain professional, civic, and personal relationships through both face-to-face and virtual networks.

An underlying feature of the Information Society is that technology has removed geography as a delimiting factor in how we live and work in communities.   Members of an Information Society live and work in “distributed communities” (we may need a better term to describe this phenomenon) that accomplish much of their work through technology.  This includes virtual working teams, professional associations, and a wide variety of social networks.   The boundaries of these communities tend to blur, as people include both social and professional contacts in the same network.  Inter-cultural understanding takes on a new immediacy: every culture is potentially present in our virtual communities.  General Education, with its emphasis on educating the student for success within the context of his/her society, can help individuals define how to conduct themselves in these new communities.

A New Pedagogy Several societal factors are signaling the direction in which a new approach to General Education might take.  Prime among these is how the Information Revolution has changed the way we think about knowledge and information.  Today, information is ubiquitously available on the web.   In this environment, education is less about the transfer of already organized knowledge than about how to find and evaluate information and turn it into useable knowledge that can be used to solve problems and provide meaningful insights.  Active inquiry, as a result, becomes both a means and an end of General Education--a core skill of the new curriculum.

            Knowledge creation, collaboration, innovation, and community building are workplace and civic skills that should be incorporated into General Education for the Information Society.   The challenge of General Education in this new environment is:

·      To create lifelong learners who can create knowledge

·      To instill problem-solving and innovation as both workplace and civic skills

·      To develop the skills of collaboration across cultures and across geography

·      To help students understand the nature of the communities in which they live and work so that they can become effective members of these communities.

This suggests that the next generation of General Education should not just be a new collection of courses, but courses guided by a common pedagogy designed to engage the students in the above goals, regardless of the discipline being studies.  This new General Education pedagogy should be resource-centered, inquiry-based, and problem-oriented and, perhaps, better integrated with the professional studies part of the undergraduate curriculum.  It should also encourage students to use online technology to collaborate to find information, evaluate it and turn it into useful knowledge, and apply that knowledge to solve problems.  These are key elements in preparing students for life in an Information Society.

One new pedagogy that is gaining attention in the online learning community is the Community of Inquiry  (http://communitiesofinquiry.com/model ) pedagogy.  This approach maintains that the educational experience is the intersection of three factors:  social presence, cognitive presence, and teaching presence.  Social Presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities” (Garrison, 2009).  Teaching Presence is the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001).  Cognitive Presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001).

Elements of a New General Education Curriculum

We can envision a General Education program that prepares students to be effective citizens of a global information society as having several elements:

·      Knowledge – The cultural foundations of civic democracy—a multi-disciplinary approach that includes history, philosophy, and social change to give students a grounding in the cultural traditions and forces of change.

·      Skills – At one time, the skills section of a general education program focused on communications—public speaking and writing, especially.  In today’s global information society, critical citizenship skills must include how to find and evaluate information, problem-solving, collaboration, and inter-cultural understanding.  These, in turn, require an active learning environment in which students work, individually and together, to local and evaluate information, turn it into knowledge, and apply it to solve problems.

·      Attitudes – This includes understanding the role of globalization in shaping one’s identity and understanding one’s role as an individual in family, local community, national, and global contexts.   It is in this area that the curriculum develops the student’s predisposition to act in different environments.

·      Experience—Just as the Industrial Revolution stimulated the inclusion of laboratory courses to help students understand the scientific process and the standards of scientific research, the global Information Society requires that students gain direct experience in working in different communities.  This can be accomplished through local internships, service-focused study abroad opportunities, or projects that bring together multicultural student teams to explore social issues and find solutions to problems.  This could also be the focus of a capstone course for professional programs.

Developing Foundational Skills  In many ways, the Information Revolution can also be described as the Communications Revolution.  Increasingly, written communication is how we convey ideas to family and friends and to professional colleagues around the world.  The Web has also opened new vistas for live verbal interaction through webinars and other synchronous communications as well as recorded speaking events on U-Tube.  As a result, it is essential that a general education curriculum include courses in writing—both academic and general—and public speaking.  They are more important than ever to the ability of a graduate to succeed professionally and as a citizen. 

            At the same time, the Information Revolution has made it critical that citizens be able to evaluate information and discern between facts and the many variations of “spin” that people use to sell ideas.  Related to this is the need to identify sources of information and to validate what is posted when the source is not clear.  In this environment, information evaluation becomes essential for both citizenship and professional life.  It should be integrated into every course and major, so that students learn to be good judges of information in many different contexts.

The general education curriculum should also incorporate the technology that drives both professional and personal life—wikis, blogs, online social networking, etc.—so that students develop a sense of the effective and ethical uses of these technologies.

General Education in Science  The role of the physical and social sciences in a general education program is a knotty issue for curriculum planners.  On one hand, higher education has become sensitized to the need for graduates to have a better foundation in disciplines that contribute to STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics—skills that are increasingly needed in today’s workplace.  On the other hand, the current distribution curriculum—which typically allows students to meet their general education requirements by taking basic introductory courses in math and various science and social science disciplines—often fails to either prepare students for advanced study in these disciplines or to develop knowledge and skills that allow them to be more effective citizens in a technology-oriented society.  In fact, many students are able to avoid taking these courses because they simply duplicate materials learned in high school.

            Institutions are thus faced with two curricular issues: (1) how to prepare students with the scientific knowledge and skills needed to be successful in more advanced courses in the science disciplines and (2) how to prepare students to be effective citizens and consumers of scientific knowledge in a technological information society.  Both are important to the undergraduate curriculum, but it is the second issue that is essential for how an institution defines general education.

The purpose of general education is to help students learn how to live and prosper in a highly inter-reliant global society and economy in which technology and mass migration and inter-dependent international supply chains are redefining “community.”  The science education community has experimented for several decades with an interdisciplinary approach that addresses this goal.  This is the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) movement.  Wikipedia defines STS as “the study of how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture.”   Harvard University notes that STS merges two kinds of scholarship:

The first consists of research on the nature and practices of science and technology (S&T). Studies in this genre approach S&T as social institutions possessing distinctive structures, commitments, practices, and discourses that vary across cultures and change over time. This line of work addresses questions like the following: is there a scientific method; what makes scientific facts credible; how do new disciplines emerge; and how does science relate to religion?

The second stream concerns itself more with the impacts and control of science and technology, with particular focus on the risks that S&T may pose to peace, security, community, democracy, environmental sustainability, and human values. Driving this body of research are questions like the following: how should states set priorities for research funding; who should participate, and how, in technological decision-making; should life forms be patented; how should societies measure risks and set safety standards; and how should experts communicate the reasons for their judgments to the public?

The goal of STS teaching, notes the Harvard website, “seeks to promote cross-disciplinary integration, civic engagement, and critical thinking.”

An STS element of general education could bring together both the hard sciences and the social sciences around specific societal issues to help students learn how to address problems in society.  In the 1970s and 1980s, Penn State University was a leader in STS innovation, under the guidance of Dr. Rustum Roy.  I was involved in several courses that used television documentaries as the basis for discussion of the inter-relationships among several disciplines.  One course, The Behavioral Revolution, looked how behavior modification can be applied to effect social change at the community level.  For instance, one program looked at how the then-new “planned community” of Columbia, Maryland, used behavior modification to encourage bicycling and walking rather than automobile traffic.  Another course, The Finite Earth, examined limits to resources and the ethical dimensions of social policy.  Central to the course was the idea of an “ethical community”—how a community defines who is affected by a decision and, thus, who should be at the table when decisions are made.

The Humanities  Defining the role of the humanities may be one of the most difficult parts of designing a general education curriculum, for the humanities have played differing roles in the undergraduate curriculum over the years.  Originally, of course, the humanities were the foundation of the liberal arts curriculum.  Over the past few decades, however, the humanities have seen rough times.  As the demand for humanities graduates has declined, so has the central role of humanism in the curriculum.  At the same time, the institution’s role in teaching the humanities has declined as institutions increasingly encourage the transfer of credits from high school and community college curricula to meet general education requirements. 

That said, institutions recently have made some interesting experiments that may point the way.  For instance, in October 2015, Tania Lombrozo wrote about two University of California-Berkeley faculty who offer the humanities as a way to “open our eyes to the distinctive ways that people in different places and in different times, in different cultures and in different groups, have imagined what it means to be human."  Their interdisciplinary approach “is the study of the different ways that human beings have chosen or been able to live their lives as human beings.”

What, then, should be the role of the humanities in general education?  As the Berkeley innovation suggests, the answer lies, in part at least, in positioning humanities studies to help students understand how people perceive what it means to be human—to live in a human community in particular times and particular places.  At the same time, we need to acknowledge that, in the global information society, the experience of ancient Greece is no longer the sole source of inspiration.  We no longer live within a culture defined by the traditions of western civilization, but in a diverse global society.  The goal of the humanities in the general education curriculum must be to prepare students to live in a multi-cultural global society in which the actions of individuals are shaped by and connected to the community by technology.

As with other parts of the curriculum, the humanities component should reflect and advance the institution’s own mission.  That said, several key elements should be present:  the program should be problem-centered, with a problem statement providing a context for reading key documents; the program should be inquiry oriented, giving students an opportunity to explore documents to find ideas that can be used to address the problem; and the program should be interdisciplinary, allowing students to see the issue of multiple perspectives (i.e., historical, philosophical, social).

A Sandwich Curriculum  At most institutions, general education is contained within the first 30-36 credits of a 120-credit baccalaureate program.  The nature of the Information Society, however, suggests that there some general education issues are more properly addressed as the student digs deeper into her professional curriculum.  One solution would be to move toward a “sandwich” general education curriculum in which general courses are sandwiched around the student’s major/professional curriculum.  The first part would develop the student’s understanding of the social implications of key concepts in the sciences and humanities, along with critical communications skills.  Student would then move to their professional studies.  The final general education component—the top of the sandwich—would be during the student’s senior year, when interdisciplinary courses put their professional studies into the context of life in a global information society.  The goal of this upper division general education, which could be tied to an internship or practicum, would be to ensure that individuals enter the workforce with an understanding of ethics, cultural understanding and communications, and the societal implications of their profession.

General Education and Lifelong Learning  Tom Friedman has observed that, while in the past a baccalaureate degree prepared a student for a profession, in the information age, it simply prepares one for that first job.  Lifelong learning has emerged as a necessity in this new era.  I would argue that this applies not just to professional education, but to general education as well.  As graduates move into their professions, they take on new responsibilities as parents, as members of new communities, and as leaders in their professions.  General education as described above should be a part of the continuing education of professionals to help them through the various roles they will play in their communities and, ultimately, to help them prepare for the third act—a fulfilling retirement.

References

Anderson, Garrison, & Archer.  “The COL Framework.” Athabasca University, 2001. Retrieved from the Internet at https://coi.athabascau.ca/coi-model/

Berry, Wendell.  It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lectures and Other Essays Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2012.

The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement.

A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2012. Retrieved from the Internet at  https://www.aacu.org/crucible

Friedman, Thomas.  The Lexus and the Olive Tree.  New York: Anchor Books, 2000.

Friedman, Thomas.  Thank You for Being Late.  New York: Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Gaff, Jerry G.  Strong Foundations: Twelve Principles for Effective General Education Programs. Association of American Colleges and Universities, 1994.

Harvard University.  Program on Science, Technology, and Society.  Retrieved from the Internet at http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/about/whatissts.html

Kennedy, Gail (ed.).  Education for Democracy: The Debate Over the Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1952.

Lambrozo, Tanya. “The Humanities: What’s the Big Idea?”  Retrieved from the Internet at  http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/news/news-item/2015-10-27/the-humanities-what-s-the-big-idea

Miller, Gary.  The Meaning of General Education.  New York: Teachers College Press, 1988.

Parker, Kathleen. “Our Unprepared Graduates.”  Washington, D.C: The Washington Post, September 30, 2011.   Retrieved from the Internet at  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-unprepared-graduates/2011/09/30/gIQAJGYBBL_story.html

Rivlin, Gary. “Should Students Get Grades 13 and 14 Free of Charge?” New York Times Magazine, May 16, 2017.  Retrieved from the Internet at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/magazine/should-students-get-grades-13-and-14-free-of-charge.html

Rockfish Cap Commission.  “Report of the Rockfish Gap Commission Appointed to Fix the Site of the University of Virginia.”  In Richard Hofsadter and Wilson Smith (eds.), American Higher Education: A Documentary History, Vol. 1.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.  (Original work published in 1818).

Rushkoff, Douglas.  Present Shock.  New York: Penguin Group, 2014.

Scully, Malcolm. "U.S. Colleges Not Realizing Their Full Potential," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24,1984.

“Science and Technology Studies,” Wikipedia.  Retrieved from the Internet at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_studies

Toffler, Alvin.  Future Shock.  New York: Bantam Books, 1971.