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 20th
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 19th century (and, later, 20th 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
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.
Kennedy, Gail (ed.). Education for Democracy: The Debate Over the
Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education. Boston: D.C.
Heath, 1952.
Miller, Gary. The Meaning of General Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 1988.
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.
Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.
