In an interview with Wired Magazine back in the July 2014 issue, the new President of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, said something solid in reference to why a Liberal Arts education is critical, even in relationship to technology.
“I was talking to [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt about this just a month ago. We don’t know where the world’s going. Technology is disrupting so many traditional assumptions, employment options, economic foundations that we don’t know what kind of jobs students are going to have a decade from now. People need to have the skills and adaptability that will make them flexible enough to be successful in a world we can’t predict. So what are those kinds of skills?
Imagination. Insight. Perspective. So much of that comes from a breath of experience that you can get through reading history, reading literature, thinking critically about yourself, challenging your taken-for-granted assumptions, and seeing that they may all change in a second because other people have challenged them in other times and places. There’s a contingency that you come to understand through the liberal arts that is very much a part of our world, that best suits students for a lifetime of continuing to learn and adapt.”
I know…you see that I love it because she highlighted “reading history.” That’s true, but I also love it for the focus on lifetime learning. I am now more convinced than other that we, as a nation, are making decisions about things like education out of fear. We are afraid of what we see in our children, in their collective scores and what that all looks like in a nation where things such as the incidents in Jefferson, Missouri still happen. We see that someone declares that our national rank in education is lower and lower, regardless of the tests. We fear that our children, most of them at least, are not going to have decent jobs and that many of them won’t seem to care as long as they can play on their Xbox or watch more TV. We are unwilling to address the deeper issues of that fear, including the possibility that our kids are merely products of an indulgent, disrespectful and self-absorbed society that we, the adults, have helped create. We are unwilling to admit that our failures as families and parents are core to the problem.
So, in our fear we create things like Common Core and we deny other things like vouchers for education. We ignore how this robs our nation’s teachers from the freedom to simply teach. We tell ourselves that our kids really aren’t stressed out and our teachers aren’t teaching to the test lest they get fired. In the process of this, we run from the Liberal Arts, urge professors to dumb down their classes, label courses that are challenging as “at-risk courses” and refuse to talk about the real issues of rigor and engagement. We keep teaching classes like its the 1970s and yet refuse to acknowledge how much micr0-management has come into all phases of our education.
In our recent Academic Assembly, we had a guest speaker who spoke about finding and encouraging the wonder of education. He urged that professors need to help students wander into the ambiguity within our topics to thus emerge into a world of curiosity, of wonder. As he wrote, I made a note that our students can’t really find their way into ambiguity if the adults, the professors themselves, in our culture are unwilling themselves to embrace that same ambiguity.
In the end, the embrace of the unknown is critical because we are all walking in the dark. You can walk in fear or you can embrace it. This is our new normal. It will not change. Get used to it. And, while you are at it, go read some more history. You’ll find that while our predecessors didn’t face this level of change—no one has, not even during the Renaissance….this really is the time of most dynamic and rapid change in all of human history—they DID face change. They faced it and adapted…and their story provides us clues how to move forward.