"Extinction Level Event" . “Death Spiral,” “Budget Bloodbath,” These are terms that must be familiar to you because often they are included in headlines regarding education, particularly the humanities and liberal arts programs.
Higher education itself has it's neck wrapped in the hangman's noose with the populist demagogues and the "Think Tank" puppeteers funded by billionaires or industries,
leading this sad parade.
Less than a year after the onset of COVID-19, by February 2021, U.S. colleges and universities saw their workforce cut by 13%. Administrators leap at the promises of ed tech to deliver a future of internet only teaching, though now that we’ve had a taste of how alienating and ineffective this can be, most students and faculty appreciate more than ever the value of person-to-person teaching. Is education kids staring at screens, following the prompts of an algorithm?
The media has turned to businessmen, politicians, and tech moguls, for “expert” opinions. They’re more likely to accept a press release from that billionaire-funded think tank or foundation than ask an educator, so they perpetuate this narrative of higher education as a “broken fiscal model” that needs to be transformed, to be made more like business.
They feature attention-grabbing stories of admissions scandals, athletic scandals, "snowflake" students, “cancel” culture and “if it bleeds, it leads” stories that find faults with higher education, but have little relevance whatsoever to the experience of most people.
The media give disrupters inordinate air time. Kind of like the way traffic slows down as people rubberneck to see an accident when they drive by, it increases their viewers-listeners-readers. Kevin Carey, author of The End of College, and Ryan Craig, author of College Disrupted, advocate doing away with “bricks and mortar” colleges altogether. They speak of “unbundling” higher education into online learning and workplace-directed programs.
For them, and for Apple or Microsoft, the “value” of higher education is measurable in the monetary sense, it's purpose is mere training that yields maximum return on investment in terms of employment. While job training is indeed a fine thing, in a Venn diagram it would have some intersection with education yet much more of the two areas on the graph would be quite separate.
While I don't begrudge Bill Gates an opinion in a any way, I think his motivation may be questionable in this matter. He devises tech-heavy, standardized, test-driven programs for other people’s children, while sending his own to the very same posh, private school he attended himself, Lakeside:
“I had great relationships with my teachers. … Classes were small.
You got to know the teachers. They got to know you.
The relationships that come from that really make a difference. If you like and respect your teacher, you’re going to work harder” Gates said...
so he knows what works.
Everyone knows what works: small classes where teachers can give students individual attention. Teaching and learning are things done with people, by people, for people,
dependent on the trust and goodwill, presence, participation, responsiveness of people.
Joshua Kim, director of Digital Learning Initiatives at Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning was asked "is there innovation/idea/movement methodology that excites you in terms of the future of education?” his reply was “Get a liberal arts education.” If we hope to “reimagine and revolutionize education,” we should recognize that “the most powerful personalized and adaptive learning platform ever invented is an experienced and well-supported educator”: “Give me an oval table, an experienced and well-supported educator, and 12 curious students — and I’ll rip out every single piece of campus technology.”
Kind of strong words, from a techie, right?
Research corroborates the truth of the matter.
Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs concluded on the basis of a 10-year study of students and alums that relationships matter more than the technology being sold to schools and colleges in the name of “innovation.” Even more than the subjects studied.
They matter in terms of “long-term life outcomes,” Richard Detweiler concluded on the basis of a study of 1,000 graduates of all kinds of colleges, “by educating people for lives of consequence, inquiry, and accomplishment,” accomplishments that serve not only the individual but “the common good.”
“If there is one thing that the educational research clearly and consistently demonstrates, it is that the most successful long-term results for students occur when they are able to develop close relationships with their faculty,”
Job training is one thing, but an education is SO MUCH MORE.
Personally I have found in most cases that the training you get for a job is obsolete within a short time; sometimes even by the time you finish the course. Particularly in the tech field.
In contrast Shakespeare will never be obsolete.liberal arts programs watch as enrollments plummet and humanities courses and programs are replaced by degree programs with “product-market fit,” as the Charles Koch Foundation advocates.
The assault on the liberal arts is bipartisan, it's sadly one of the few things Democrats and Republicans can get together on; and it’s been extremely effective.
Students are flocking to majors in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) because they’ve been told this is where the jobs are — when in fact, there are more STEM graduates than there are jobs and many of those markets are farmed out to labor markets that Americans simply can not afford to compete with. (Just like most other industries)
They’ve been told the humanities offer poor job prospects,
when, as
Karl Voss (Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Bucknell University) explains in the
Hechinger Report:
“Employers consistently say that they are looking for employees who can analyze complex, multifaceted problems, are creative and innovative, have good communication skills, are willing to learn, work with a variety of people, see the larger setting in which decisions are made, and understand the ethical dimension of decisions and interactions” — all of which is EXACTLY what the liberal arts develop.
“The difference between humanities majors and science majors, in median income and unemployment, seems to be no more than the difference between residents of Virginia and North Carolina,” writes Benjamin Schmidt in the Atlantic: “If someone told to me not to move to Charlotte because no one there can make a living, I would never take them seriously.”
And neither should you!
Mathematics, the sciences, engineering, and technology are certainly useful, but the humanities provide another way of viewing issues and solving problems that is equally valuable. The more we automate, the more we create a constant low-level hum of digital connectivity, the more we get tangled up in the vastness and blind spots of big data, the more essential it is to bring human judgment into our lives. A liberal education is a cohesive collection of experiences, each providing its own unique contribution to the enlightenment of its practitioners
.
Typically, a liberal arts education involves the study of the natural sciences (including mathematics), the social sciences, and the humanities. (The natural sciences and math are frequently associated with STEM — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — and not considered to be part of a liberal education, even though they are.)
As with most things in life,
the most satisfying experiences are to be had
when we have multiplicity on our side.
A liberal education is a cohesive collection of experiences,
each providing its own unique contribution to your enlightenment.
It should be pointed out that typically, a liberal arts education
involves the study of the natural sciences (including mathematics),
the social sciences, and the humanities.
(The natural sciences and math are frequently associated with STEM — science, technology, engineering, mathematics — and not considered to be part of a liberal education, even though they are.)
I suggest understanding the liberal arts is similar to understanding the Tao (the source of everything in Taoism) is it not a philosophical system that explains why things are the way they are and why things happen the way they do?
Consider Leonardo da Vinci, was he an engineer or an artist?
He was both.
The liberal arts offer knowledge and the cultivation of habits of mind,
that allow one to mature into a successful, productive member of society who can appreciate others, experience and embrace the notion of empathy, and seek lifelong learning.
Leonardo is not a bad role model.
