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Wednesday, September 05, 2007
A Nation at Risk After complaining about the tendency of American college curricula to rush to theory courses before teaching students the basics, Peter Berkowitz, in the Wall Street Journal, describes the terrible life consequences of this sort of education for students, and for the nation: ... [U]niversity education can cause lasting harm. The mental habits that students form and the ideas they absorb in college consolidate the framework through which as adults they interpret experience, and judge matters to be true or false, fair or inequitable, honorable or dishonorable. A university that fails to teach students sound mental habits and to acquaint them with enduring ideas handicaps its graduates for public and private life. It's helpful to put names to the curricular models Berkowitz here invokes: UD would suggest St. John's in Annapolis as one version of the common core he has in mind, and crazy quilt Brown University as the enemy.... And if you've read at all deeply in University Diaries, you know that UD has a lot of sympathy with what Berkowitz is saying. Though she finds his writing pompous. I wonder whether he's overstating the effect and significance of a four-year undergraduate education, however. He reminds me in this piece of poor Dana Gioia, the head of the NEA, who's always gadding about warning the nation that it will soon meet its doom because not enough of us are serious readers... I think it makes more sense to defend a basic liberal arts curriculum by arguing that it may contribute to greater happiness, to a profounder reconciliation to the conditions of human life, and, since this sort of education tutors one in the particularities of suffering, to deeper empathy with other people. It's a little tricky, thinks UD, to make grand claims about the urgent political utility for a liberal democracy of what may turn out to be, on many college campuses, a matter of fine-tuning... |