We say we prepare students for undefined futures. Are they better for it?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/an-unconvincing-argument-for-the-liberal-arts
The medieval European understanding of liberal arts, based partially on a reinterpretation of classical ideas, suggested that elites needed an open-ended education based on the trivium and quadrivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) because, as rulers, they would face complex and unexpected problems, whereas others only needed an introduction to “practical arts” relevant to specific repeated labor.
either everyone needs liberal arts or no one does. If liberal arts and preparation for uncertainty are synonymous, it can’t possibly make sense to limit that training to future leaders or a small elite.
Liberal-arts faculty can be surprisingly incurious about how teaching actually happens in educational settings different from their own
Helga Nowotny calls “the cunning of uncertainty” and accept her argument that everyone — rich and poor, college educated in a liberal-arts curriculum, or high-school educated in a trade — can and should live with and even embrace that cunning. By “cunning,” Nowotny means that uncertainty is an irreducible part of human life and the physical universe, and that we should follow where it leads us.
John Kay has called obliquity: that in a very concrete and empirical sense, many of our most cherished goals and values are achievable only if we do not try to achieve them directly.
Maybe a liberal education is, or could be, about embracing uncertainty where it is generative, necessary, and useful.
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more on liberal arts in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Liberal+Arts
To RSVP ahead of time, or to jump straight in at 2 pm ET this Thursday, click here:
https://shindig.com/login/event/volkbenedix
the topic of liberal education, in the company of two great advocates. On Thursday, January 28h, from 2-3 pm ET, we’ll be joined by professors Beth Benedix and Steven Volk, authors of the new book The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College: A Manifesto for Reinvention (publisher; our bookstore).
Beth Benedix teaches literature and religious studies at DePauw University. There she founded and directs The Castle, a nonprofit organization that partners with local public schools to build a culture of arts-integrated project-based learning, and TransformEdu, a consulting business that works with college educators to develop holistic, intentional and collaborative practices to energize the classroom.
Beth has published: Reluctant Theologians: Kafka, Celan, Jabes; Subverting Scriptures: Critical Reflections on the Uses of the Bible; Ghost Writer (A Story About Telling a Holocaust Story). She is working on a documentary film project about public education with film-makers Joel Fendelman and James Chase Sanchez.
She completed her B.A, M.A and Ph.D at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Steve Volk is Professor of History Emeritus at Oberlin College where he taught Latin American History and Museum Studies between 1986-2016. He founded the Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence (CTIE), Oberlin’s teaching and learning center, in 2007 and served as its director until retiring in July 2018. He was named Outstanding U.S. Baccalaureate Colleges Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Center for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in 2011. In 2012, he was named a Great Lake College Association Teagle Peadagogy Fellow. In 2003 he received the Nancy Lyman Roelker Mentorship Award from the American Historical Association, and was recognized for his teaching leadership by the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education. In 2001 he was commended by the Government of Chile for “his contributions in helping to restore democracy” in that country.
He blogs at https://steven-volk.blog/.
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more on future trends in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=future+trends
the importance of liberal education
Setting Up Ghana’s First Liberal Arts College Makes Him A ‘Genius’
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/10/14/448569082/setting-up-ghanas-first-liberal-arts-college-makes-him-a-genius
The Big University
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/opinion/david-brooks-the-big-university.html
for the past many decades colleges narrowed down to focus on professional academic disciplines, but now there are a series of forces leading them to widen out so that they leave a mark on the full human being.