the best thing about education

Vanderbilt's Chancellor quoted John Dewey in his commencement address Friday. Here's the text, from Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy:

"Bus, do your stuff"

Jaron Lanier seems to imagine the future of pedagogy as a ride on the Magic School Bus. [wiki] “In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles in order to learn about them…” Cool, take me into the ballgame. This was always my favorite episode, of course:

higher education

"We have a system of education modeled on the interests of industrialisation."


In Tennessee it's with a "z" but the idea's the same as Sir Ken's, as we faculty Senators were reminded yesterday when the Chancellor-Emeritus of our governing board spoke to us* of the importance of appeasing state legislators' demands that we meet arbitrary and ill-formed "outcomes-based" targets to justify our very existence. 


We dare not speak to our benefactors, if you want to call them that, of the value of a liberal education. They don't like "L" words. Like learnin'. (Or did I misspell that?- A colleague summarizes the Chancellor's message: "TBR -- WE LURN YOU REAL GOOD")




*Chancellor-emeritus Manning delivered a sobering talk to the Senate yesterday afternoon, emphasizing that getting funding for higher ed in Tennessee will always be like squeezing blood from turnips. (And that UT, where "scholar-athletes" rule, will always have first dibs on whatever's on the table.)  


He said we should acknowledge the strong anti-intellectual sentiment now re-ascendant across the land, especially here in the Bible belt-buckle. (The irony of a colleague's sharp, pointed question about anti-intellectualism on the TBR board itself was evidently lost.) Our best long-term strategy for survival at MTSU? Shrink [we currently teach more students than UT-Knoxville] and try not to piss off the "deeply religious" zealots who control our purse-strings. 


Serve our prime constituency, the C & D students who become community leaders and legislators. Don't waste too much time trying to figure out the political "game" in the state capitol. We may not like the budget allocation formula but we should understand that bizness leaders and politicians (a convergent set) love "outcome-oriented" funding. And the new gov's priority will not be higher ed in any  event.

Oh, and when can we hope to get that new science building we've needed for twenty years? Hard to say, ask him again in 2015. 

There was also, another colleague reminds, an obnoxious reference to an 

"Oriental girl on a mule" outperforming the kids with the big backpacks full of books to show how Tennessee education must compete in a global market (or this is what I tried to draw from it).  I have to say this off-hand comment was particularly galling at a school that just landed a Confucius Institute on its campus.

And, 

And please do not overlook the response to his friend's query on the removal of non-christian professors.  I assume he was from the Christine Todd Whitman School of Constitutional Interpretation. 

Yes, speaking just for me and some other academics from Tennessee: a new higher ed paradigm would be welcome here. 

carriers

I've fallen behind my stack of New Yorkers.


Yesterday I caught up with Rebecca Mead's Talk of the Town defense of liberal education in the June 7 issue. She notes that politicians, including the bright ones (like the President), tend to speak of education in strictly economic and vocational terms, i.e., in terms of jobs jobs jobs. They tend not to stump for education's value in enriching the quality of life. Then, she offers this example:

Consider Stephen Law, a professor of philosophy at the University of London, who started his working life delivering mail for the British postal service, began reading works of philosophy in his spare time, decided that he’d like to know more, and went on to study the discipline at City University, in London, and at Oxford University....

Stephen Law is an excellent philosopher, and his War for Children's Minds is an impassioned defense of childhood. 


Mead concludes that we really don't need more accountants and numbers-crunchers and bean-counters and cubicle-dwellers. (That's not exactly what she says, but it's my takeaway.) 


More thinkers, on the other hand, would be good. For "pragmatic" here, read "conventionally employable."

An argument might be made in favor of a student’s pursuing an education that is less, rather than more, pragmatic. (More theology, less accounting.) That way, regardless of each graduate’s ultimate path, all might be qualified to be carriers of arts and letters, of which the nation can never have too many.

Some of our best thinkers-- besides Steve Law, John Prine (That's the way that  the world goes round.. at the LoC) comes straight to mind-- were carriers too. We need both.

Commencement

It's Spring Commencement day at ESU, and I get to participate as our department's representative. It's regarded as a necessary but unwelcome chore by many of my colleagues, and -- considering how many bad Commencement speeches have been inflicted, through the ages, on captive audiences -- with good reason. But I recall the elation of that day, the pride of goals achieved, the satisfaction of accomplishment, and the pleasure of public recognition by one's mentors, friends, and family. As chores go, it's one of the better ones. If I ever get to deliver a Commencement address myself, I'll try to be as succinct as John Dewey in delivering this simple message:

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

If we've done our job as educators, and if they've done theirs, our students will commence "real" life with humble curiosity about themselves and the world, and with confidence in their abilities to feed it. But they'll never think they know enough. They'll cultivate a noble, Socratic ignorance. They'll reject what Dewey called the "conceit of learning," the shallow and pretentious display of facts for their own sake, the repitition of cant and convention, the resistance to new thoughts and fresh perceptions.

In other words, grads: don't stop learning. Have a great life.