by Robert Pondiscio
January 13th, 2010
Tags: liberal arts, Newsweek, small colleges
Posted in Curriculum, Education News | 2 Comments »
Is there ROI on Milton and Shakespeare? Jon Meacham argues a traditional liberal arts education may be the key to producing economic innovation and competitiveness. “The next chapter of the nation’s economic life could well be written not only by engineers but by entrepreneurs who, as products of an apparently disparate education, have formed a habit of mind that enables them to connect ideas that might otherwise have gone unconnected,” writes the Newsweek editor-in-chief, who sees small liberal arts colleges as “a crucial element in the creation of wealth, jobs, and, one hopes, a fairer and more just nation.”
Barack Obama started out at such a school (Occidental in Los Angeles) before moving to Columbia, where the core curriculum requires undergraduates to be grounded in canonical literature, philosophy, and history. Steve Jobs, who dropped out of Oregon’s Reed College, nevertheless credits a calligraphy class he attended there with providing part of the inspiration for the Macintosh. Employers say all the time that they value clarity of writing and verbal expression, and that they often find liberal-arts graduates expert in both.
Meacham winningly describes small liberal arts colleges like his alma mater, the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, as places that prepare people for a good life, not just the good life. “If the country is to prosper—economically, culturally, morally—we have to trust in the institutions, old and new, that nurture creativity, and then hope for the best,” he concludes.
by Robert Pondiscio
July 16th, 2009
Tags: Curriculum, Democrats, liberal arts, Mike Petrilli, Republicans
Posted in Educational Policy | 2 Comments »
Neither the Republicans or the Democrats understand what it takes to produce educated Americans, writes Mike Petrilli in the latest Education Gadfly. Commenting on the image projected by Sarah Palin, he notes there was a time when Republicans “valued candidates who could demonstrate mastery of subjects like history, geography, and political philosophy. But splitting the country politically between wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and “the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts” has driven well-educated voters away from the GOP.
So naturally, the Democrats have rushed in to fill the void, right? Wrong, says Petrilli, who wryly observes that so far the group “Liberals for the Liberal Arts” has yet to be founded. “Democratic reformers seem just as enamored with the utilitarian and narrow drive toward ‘college and work readiness’ as their Republican counterparts, if not more so,” he notes. If you need proof, take a look at Ed Secretary Arne Duncan’s speeches.
Over the past six months, he’s made nine major policy addresses that have been posted on his Department’s web site. And in those speeches, he’s mentioned “history,” “literature,” and “geography” exactly zero times. Meanwhile, there were seven instances of “accountability,” and “charter schools” left his lips an astounding twenty-nine times. Duncan and his team are pushing for structural changes in the system; they, like most reformers these days, are ignoring the “stuff” of education–what students actually need to learn in order to become good Americans.
“But these Democratic reformers had better be careful,” Petrilli concludes. ”An obsessive focus on nothing but basic skills in reading and math, which can be chopped into little bits of data with which we can make all manner of decisions, will result in a generation of students who will make Palin sound like Socrates.”
