To think about education—its purpose and goals—is an occupational hazard when you’re a college professor. And yet, while I think about goals and outcomes for classes every time I make a syllabus, and while I look back on my professors (whom I have
never thanked enough for their generosity, wisdom, humanity, and care), I always trip up at the grand pronouncements about what education is or should be about. I tend, when it comes to the larger picture of what I do, to “think by feeling”—to quote the Roethke poem that baffled my first-years on Tuesday afternoon. I also balk at most of these pronouncements (no matter whether by progressives or conservatives) because it’s not up to me or anyone else who leads out of ignorance and into knowledge, it’s up to the students to “learn by going where they have to go,” and it's up to them to do what they can with what they receive. And it’s important to recognize that. For all the talk about the influence that professors do or don’t have, about how professors do or don’t shape students, at the end of the day what and how students take what is offered is largely up to them.
What has me thinking about this at the moment—and I do so every year around this time—is yet again another call to be nimble as a college and to prepare students for the five future jobs not yet invented but which future casters are certain that all current students will have over the course of their lives.
But both of these ideas are rather empty and they point the enterprise in the wrong direction. Education is not nimble. Complex ideas, habits of mind, and the things one goes to college to study and acquire take time and are just as much dependent, if not more so, on the student giving themselves to those matters than on whether the institution and its faculty have some how seen into the future and made the right bet on some new course of study.
The acquisition of knowledge and skills is iterative and incremental and so it takes time and it seems inefficient to those for whom education is solely about job preparation—the very same people who then say that these poor students will be working jobs not yet invented. But not for that, not for its incremental, time-intensive ways, is it useless. In fact, I would venture to say that the cultivation of curiosity, creativity, tenacity, and resilience is more important than chasing down any new fangled tech, and creating the space for students to explore and wonder about themselves and the world is more important than providing students as many ready-made cross/trans/interdisciplinary course sequences as possible. I am not against any of these nor am I against innovation, but to quote the often quoted Archimedes, give me a place to stand and I shall move the world. Students need to be grounded in a discipline, they need to know and understand things, and from there they can then branch out and become inter/trans/cross/multi and/or work on such teams. Education should focus just as much, if not more so, on the cultivation of the self as on job-skills.
By cultivation of the self, I do not mean a class or two on ethics, or religion, or aesthetics (though these are good places to do this work), nor do I mean inculcation in any of the current moralizing trends or pieties (whether from the progressive camp or conservative one), instead I mean ensuring that students have the time and space to ask big questions of the self, of the world, of society. We should provide students the space for them to learn how history is made and used, what scientific reasoning is, what good arguments are; we should allow them the space to develop their own aesthetic sense (one that also recognizes that in matters of taste argument profits little and that also understands how aesthetics can be used to influence decisions, etc.); and, we should have them cultivate their own ability to communicate in spoken and written form about these matters.
The thing about the use of nimble as a metaphor for an institution of learning is not just that it inaccurately describes education it also is just plain false. We have this notion that the business world is nimble—but it’s not. A dairy farm is a dairy farm; it might branch out and have an ice cream shop attached to it; it might even have a small scale abattoir to sell meat. But those don’t make it nimble. They make it slightly diversified. A cereal company might be able to add flakes to its line of granola and wheat biscuits and various extruded carbohydrate products but not for those is it nimble, not even should it add bars. The idea of a company being nimble so as to respond to market demands —and the belief that in the business world companies that can turn on a dime can more easily turn a dollar— is not true. Scaling up and going into new ventures takes a lot of time and it takes even more money. I could be wrong, but nimbleness seems especially associated with Venture Capitalism. Yet, while sitting on a pile of money lets you make a wide range of bets, is that nimble? VCs lose many more bets than they make, and they do this in the hopes of making a handful of bets that give outsized returns.
But maybe this initial characterization misunderstands nimble. Nimble is also used as a way of taking about quickly and easily taking on and shedding human capital. “Nimble businesses" hire and fire at will to respond to "market demands." Yet, we are talking about education, about lives and minds, about the long and messy game of giving people tools so that they can create and build their own beautiful world. All of this is slow and labor intensive.
Students, on the other hand, can be nimble. Students can respond to these future jobs that always sit, not yet invented, just beyond the horizon. But the way they are going to do this is by taking what they know, the skills and habits of mind they have acquired, and putting these to use. Research, synthesis, argument, an understanding of math, science, history, aesthetics. This is what what will prepare students for the future.
Educational institutions should double down on the artes liberales. Let us help lead students to a place where they can become their best selves. Let us find the way to use the arts, or sciences, of the liberal arts in such a way that (to quote En Vogue misquoting The Parliament Funkadelic) the minds of our young charges will be freed so that the rest can follow.
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