The Deeper Purpose of Higher Education
Jan. 29th, 2006 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaSo I've vented quite a bit in the past few months, both in RL and here, about the increasing tendency of "a university education" - or, perhaps more accurately, "a college degree" - to mean nothing more than advanced vocational training, a set of knowledges and skills that prepares one to enter a specific profession, whether it be law, medicine or one of its sub-fields like nursing or veterinary medicine, architecture, one of the myriad subsets of engineering, computer programming, or even education. In the long ago and far away, it wasn't about that at all, and in fact one went off to specialized schools - medical school, law school, business school, a "normal school" - after, or in some cases instead of, college to learn these trades. The various art academies seem to be the only undergraduate remnants of this. The professional graduate schools still exist, of course, but they seem to expect that four years of their job be already done by the colleges and universities.
So the question has been asked, what is it that I think a university is supposed to do? And while I have a very, very clear idea of its task, I've had a great amount of difficulty articulating it well. Fortunately, one of the universities has already done the job for me. I knew I liked the Claremont Colleges - one of them, Harvey Mudd, was the only college that wait-listed me - and another one, Pomona, used to have a set of graduation requirements that described exactly what a college-level education should be about, for me. To wit, you had to take courses that fulfilled the following purposes:
That's it in a nutshell. Unfortunately, Pomona itself has simplified the requirements under pressure from both the engineering side and the humanities side, but I think the list itself still stands as a good example of what it might mean to have a complete education.
So the question has been asked, what is it that I think a university is supposed to do? And while I have a very, very clear idea of its task, I've had a great amount of difficulty articulating it well. Fortunately, one of the universities has already done the job for me. I knew I liked the Claremont Colleges - one of them, Harvey Mudd, was the only college that wait-listed me - and another one, Pomona, used to have a set of graduation requirements that described exactly what a college-level education should be about, for me. To wit, you had to take courses that fulfilled the following purposes:
1. read literature critically
2. use and understand the scientific method
3. use and understand formal reasoning
4. understand and analyze data
5. analyze creative art critically
6. perform or produce creative art
7. explore and understand human behavior
8. explore and understand an historical culture
9. compare and contrast contemporary cultures
10. think critically about values and rationality
That's it in a nutshell. Unfortunately, Pomona itself has simplified the requirements under pressure from both the engineering side and the humanities side, but I think the list itself still stands as a good example of what it might mean to have a complete education.
