Here it is:
Editor, Atlantic Monthly:
I'm in complete agreement with Paul Gagnon's vision of the ends of
a liberal education. I don't, however, agree with his plan for achieving
those ends.
Yes, we hardly scratch the surface of student potential. Yes,
just about every part of the educational establishment shares
responsibility for the sad state of education. And yes, we should start
school reform "by first deciding what every child should learn . . ."
It's when Gagnon begins to be specific about what he thinks the
young should know that we part company. He wants representatives from
mathematics and science, history, geography, and the other traditional
disciplines to get their acts together and do well what they're now doing
poorly--decide what's worth teaching. National education standards would
then be keyed to the content these representatives selected.
This makes good, conventional sense. I'd bet that nearly all
teachers across the country with whom I have contact believe this is
exactly what they're already doing. Some have difficulty occupying the
middle ground between content that's too abstract or too mundane (and
would profit from Gagnon's illustrations of "good" content) but given a
little guidance, most educators who aren't already there would probably
move in the direction he advocates.
But a curriculum that makes good, conventional sense isn't good
enough. Gagnon sees much-tightened standards in each of the academic
disciplines as the solution. I see the disciplines themselves as the
problem, and believe that, by reinforcing their role, the course he
advocates would ultimately make the situation worse.
To argue that the disciplines are getting in the way of a liberal
education is to risk not being taken seriously. For many, the disciplines
are synonomous with education--are now so institutionalized that, for many
teachers, teaching the disciplines is more important than teaching about
the reality the disciplines were originally designed to explore.
Understanding reality--that, not understanding biology,
psychology, literature, or some other field of study is what general
education is all about. If one starts with that assumption, the
inadequacy of the traditional, discipline-based curriculum is apparent.
The problems are manifold and fundamental: Vast and important
aspects of reality lie outside the boundaries of the traditional
disciplines. Collectively, the disciplines are too complex for students
to fuse into a manageable mental model of reality. Because the
disciplines resist being conceptually integrated, they deny the systemic
nature of reality. There are no agreed-upon criteria for mediating
competing disciplinary demands. A general education curriculum assembled
from introductions to specialized disciplines is bulky and inefficient.
The trickle-down-from-the-experts content that makes it into classrooms
casts students primarily in passive roles, forcing them to be mere
assimilators of existing knowledge rather than creators of new knowledge.
That's only a partial list of problems, any one of which is surely
serious enough to convene a national conference to consider solutions.
(Should we hand the problems to another session of the 1989
Charlottesville meeting, involving only the president of the United States
and the state governors? Maybe they could succeed where generations of
academicians have failed.)
The nature of modern life is such that specialized disciplines are
essential. They serve us well and should be supported and encouraged.
But their random, uncoordinated, piecemeal approach to the study of
reality make them extremely poor material from which to fashion a general
education curriculum. Using them as a base for setting national education
standards, as Gagnon advocates, would improve standardized test scores,
but would in the long run move us even farther away from a general
education curriculum likely to achieve the goals he seeks.
In Western culture, in our attempt to understand experience, we
routinely "take reality apart" by attending to time, location, participant
actors, action, and cause, and the systemic relationships between these
five aspects of our perceptions of reality. These, not the traditional
academic disciplines, are the proper subdisciplines of a single,
integrated, intellectually manageable general education curriculum.
Unfortunately, an educational establishment made up almost entirely of
disciplinarians is more likely to react to an alternative to present
practice with skepticism and hostility than with interest sufficient to
lead to a test of the merits of that alternative.
Marion Brady
-- GMBrady@aol.com