(James G Martin Center) F. Andrew Wolf–Universities Are Doing Education Badly

One often hears liberal-arts professors, as well as college and K-12 administrators, advocating two ideas about academics in America: (a) the importance of a broad, well-rounded, liberal-arts education and (b) the equating of that education solely with the head, not the heart. In 1931, John Dewey chaired a national curriculum conference that declared the liberal arts important for “the organization, transmission, extension and application of knowledge” (emphasis added). That concept has given us the educational system we have today, and it is not what was promised.

Don’t misunderstand my point; there is great value in a broad, liberal-arts education. It is just that, today, we do it in a way that is ineffective; time is wasted, and so is a lot of money. College should not be the venue where liberal-arts education begins. Instead, college is where students should start to specialize in a course of study, having already acquired general knowledge in K-12. The “12” does represent years, you know.

According to Dorothy Sayers, a noted 20th-century advocate of the liberal arts (and especially the classical liberal arts), much of modern education involves an “artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence.” It used to be that a well-educated person was deemed fit for higher education at about the age of 16 and specialization (either in the form of apprenticed work or more advanced learning) by the age of 18. With the advent of the modern era, however, the West moved away from serious education to the point that it has now collapsed.

Suffice it to say, in the West today (and especially in the U.S.), a type of schizophrenic malaise has crept into colleges, due primarily to an ineffective K-12 system, an overreliance on developmental college curricula, and “general course requirements” that essentially reiterate high-school learning.

Read it all.

Universities Are Doing Education Badly — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal https://t.co/QxnZUnk8XN

— Allen Mendenhall (@allenmendenhall) October 9, 2024