ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, September 4, 1996 TAG: 9609040079
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
TODAY'S world is exerting new stresses on the old idea that higher education entails participation in a common core of knowledge, skills and attitudes - what used to be called, and sometimes still is, the liberal arts.
The knowledge explosion has fostered intense academic specialization. Rapid technological advance has in some quarters fostered an emphasis on acquiring technical skills of immediate vocational application. The rise of worldwide communications and a global economy has fostered a creed of multicultural diversity that in some eyes has rendered obsolete the notion of a common Western heritage.
The irony is that the liberal-arts idea (excuse us for using the "L" word) has become more essential, not less so, in such a world.
Virginia's colleges and universities never departed as far as some from the higher-education basics. And, to the extent there was a departure, schools in the state reportedly now are moving back toward them.
This is commendable - so long as getting back to basics in higher education is understood to be something other than memorization, acquisition of elementary literacy skills or rigid adherence to an inflexible canon. Radicals' and reformers' reaction, beginning in the late '60s, against such things as core curricula and strict course requirements was excessive - but the overreaction was to real excesses on the other side as well.
Among other flaws, memorization as the chief mode of instruction is wasteful: Too little is learned, too much forgotten. Wasteful, too, is the confusion of higher-education basics with instillation of elementary literacy skills that should have been mastered years earlier. Insistence on an unchanging canon merely reflects the narrow biases and perspectives of the people doing the canonizing.
Those, however, are perversions rather than perfections of fundamental liberal-arts principles.
Properly understood, those principles are the source of higher education's greatest value, in producing able workers for the information age and solid citizens for the democratic societies that are leading this knowledge revolution.
An inflexible canon may be obsolete, for example, but the notion of standards is not. In a world too full of information, discrimination becomes all the more important. Shakespeare is better than the array of authors being added by multiculturalists to the canon, and woe betide the nation whose higher-educated citizens can't tell the difference.
More to the point, the core purpose of higher education is broader than passing on a tradition. It has to do with sustaining a desire and ability to learn to learn - to be critical, creative, curious.
Those who do not learn to think critically will find the knowledge explosion incomprehensibly overwhelming and their citizenship duties daunting. Those who don't stay creative and curious as adults will find themselves lost in the workplace of tomorrow, with its demand for constant adaptation to new techniques and new information. Even worse, they will be less human, less fully alive, than they could be.
LENGTH: Medium: 58 linesby CNB