Hugh Mercer Curtler
Philosophy
Minnesota State University-Marshall
All of us tend to prefer the type of education we ourselves have had and to posit as an ideal the sort of person we admire or prefer. It is difficult to avoid this sort of bias when discussing the purpose of education, and since there is a variety of types of education, there is no wide-spread agreement among educators or those who formulate educational policy as to which type is to be adopted.
To guard against such tendencies it is necessary to discuss the goals of education in neutral terms, if at all possible. Toward that end, I have chosen to recall the somewhat dated concept of "citizenship" as a focal point for this discussion. "Citizenship" is a respectable term, though somewhat fuzzy, and neutral enough not to offend most people.
The problem with the concept, of course, is that citizenship is not something that most people today take seriously--judging from the low numbers of people who turn out for elections and the difficulties towns and cities have in finding responsible people to run for public office or serve on juries. Athens, we might note in passing, began to fail as a democracy as soon as its citizens demanded pay for public service rather than viewing public service as a duty. In any event, the term "citizenship" is still useful as an ideal, or a concept, whose clarification will allow us to gain a sharper focus on the nature of education, which can best be understood in light of this ideal. It is quite possible that the failure of our nation's citizens to take seriously the notion of citizenship marks one of the failures of education. I will suggest that this is the case, while I try to get a firmer grasp of the notion of what citizenship, properly understood, happens to be and how it is related to education, also properly understood. If this nation's citizens are busily pursuing, say, economic goals and sadly neglecting political goals, then perhaps things are not as they should be and it is time to regroup and ask some penetrating questions. In any event, as Plato reminds us in the Republic, we should only assess events as they are in terms of events as they should be, and it is this latter concern that will preoccupy us in this paper. Properly regarded, education, like citizenship, has to do with human freedom, namely, the freedom of all human persons as autonomous agents capable of self-directed activity. This also happens to be the freedom of citizens and to the extent that education fails and citizens fail to act responsibly, freedom remains a goal yet to be reached.
There is a presumption involved in taking upon oneself the setting of goals for another person. This presumption, coupled with the bias mentioned at the outset of this paper, makes "citizenship" an even more attractive focal point in the philosophy of education. Citizenship is necessary if a free society is to remain free and survive as a community of free persons. The basic assumption in a democracy is that all citizens are capable of self-determination and that they will make correct choices if sufficiently well-informed. By putting citizenship at the center of our discussion, therefore, we avoid to an extent the charge of paternalism and the pull of whatever bias we might have stemming from our own particular preferences as to the scope, method, and subject-matter for study in the educational process. That is to say, we neutralize to an extent the difficulties of prescribing and recommending if we have the objective of a free society in view rather than the particular needs and desires of particular people or special interest groups. The needs of a particular society, especially one that regards itself as a free society, are fairly easily determined, whereas the needs of particular people are never quite clear--except insofar as that individual is a member of a free society and benefits from participation in the political process.
Indeed, as we are finally beginning to see rather too clearly, it is one of the failures of progressive education that it focuses upon the individual in isolation from the group. This comes, one might suggest, from a cursory reading of John Dewey and a growing preoccupation with individual concerns that has led to a "child-centered" educational system that denigrates the role of subject-matter.
There has been, in this regard, ample time for progressive education to prove itself worthy of the attention that has been paid to it. But even if we grant some minor successes in the earliest years of school, it is clear that as children grow older and enter high school and beyond they lack one major quality that is essential for a lifetime of learning, namely, self-discipline. It is a characteristic of young people today that they cannot do what they do not want to do. Accordingly, the schools line up to meet the demands of the students with little thought for what they need. It is by no means clear that young people know what they want; but it is abundantly clear that they do not know what they need. And this confusion permeates thinking about what the schools should offer their students by way of an education. For some reason which we cannot investigate here, those who teach seem afraid to tell those who would learn what they should know. Instead, they ask the students what they want to learn and then scurry about trying to accommodate those demands. This, of course, marks a clear abandonment of the educator's primary responsibility. No doubt this is a cultural phenomenon brought about by a growing suspicion of anyone who professed to know, a growing distrust of expertise. One can only hope that this distrust never reaches within the walls of schools of medicine, though that ship may have already sailed.
While some of what I have said may be subject to recall, it can generally be agreed that as a group educators at all levels have shown themselves unwilling to a remarkable degree to design curricula in terms of what students will require as adults in a changing world. One of the reasons this has happened is that educators are themselves uncertain of what they are doing and why they are doing it. One of the least discussed questions among educators at every level has to do with the purpose of education. A preoccupation with method permeates schools of education and while educators at the middle grades struggle to meet the demands of angry parents who want them to raise their children, in higher education vocationalism and an odd concern for esoteric theory and a preoccupation with cultural diversity have replaced questions of purpose. In this sense, the academy was ripe for attack by dissident students in the 1960s and 1970s. Much useless information and wasted motion passed for learning. But one must wonder whether the changes this protest brought about are improvements, or whether the academy has merely followed the whims of fashion by catering to the preferences of a babble of students clamoring for "relevance" while insisting that it require a minimum of effort.
Any attempt to meet the demands of a heterogeneous group of students is doomed to failure at the outset. But the attempt has been made, and is still being made in the name of retention and to keep the doors of the academy open. The results have been a hodgepodge of courses of study that make no demands on the students and leave them unchanged--a sin of major proportions in higher education.
The needs of the students have really not changed that much over the years, since human beings have not really changed that much. Students need to be able to use their minds: they need to be able to read, write, figure, and speak, to manipulate the symbols whose use distinguishes homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom. In turn, these skills would make our students useful citizens. And this is where education and citizenship meet.
Increasingly, however, citizenship must be expanded to include membership in the world community. What this means is that other persons wherever they might live and whatever government they might live under ought to be the concern of all thoughtful persons. As Robert Hutchins put it a number of years ago, what the world needs now is citizens in the sense of this term being discussed here. Thus when we speak about citizenship we must bear in mind that we are not taking the term to mean membership in a particular political system; rather we are using the term in the broadest possible sense. The term remains political at its core, to be sure, but the term involves, above all else, concern for the other no matter who that may be. Recall that Aristotle was convinced that the polity began to break down when short-term self-interest began to replace concern for the public good. The difference today is that the public includes all of humankind and, quite possibly, the earth itself.
As has been suggested, however, our schools, colleges, and universities are not measuring up. They flounder for lack of purpose, and they confuse education with vocational training, desires with needs, teachers with learners, freedom with license, and methods with goals. The evidence for this is at every hand. It is as close as the nearest newspaper or the overheard discussion of faculty colleagues. It is as close, say, as a newspaper editorial or the latest copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Bible of the education establishment. In a recent editorial in the Minneapolis Tribune, for example, Professor Stephen Cahn correctly likened educational institutions to giant caucus races in which everyone proceeds at his or her own pace and everyone receives a prize. If citizenship is to be the goal, and it would appear to be the most attractive candidate at hand, then it will require rigor, commitment, discipline, and an expenditure of considerable effort. To be sure, we have lost sight of the profound truth contained in the Athenian maxim "Anything worthwhile is difficult." To quote Cahn, "students have been led to believe that they can achieve without effort, that all they need do in order to obtain a good education is to skip blithely down the merry road to learning. Unfortunately, that road is no more than a detour to the dead end of ignorance." And the irony is that there are well meaning faculty members, genuinely concerned about their students, who send them down that road, pack their picnic lunches, and wish them well.
Declining student enrollments have compounded the problems I have noted here, of course. These declines result in increasing pressures on academic institutions to compete with one another for the favors of bright (and not-so-bright) young high schools students. Once in college, the student is in a position to demand and expect high marks for a minimum of effort--much like the highly recruited athlete. This also contributes to the "caucus race" syndrome sketched above. Such pressures from students bear directly on the fiscal soundness and academic quality of our academic institutions. In addition, there are pressures from the faculty to "democratize" operating procedures, together with pressures from legislatures and boards of governors for cost accounting and the streamlining of operations. All in all, our academies are looking more and more like factories and professional faculty members more and more like laborers preoccupied with job security and getting top dollar. The question naturally arises, What are we to do?
Clearly, higher education has lost its moorings as it seeks to satisfy the latest adolescent fad or cater to politically minded faculty. Educators need to be prodded to talk about the nature and purpose of their enterprise. It is high time to bury the hatchet of political infighting and to stop worshipping at the feet of the great god Youth. We must recognize that young people do not know very much and are decidedly unfree. They are preoccupied with themselves and have rather little to say about their world that is worth listening to. In research done for the National Education Progress Report in 1976, for example, it was determined that between 1969 and 1976 there had been a drop of 11% in general knowledge among college students. That drop was confirmed by a more recent study conducted in 1985 that showed that by 1984 fifty-six percent fewer students scored above 600 on the SATs than in 1972 and seventy-three percent fewer scored above 650. According to the report "Nation At Risk" written in 1985, American students do not compare favorably with students in other industrialized nations of the world, failing to come in first or second on any of 19 academic tests and coming in last seven times. That report also indicated that the average achievement of American high school students on most standardized tests was lower than it had been 26 years previously and that many 17-year-olds who plan to go to college do not possess the "higher order" intellectual skills necessary to write a persuasive essay or solve a mathematical problem requiring several steps. As things now stand, 30% of entering Freshmen in four-year colleges across the country require some sort of remedial coursework. In some cases, the proportion runs as high as 50%.
Our students generally cannot grasp basic concepts, comprehend what they read, structure and organize information, follow a logical argument to its conclusion, or solve fairly simple mathematical problems. In many cases they cannot comprehend what a word problem in mathematics is asking them to do--even if they could do it in the end. They are intellectually handicapped and in a real sense cannot use their minds. That is why they are unfree and why educational institutions must concentrate on helping them to achieve freedom and self-determination, lest they remain slaves the rest of their lives.
There is care and concern among these young people, we are told, but there is no plan of action. Thus they are frustrated since what they "feel" to be the case never quite melds with reality. With the natural impulsiveness of youth they demand immediate solutions to complex problems and find refuge in clichés and instant "remedies." They are tolerant to the point of indifference and simply want their walking papers so they can get a job and start making a living. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education it was noted that 75% of today's college students are there simply to get a good job.
There are doubtless numerous exceptions to the chain of generalizations recounted here. Many of today's students are bright and able, idealistic (as youth have always been) and suspicious of hypocrisy, and able to entertain antithetical points of view. At the same time, even the brightest and best often show an alarming ignorance of history and have little sense of their place in time./1/ Again, the question arises, What are we to do?
Citizenship, as we have seen above, presupposes a regard for one's fellows together with the ability to reflect and deliberate as an autonomous agent. If we presume that the lower grades in the schools are primarily concerned with providing the young with the basic tools they will need to become social beings, the question naturally arises concerning the program for higher education that will enable the human being to make the transition from a merely social being to a political agent, in the broadest sense of this term.
To begin with, it is clear that the heart of any program of higher education must be the refinement of the student's ability to use symbols. This includes increased vocabulary, reading speed and comprehension, the ability to write coherently and speak clearly, and the ability to compute and calculate. In a word, I would include here the ability to read, write, speak, and figure--all of which, the evidence suggests, our students now lack.
Whatever program is devised, it should continuously reinforce these skills which are the sine qua non of an autonomous agent and a citizen of the world. Certain other subject areas are also generally accepted as of prime importance, while still others generate considerable difference of opinion among educators. What we require is an operating principle that will provide us with a means of selecting subjects of study on a priority basis. In concrete terms, we need to be able to answer the question: Why should a student study literature rather than cards? Intuitively, the answer is obvious, but we must try to improve on this and provide an answer that does not appear to be arbitrary.
With this in mind, the most plausible operating principle is that the academic program should contain subjects that the student cannot reasonably be expected to learn on his or her own. This principle, if it were generally adopted, would result in the elimination of a mass of trivia that currently clutters the catalogues of many of our undergraduate colleges and universities.
If we apply this principle objectively, with an eye on what the student needs in order to become an autonomous agent who is concerned about the world and its people, we could devise a "core" program with relative ease. We could identify subject areas of greatest importance which would develop outwards from the basic human skills of reading, writing, speaking, and figuring.
Specifically, our list might include the following subject areas:
Logic--practical logic, including critical thinking and syllogisms.
Great Books, including exceptional literature and moral, social, and political philosophy.
History--American, European, and Eastern, including elements of historiography.
Psychology, and Anthropology (including diverse cultures)
Laboratory Science
Mathematics through calculus.
In addition, it would be consistent with the principles stressed here to emphasize interdisciplinary courses and seminars whenever possible--especially at the Junior and Senior levels. Within any one institution it is of fundamental importance that this program be a common core program to provide a focus for the specific major studies of any given student. This will help to assure that learning goes on outside the classroom as well as within.
The question naturally arises in connection with any such listing of courses such as the one provided here: why these courses rather than others? To begin with, these subject areas, practically without exception, incorporate a mass of content coupled with emphasis on process that will, if approached properly, improve the student's understanding and not merely his or her knowledge. Logic and philosophy, together with mathematics and the laboratory sciences, improve the students' analytical skills, while literature, history, and the social sciences expand their range of awareness and sensitivity to others. Close reading of challenging texts in all courses will improve reading and writing skills, while seminar discussions will improve speaking skills as well.
We might also admit to our list of fundamental subjects other courses such as foreign language and speech, which refine and develop verbal skills. If we were to stress the importance of travel as productive of awareness, sensitivity, and appreciation of other cultures--thereby reducing the student's natural parochialism--then the student would be well served. At the very least, one's ability to use one's own language increases as knowledge of the language increases, and a careful study of another language (as opposed to merely learning to speak that language) increases one's knowledge of one's own language as well.
The fine arts are more problematical, since the greatest benefits from these areas can be gained outside the classroom or in the primary and secondary grades where they should be stressed much more than they have been in the past. In addition, theorists such as Karl Van Doren have pointed out that a well-educated person will naturally develop an interest in and enthusiasm for these subjects without presenting them as requirements. At the same time, it must be admitted that music theory, art history, and dramatic preservation and criticism can increase sensitivity for and appreciation of one's world and others. In this regard, any subject area that takes the adolescent outside himself or herself and leads to greater maturity, sensitivity, and the ability to use one's mind can be defended in terms of the principles outlined here.
In terms of procedure--and we ought not to neglect this altogether--it is consistent with our focus on citizenship to employ techniques that will be of greatest benefit to the students themselves as active participants in the political process. In this regard, discussion and direct participation in the learning process itself is of greater benefit to the students than the passive lecture system that regards the student as a receptacle. In addition, participation by the student wherever possible improves verbal skills and reinforces his ability to manipulate the symbols of language. Papers can be of considerable importance in developing writing skills, especially if the writing is done in class under supervision and stress is on form as well as content.
In closing, it is of central importance that the concept of citizenship that has been used throughout this discussion be quite clear. I speak here of a world citizen, a person who is an agent, that is, a person who is in control of himself or herself as far as this is possible. Agency presupposes self-knowledge and an awareness of and sensitivity to others and to the world in which we live. The citizen is one who participates in self-governance. It follows from the citizen's awareness of and concern about global problems for which only thoughtful action can provide some remedy. The citizen's own happiness and well-being are a function of the knowledge of what is possible for him or her to do--and what is not possible. And the citizen's actions follow from a determination that in certain spheres effective action is possible. There can be no loftier goal for higher education than the production of citizens in this sense for the world in which we live.
Notes
See Paul Trout, "Remediation and the Dumbing Down of Campus Standards," The Montana Professor 11.3 (Fall 2001): 4.[Back]