Friday, January 30, 2009
liberal education
While deciding which essay to write on I found it very difficult to choose just one. Each of the writers Jefferson, Meiklejohn, Flexner and Kerr are interesting in the each individual way. I found Jefferson of all to have the most interesting aspect of this form of higher education. The layout of his university itself is an attest to his idea of the university as a whole and what it should entail. The fact that the professor are to live on campus is the exact idea of what Jefferson wanted from that education, the connectedness and interweaving of students and teachers. In my mind the image i receive from Jefferson's idea of the university is a type of apprenticeship between these professors and students. I find it actually in a way more of an appealing idea of a university that a sense of community and a bond is formed which can help to motivate the students with continuing that education. I also found it quite motivating the step that Jefferson took outside the norm of the religious era in which a University was formed around the religion and for once in Jefferson's university it was actually shockingly based around education by removing the chapel from the center of the university and replacing it with a library. Another interesting topic we discussed in class was the matter of this idea of the liberal education with the removal of specialization. I find this idea to be difficult. In the time of educators such as Jefferson i find this idea to be more of a possibility but in our day and age people don't have the time or the money to have the luxury of taking classes for their own leisure as is implied by this type of educational focus. I believe that this time calls for specialization in order to produce more efficient and affective students.
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It is true that one of Jefferson's goals for a university was to cultivate a more personal relationship between the faculty and the students. It is interesting to think about this fact in relation to our own lives and experiences at Trinity. I know one of the main reasons that I decided to attend Trinity was because of the outstanding student to faculty ratio, which creates more opportunites for direct attention from a professor, allowing them to know you more as a person rather than just another student. God forbid a professor might even know your name! Regarding your thoughts about specialization, I agree that it is a necessary procedure. In a day and age where young people are raised with the idea that they will go to college and leave with a well-paying job waiting for them, it is logical that to fulfill those goals a student must have a skill set that allows them to excel in a particular field, not just merely succeed in several areas.
ReplyDeleteJefferson’s university, and also most of the other universities we have read about, was more of a utopia than anything else. According to Jefferson, the university would be a group of people who lived together and learned in a village of sorts. Instructors would live in this village and hold classes in their own home. While I agree that there needs to be a close relationship between teachers and students, it is a little extreme to believe that students should be allowed to study in the instructor’s home. Also, I agree that it is impossible to not have specialization with our current job market. Despite the need for specialization, every student should be required to take some classes in every subject, not just their projected job area. This way every student experiences all aspects of learning and has a greater pool of knowledge to pull from later in life. Also, since the students have experience the major areas of learning, they will be better informed to choose an area to specialize in.
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ReplyDeleteFrom an email to Dr. B. by Steve Street: "Melissa's remark about contemporary students not having the luxury NOT to specialize I'd think might open up into a fruitful area of discussion: the whole debate about whether what used to be college education has become job training, which goes along with the huge debate about the "corporatization" of American higher education. Though those trends might be less apparent in an institution like yours and seem less relevant to your course, Melissa's remark seems to assume a university's function as a simply practical one that can be best performed efficiently . You might have read the recent "crowning indignity" piece in IHE, bemoaning schools' deemphasis of faculty members anymore; contingency issues play into this, too, as we adjuncts generally, without official protection to our academic freedom or governance input, help the transfer of decision-making power to those running the institution on a business model rather than on the more idealistic goals and assumptions of tenured faculty."
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