Martin Henry
TODAY THE Department of Liberal Studies of the University of Technology hosts its second annual symposium under the ambitious theme "Humanising Tertiary Education: Reshaping Society". You may have seen the press notices.
The sub-text of the theme could well be that tertiary education now lacks humanising features, or, even worse, could be dehumanising. And in a sense both contain elements of truth. The creation of the super-specialist who knows more and more about less and less, one of the functions of 'higher' education, is, inevitably an act of dehumanisation.
Human beings are whole beings who see and respond to the real world holistically. But super-specialisation has delivered opulent results in generating and using knowledge, another function of higher education. The fact that the formation of whole human beings could be compromised may simply be regarded as acceptable collateral damage.
SETTING THE TONE
To set the tone of the symposium deliberations is Dr. Ralph Thompson, a decidedly unusual character. Dr. Thompson is a trained lawyer, a published poet, and an accomplished businessman who in 'retirement' is still running a company. He has served in the US military in cross-cultural settings. A real 'liberal' man.
Dr. Thompson, in retirement, has been writing up a storm in The Gleaner focusing his fire on the problems of early childhood education and the CXC. He knows that that is where liberal studies should properly begin for the formation of mind and heart for purposeful and productive living in the polity of citizens. 'Liberal Arts', in fact comes from the Latin artes liberales which literally means art befitting a free man, in contrast to artes serviles, the servile arts.
A parallel to the business of liberal education for humanising people and their society is the business of critical thinking. Everybody thinks. Critical thinking is just taking due care in doing so by self-consciously testing the reasonableness of one's own thought as both process and product against some pretty basic universal rules of play. It is being willing to examine contrary views respectfully while demanding of them the logical rigour applied to one's own thinking. It is grounding conclusions drawn about things in reasonable and reasoned evidence that others may be persuaded to adopt by reason not by force or blind faith. The capacity and the willingness to do so are incredibly short. One of the biggest hazards of even tertiary level teaching is the demand for settled knowledge delivered drip by drip as notes to be swotted and regurgitated as test answers.
But what should people know as basic knowledge for getting on in the world as it is? E.D. Hirsch as a professor of English at the University of Virginia in the 1980s led a core knowledge and cultural literacy movement in the United States which has spread internationally. Many core knowledge schools have been set up.
We are very familiar with the 3Rs as a measure of basic literacy. Current thinking sees 'literacy' as being far more multi-faceted. In today's world nobody is going to be literate if he/she hasn't got basic IT skills. Others are arguing that people need to know about how economies and governments work, about the environment, science and technology, and media etc, etc, to be truly literate.
In recent years both UTech and the UWI have designed general education courses for liberal education and broad 'cultural literacy'. NCU has always been a strong liberal arts institution and one with a significant infusion of religious and theological education into the general curriculum. In fact, before the thorough secularisation of higher education beginning around the middle of the 19th century theology and philosophy were cornerstones of higher education.
TRAINING INTELLECTUALS
At that time also, the purpose of higher education was more about training a small intellectual leadership class for society, and that training was essentially a liberal arts education. Just recently leaders from over 300 Commonwealth universities, linked together in the Association of Commonwealth Universities, met at the University of Adelaide in Australia to consider the widening roles and responsibilities. By and large, the role of tertiary level institutions is, increasingly, to provide specialist technical and professional training for workers in the 'knowledge economy'. Famous management thinker, Peter Drucker, who died last year just before he was 96, declared management studies to be the new liberal art and warned that traditional liberal arts would not survive in higher education unless taught in the context of the 'new realities'.
UTech's Department of Liberal Studies will have much more to consider than today's presentations and discussions on science and technology in liberal studies, facilitating individual and social improvement through tertiary education, the humanising influence of community service, soft skills and the new society, philosophy and ethics in the curriculum, and alternative education. Drucker was also busy prophesying that universities as now configured cannot last another 30 years.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
