Article from University Affairs, February 1987 edition

 

 

There's a new agenda
for ‘liberalizing’ education

Bonnie Coulombe

 

 

“T here is a little story I like to tell about

two medieval stonecutters who where
working away. When one was asked what
he was doing, he replied: ‘Cutting a stone.’
When the other was asked, he replied:
‘Building a cathedral.’”

The anecdote was told by Russell Edger-
ton during the keynote address at Ryer-
son Polytechnical Institute's recent confer-
ence on “Career Education for the 1990s:
The Role of Liberal Studies”.

The conference brought together over
100 leaders from business, labor, govern-
ment and academe to exchange ideas on
the changing role of liberal education —
in society in general and in the professions
in particular.

The ensuing dialogue moved quickly
from the role of liberal education to the
precepts of a “‘liberalizing education”.

To Russell Edgerton, president of the
American Association for Higher Educa-

, the individual in his story who envi-

s the cathedral embodies many of the
attributes and values that are the by-
products of a liberalizing education.

And thinking about what it means to
be a generally or liberally educated per-
son is part of what Dr Edgerton describes
as the new conversation or the new
construct in American higher education
today.

Search for coherence

This new conversation seems to have
come to the fore in the U.S. at about the
same time as the report To Reclaim a
Legacy by American Education Secretary
William Bennett appeared on the scene.

In order for his audience to understand
this new construct Dr Edgerton reviewed
developments in higher education in the
U.S. over the past decade. In the mid-70s
when the ‘‘babyboom" cohort saw the
value of their college diploma eroded in a
shifting economy and a labor market that
could not accommodate their burgeoning
numbers, more and more students moved
from “liberal arts’’ programs to the pro-
fessional and technical occupational fields.
And even then roughly a quarter of the
college graduating classes found they had
to take up ‘‘so-called non-college-type
jobs.”

Students increasingly responded

labor market trends in selecting their

iversity programs, and universities shift-
ed their faculty priorities to accommodate
the shifts in student demand.

And the liberal arts faculties went on
the defensive, said Dr Edgerton. These
faculties looked for ways to save “‘liberal
arts’. And they urged employees and stu-
dents to look beyond the entry-level jobs
to middle management positions where the
competencies, attitudes and values of a

‘generalist’ or more broadly educated per-
son become more important.

Finally, said Dr Edgerton, in the late
1970s and early 1980s the dialogue shift-
ed again.

People within postsecondary institutions
who had been responding to both the needs
of a rapidly shifting labor market and toa
markedly different clientele felt that some-
thing had been lost. And, continued Dr
Edgerton, they began to ask questions
like: Haven't we given away the store?
Didn't we abandon too much of the stan-
dards and coherence of our curriculum?
Aren't we overspending on all fronts? and
Where is our integrity and our coherence?

Dr Edgerton views the report To
Reclaim a Legacy as the most symbolic of
those produced in the recent search for
integrity and coherence in college curricula.

He likens it to a call for the old time
religion of the classic canons of Western
civilization.

Educate for a new order

The new conversation is more forward
looking, and it takes place in a new socio-
economic order, continued Dr Edgerton.

There are three principal factors in its
articulation. :

First, advancing technology and inter-
national competition are producing a fun-
damentally new era, and as a consequence
we ought to be thinking not in terms of
economic development but economic trans-
formation. The character of the transfor-
mation, said Dr Edgerton, has to be within
each sector and a number of people are
arguing that organizations must be put
in a new mode.

In North America we need a whole new
dynamism if we are to maintain our stan-
dard of living, continued Dr Edgerton. The
key to this dynamism — the second ele-
ment in this dialogue — lies in the quality
of the workforce.

“Only if you look inside a dynamic orga-
nization do you find enterprising managers
and flexible workers — people with initia-
tive and persistence and willingness to
change.

“So the real limiting factor is not sim-
ple lack of professional expertise, but it is
some of those softer skills and attitudes
and energy levels of people to staff the
kind of dynamic organizations that are the
kind of ways that we are going to make
our new living in the world.”

An implication of this line of thinking.
observed Dr Edgerton, is that we're begin-
ning to think in terms of ‘sort of stand-
ing the supply-demand equation on
its head.

“We're not only looking at what are the
niches out there that we ought to be put-
ting people into. But rather, we're saying

that the kind of people we put into those
niches affects the character of the work,
the demand for the work. And so, we can
change our economy by the character of
the people that we produce from our col-
leges and universities who are going into
that economy.”

The third and final component of this
new construct is a ‘“‘kind Gt canelision of
the first two", he said. The educational
objectives for which we are educating peo-
ple are changing.

But, added Dr Edgerton, here the think-
ing gets a little fuzzy. Most of the people
thinking about the new economy are either
economists or people interested in man-
agement or organization theories, they're
not educators, and they're not human
developers. ‘‘So they leave us with words
like flexibility and creativity, and risk-
taking and other characteristics that they
see as important for the kind of people and
economic future that we have.

“But the missing link is between leaving
us at that point and translating those
vague words into statements of outcomes
of education and training.

“So I don’t pretend to have any data-
bases in making the connection from where
they leave us, and where educators, psy-
chologists and people engaged in the dusi-
ness of human development and traning
pick up.”

However, Dr Edgerton said, there is @
new agenda and it has important implica-
tions for higher education. While it lacks
specifics, there are some themes.

“One theme is that in terms of the un-
skilled and semi-skilled categories of our
workforce, the most important vocational
education is an education in basic acade-
mic skills. More and more people need to
know how to read, write and compute at a
basic level. There is a certain level of
sophistication in dealing with the informa-
tion society that wasn't there 10 years ago.

“In the professional, technical and mana-
gerial areas some of the things that I read
suggest that specialization is running ram-
pant and will continue to run rampant. We
all need to be increasingly specialized. But
there's something more. And that is, that
more and more of the knowledge that we
need needs to be more and more theoreti-
cally based.”

Applied knowledge
has short life span

Dr Edgerton pointed out that in a world
of increasingly rapid change, applied know!-
edge has a short life span: « conly things
that are fundamental! endure, and there is
nothing more fundamental than a good
theory”, he quipped. ;

He noted that this results in pressure for

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