What to learn, when
Ends of years are good times for taking stock. Since May I’ve been enrolled in the Marketing program at Melbourne Business School. It is the right time in my life, I think, to be back at school.
The key difference I notice between my undergraduate and graduate educations is that the latter is emphasising a body of knowledge and an intellectual toolkit in an explicit way. Let us call this “the goods.” I find this approach to learning beneficial. Despite the classic arguments against canons, certain ideas and principles must be better and more useful than others, or at least form a useful starting point to diverge. It makes sense therefore that we should cover off the goods in a non-random fashion.
There are a few plausible explanations why this does not, largely, occur in undergraduate education. I think the most salient explanation is the issue of taxonomy. This has two components.
The first, that in carving up knowledge, a sense of the whole is lost. Knowledge must firstly be carved into moderately coherent 15-week pieces. Then, these pieces are offered as a smorgasbord, with no hand overseeing whether the goods get covered off or not in the infinite permutations of student whim.
The second component is that some crucial things don’t fit into any taxonomy at all, or if they do, they’re in a part of the smorgasbord you may or may not pick. I’m thinking here about the kinds of things the UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century calls its Four Pillars: learning to know, learning to be, learning to live with and learning to be. There’s a lot of meta-thought and context in the Four Pillars, more or less the antithesis of what a depth-oriented, subjectised, semesterised course can offer. Meta level learning, such as general problem solving, people skills, analysis, study skills, basic philosophy and socioeconomic context are understandably glossed over by lecturers whose main objective is to realise the objectives of the existing model.
The University of Melbourne makes much of its breadth program in the Melbourne Model – but to me this seems like more of the same: an unstructured smorgasbord, only this time across disciplines rather than within one. What is needed, at both secondary and undergraduate level, is a commitment to the definition, explicit teaching, and practice of the goods. This is too important to leave to chance. Whoever moves first will be rewarded with a massive brand advantage in an employment marketplace hungry for these skills.
But branding education is effectively leaving it for the free market and will ultimately lead to education only being for the rich. So how would you go about making this a universal model?
> The University of Melbourne makes much of its breadth program in
> the Melbourne Model – but to me this seems like more of the same
I really don’t think it’s more of the same. I think it’s the thing you’ve been complaining about only WORSE.
I agree – that’s what I’m trying to say! Is there anyone who does this well in your experience?
I’m out of date on everywhere except Australia, but British universities USED to do this well. Traditional British degrees were very structured. They managed this by being very specialised. For example, my degree was a year and a bit of (only) maths followed by nearly two years of (only) pure maths.
Personally I think the best system is to have the main part of the degree very specialised like that, and add a requirement to do a few courses chosen ad libitum from all over the place.
S, the educational brand would be the _consequence_ of providing this kind of education, not the precursor. I think the real issue of education and the free market is finding the balance between letting educators innovate, and defining the compulsory elements.
I think your strongest point here is that the current higher ed model is hopelessly inefficient when it comes to developing students’ higher order skills. Presumably the reason why universities don’t do this better is because developing these skills on an individual student basis and over a whole of degree time frame is incredibly resource intensive.
But I’m not sure choice is the big problem though or that we should be too worried about subject specific ‘goods’. I doubt an arts degree which gave greater emphasis to the canon but kept the possibility of students sailing through three years of tuition without ever having somebody critically engage with their writing and ideas would add that much value.
It’s the ‘meta level learning’ skills that are really important and will become more so as we adapt to having near instantaneous access to the assembled body of human knowledge (ie the internet). It’s not that socially or economically useful anymore for me be able to give someone a summary of the key points of The Republic (and write a 2000 word essay to train myself to do so). Wikipedia has destroyed the scarcity of that sort of knowledge. It IS useful for me to have a familiarity with what Plato was getting at, know where it ‘fits’, and know how to find the detail of the arguments when I need it and use it analytically to solve problems in different contexts. The problem with our current model is that it doesn’t teach people to be good at using knowledge to solve problems usefully. (The huge redundancy in universities’ collective intellectual output is a related topic for another day.)
But I don’t really care if a student develops those skills learning about film theory instead of basic microeconomics so I’m less fussed about being too restrictive on content. Subject mastery should come at the graduate degree stage. Plus being too prescriptive about what ‘the goods’ are is a really difficult practical task (I mean considering the politics of universities). And some of the classic arguments against canons are pretty good arguments. Saying that ‘certain ideas and principles must be better and more useful than others’ is fine but it doesn’t take you very far.
That said, I agree that there would be benefits to setting aside a significant chunk of a liberal arts degree (say at least 25%) to give people a primer on recurring ideas and themes within the humanities – liberalism, democracy, globalisation etc. But I wouldn’t bemoan choice. The best skill arguably a good university should inculcate is the ability to think creatively and innovatively. Surely you don’t get that by being too prescriptive about what people should know.
Mike, I really like everything you have to say. (I know a few Mikes, are you one of them? If so, which one?)
I didn’t mean to demonise choice… I guess what I’m suggesting is that these two things, the meta-level skills and the “primer on recurring ideas”, should be covered off in an explicit and non-random way. In the choice students are offered currently, they may well pick up all of these skills and ideas – but the lack of an intent or a guiding hand makes it less likely.
Your points about content I agree with entirely. The issue of what goes into such a course would not be easy to resolve – but the alternative is not having any idea what the content is or could be. This makes it impossible to measure or manage anything about this dimension of learning, so it gets lost. Potentially the “meta-level” bucket would be less controversial to define than the “recurring ideas” bucket. The tension between prescription and innovation doesn’t worry me unduly, since the point of the goods is to enable creativity.
“Presumably the reason why universities don’t do this better is because developing these skills on an individual student basis and over a whole of degree time frame is incredibly resource intensive.”
No, historically it’s because universities have believed that the best way to attract students is to offer almost unlimited choice. They think (maybe correctly; I don’t know) that 17-year-olds will prefer a university that lets them tailor their own degree program.
We don’t need to reinvent the meta-level degree. That’s what a degree traditionally was, for many decades before the post-war expansion. Well, OK, maybe we should reinvent all the details, but the idea is very old. I believe traditionally it was done through theology and/or Classics (i.e. Greek and Latin) and/or mathematics, and later through English literature.