Bruce Leier wrote:
>
> Brad,
>
> Ahhhhhh? Your point??? Is???
[snip]
I gave this question some thought, and, amazingly enough,
I came up with a succinct answer that I think gets to the
point:
First, let us all agree that formal education in America,
whether at the public high school level or at the
doctoral level At Harvard, is not genuine "liberal
education", nor does it in any way aspire to be.
Of course some liberal education occurs in the
system, but it is the exception and not the rule,
and often it is *despite the rules* (like when a
teacher promises every student an A before the course begins).
Genuine liberal education is freely self-selected
inquiry conducted in leisure, as Rabelais
describes in the big quote at the top of the following
page:
http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/aboutTime.html
I actually had some of this in doing my EdD dissertation,
but the "price" was that my degree has no cash value, i.e.,
my degree and the process by which I got it would
be unambivalently consonant with the
life only for a person "of independent means".
What we do have is aimless pedagogy that gets
graded and students pass or fail, etc. There
is limited and ambivalent incentive here for the students to
learn.
Here's what the example I described aims at
instead: The company had certain work it needed to
get done. The pedagogical question posed was: "Is there
any reasonable way we can get these students to
successfully accomplish the work we need to get done?"
Education with such a goal-directed focus
has lots of reasons to try to get every student to
learn, and no reasons to either produce failures
or even just not be too upset if there are any
failures (road kill on the education credentialling
superhighway).
Man, unlike the donkey,
walks in a straight line,
because he has a goal.
(--LeCorbusier, "Towards a New Architecture")
Let me repeat: This has little or nothing to do
with genuine liberal education ("Bildung", i.e.,
cultural self-formation). But I claim that
you will have to look very hard to find any
liberal education in the regional ontology
of student-objects. Tests and grades are
on principle incompatible with the activity
of liberal education. I forget who said,
but there is truth in it:
What was once the leisured pleasure of a privileged few
Has been transformed into the obligatory tedium of all.
Does this make my point more clearly than my original
case presentation?
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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