Without getting into the out-of-control imbalance and hypocrisy of
college sports, higher education makes its appeal to students in an unbalanced
and distorting way. It advertises itself in economic language, not in social
or cultural or moral language. It sells itself as a producer of professionals,
but not as parents, friends, neighbors, and citizens; it touts job, with its
title, position, and paycheck, and very seldom does it sell character
development. It images itself as an employment agency. Too many professors
are high on being information transmitters and stuffers, and teach to
credential; too many present themselves as head hunters for a good paying job;
too few talk of personal transformation. Higher education has put itself in
restricting balkanized containers: departments, colleges, schools, courses,
classroom, campus, major, program, degree, tests, grades, GPAs, pedagogy,
assessment, technology.
By putting on center stage the vocational "business" and banishing to the wings
the human "beingness," the idea that education's goal is to help a person learn
how to live the good life has gone into eclipse, overshadowed by the idea that
education's sole role is vocational or credential, that is, to help a person
earn a good living. Students are asked in word and action, especially at
revealing career days and job fairs and Career Services Office, "what do you
want to do," and seldom, if ever, "who do you want to become." And so, higher
education has generally surrendered a significant part of both its educational
and "higher" character.
Whatever makes higher education both education and higher, often
ignored "beingness" intensifies it; it focuses; it concentrates. It's the
moral core; it's the ethical center; it's the source of integrity and
authenticity which goes by the name "character;" it's the name of the game.
It's intensely personal; it's very social; it's a resource for questioning,
change, development. It is "beingness," not "business" that puts you on a
questing life of pilgrimage that takes you out of your world into other worlds
and thereby expands your world.
As a guide to myself, almost exactly twenty years ago, in a piece I
called "What It Is We Get Paid To Do, I wrote that higher education "is the
development of a thoughtful citizen and a compassionate human being who is also
a skilled worker. It is a mission that is concerned with the whole person
rather than merely the partial wage-earner. It is the mission that seeks to
insure that our students will graduate as individuals of character more
competent in their ability to contribute to society, more civil in how they
think, more respectful in how they talk, more sympathetic in how they act, more
sensitive to the needs of the community of which they are a part...."
I believed and lived that then; it believe and live it even more today.
But, you know something, you don't get invited if you think this "fluffy,"
"touchy-feely," "tosh," "junk" way because most academics find it real hard to
admit it, grasp it, talk about it, much less believe and live it.
Make it a good day
-Louis-
Louis Schmier
http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org
203 E. Brookwood Pl http://www.therandomthoughts.com
Valdosta, Ga 31602
(C) 229-630-0821 /\ /\ /\ /\
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/ \ / \
/ \/ \_ \/ / \/
/\/ / \ /\ \
//\/\/ /\ \__/__/_/\_\/
\_/__\ \
/\"If you want to climb
mountains,\ /\
_ / \ don't practice on mole
hills" - / \_
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