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How Our Educational Values Reveal Attitudes about Class
by Mary Churchill, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 15, 2011
When Mary Churchill, special assistant to the vice president of institutional advancement at Queens College, City University of New York, and a higher education blogger, recently attended a forum on common core educational standards in US elementary and secondary schools, she was pleased to see that the standards focused on both college and career readiness, rather than one at the expense of the other. This focus is a positive change, Churchill writes, from her own high school days in the mid-1980s, when students were “tracked” into college prep or vocational tracks starting as early as the eighth grade. But while we might be moving in the right direction, institutions of higher education still tend to “focus more on marketable skills and productivity than greater human understanding and the opportunity to create new knowledge” when speaking about and working with first-generation and lower-income college students. The best undergraduate programs in our country are known for their strong emphasis on the liberal arts, Churchill points out. “If we know that the skills we focus on teaching today may be outdated in five or ten years, why would we stress skills over the ability to question, think creatively, and take risks?”
The entire opinion piece may be read online.
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