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Peer Review, Spring 2003
Introduction
Carol Geary Schneider, president, Association
of American Colleges and Universities |
For much of our history, civic education was thought to be
primarily the province of the schools--initially the grammar
schools, and then the high schools as well. But now, with
a new majority of high school graduates proceeding on to higher
education, and with Americans newly sensitized to the complexity
of our role in the global community, civic engagement is becoming
an organizing principle in today's discussions of higher learning.
Preparation for civic responsibility is assuming new prominence,
not just as a strand in general education programs, but also
in contemporary conceptions of good education both in the
disciplines and in the professions.
As in any cultural change, there are not only advocates and
adopters, but vocal resisters too. This spring, Stanley Fish,
dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University
of Illinois at Chicago, published an arresting critique in
The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled "Aim Low:
Confusing Democratic Values with Academic Ones Can Easily
Damage the Quality of Education." Speaking directly to faculty,
Fish opined: "You can reasonably . . . put your students in
possession of a set of materials and equip them with a set
of skills (interpretive, computational, laboratory, archival).
. . . You have little chance however . . . of determining
what they will make of what you have offered them. . . . And
you have no chance at all . . . of determining . . . their
behavior and values . . . in those aspects of their lives
that are not, in the strict sense of the word, academic."
Fish is right, of course, that the campus cannot--and indeed,
should not--seek to instruct students on the judgments they
will make as citizens and human beings. The academy in a free
society seeks to educate students for the responsibilities
of freedom, and not to instruct them in one doctrine
or another. But are teaching concepts and procedural knowledge
the whole of our obligation to students? Or, in a knowledge-intensive
society, do we have some responsibility to give our students
practice in considering the implications of their knowledge--and
especially the implications of different courses of action
that may be based on their knowledge?
As we at AAC&U review educational innovations emerging
across the nation, one of the most prevalent trends is the
effort to create and explore more powerful connections between
knowledge and society. Thematically linked learning communities
(which Fish's campus is sponsoring), community-based research,
collaborative projects, service-learning, mentored internships,
reflection on what has been learned from experiential learning
and/or study abroad: All are efforts to help students make
connections between scholarship and public questions, consider
alternative frameworks for judgment and action, draw meaning
from experience, critique theory in light of practice, and
evaluate practice in light of new knowledge. All are practices
that require students to negotiate their differences with
colleagues and which therefore have clear implications for
cultivatingthoughtful and reflective forms of citizenship
in a diverse democracy.
One impetus for these widely adopted educational innovations
is the recognition--grounded in decades of cognitive research--that
students' learning is deepened when they can see the implications--the
larger contexts--of particular concepts. In other words, even
"academic" learning as Fish delimits it is improved in quality
when students are encouraged to make connections. Moreover,
as Pat Gurin and her colleagues at the University of Michigan
have effectively documented, students' cognitive skills are
deepened when students confront difficult and consequential
differences in their own views and those of others.
A second impetus, however, is the realization that too many
graduates have entered the community--and the professions--armed
only with technical and procedural knowledge. Brutalizing
governments, today's terrorists, renegade corporate criminals--each
of these horrific examples reminds us in different ways that
conceptual knowledge and technical skills can be turned to
profoundly destructive ends. And each of these examples, in
its own way, illustrates the dangers of learning too little
tempered by an ability to engage and respect the humanity
of those outside one's own circle of identification.
In short, whether we are concerned in traditional terms with
the "depth and breadth" of academic learning, or in more contemporary
terms with helping students explore the implications and contestations
surrounding the uses of knowledge, civic engagement claims
a formative place in today's conceptions of educational excellence.
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