I’ve concluded that the goal of most college courses should not be knowledge but engaging in certain intellectual exercises. For the last few years I’ve had the privilege of teaching a seminar to first-year Honors students in which we read a wide range of wonderful texts, from Plato and Thucydides to Calvino and Nabokov. We have lively discussions that require a thorough knowledge of the text, and the students write excellent papers that give close readings of particular passages. But the half-life of their detailed knowledge is probably far less than a year. The goal of the course is simply that they have had close encounters with some great writing.
. . . The fruits of college teaching should be measured not by tests but by the popularity of museums, classical concerts, art film houses, book discussion groups, and publications like Scientific American, the New York Review of Books, The Economist, and The Atlantic, to cite just a few. These are the places where our students reap the benefits of their education.
Many will see all this as fuzzy idealism, ignorant of the essentially vocational needs that must drive even college teaching. Students need jobs and employers need well- trained workers. What do the alleged joys of the mind have to do with these brute facts? It’s hard enough to just teach what people need to do their jobs.
But what do they need to do their jobs? In professions like medicine and engineering there’s a body of technical knowledge learned in school and maintained through subsequent use. Beyond that—at least it is often said—we need critical thinking and creativity: the ability to detect tacit but questionable assumption and to develop new ways of understanding issues—in short, to think beyond what “everyone knows.”
And perhaps my performance should be measured by increased engagement in political matters - however people choose to express that. Perhaps this should include a measure of how capable students fee in influencing the political process, or at least having an understanding about how this is done.
Just a thought.
