Bring Back Broad Education

 

Yeah, the term they're searching for is "liberal arts."

I graduated from little Allegheny College, a school that used to proudly advertise itself as a liberal arts college. Students were required to meet distribution requirements by taking courses outside of their major, and every department offered courses for non-majors, which is why I graduated with a degree in English but courses in astronomy, geology, computer science, sociology, music, and theater. 

I never doubted the value of a liberal arts approach for me as a future teacher; teaching is all about showing connections between stuff, and you can't really connect dots if you aren't familiar with more than one or two dots. 

A liberal arts approach makes double sense to me in K-12 education. The more stuff you know about, the more choices you have. The more stuff you try, the better chance you'll find what you are in tune with.

But one of the pressures of reformsterism has been to turn schools into vocational training centers. Back in 2013, Allan Golston at the Gates Foundation wrote "Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools." That was endemic in Common Core support. Take this other example from Rex Tillerson, Exxon CEO, also pitching the Core:

“I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”

Get those meat widgets ready to be useful and employable by corporations. There has been bipartisan support for the idea of measuring college swellness based on the quality of job that graduates get. 

And with this focus on education as vocational training, folks have embraced the idea that education, even from early years, should be singularly focused on that future job. Come on, fifth graders-- pick your career!

The problem with this was always that it serves employers far batter than it serves students. Sure, it's great for Widget Corp with a need for 20 new widget makers annually if the local K-12 district cranks out 100 widget makers every year. Widget Corp gets to pick the best 20 of the 100-- great for them. But what are the other 80 supposed to do?

As described in the clip above, the situation can be even worse. Four years ago, going to college to be a computer programmer seemed like a no-brainer, and now it's suddenly a huge mistake. The employment landscape is shifting and changing, sometimes with catastrophic speed, and a person who trained for one particular career path can find himself in a real bind.

So we have this "new" wisdom-- instead of focusing all your energies on one particular deep pursuit, maybe broaden your education so that you are familiar with a whole bunch of stuff. Gives you flexibility (and maybe even makes you better at whatever job you end up with and maybe even also enriches your life). 

This all dovetails nicely with the returning idea that reading proficiency is best built through teaching lots and lots of content, that students best learn to read by building a body of content knowledge. 

So by all means-- let's bring back a fully rounded education aimed at fostering broadly educated complete human beings who have a fuller knowledge of being fully human in the world, because that not only gives them a better shot at living full and rich lives, but because it's also better protection against the wide swings of economy and business than, say, chasing whatever corporations demand for their meat widget supply.