Goodreads Bookshelf
Higher Education
Listening to a podcast recently, I heard an interview with the founders of Gaia University, which seems to have programs largely in things like ecological building and permaculture and other issues surrounding the building of a sustainable world. They keep fees down ($2500-$8800 depending on where you are in your studies) by offering a "blended" program (most of the work is on-line, with only a portion occurring on one of their "campuses") and having their campuses essentially utilize existing facilities of "eco-villages" and the like.
Anyway, what I wanted to blog about wasn't this program per se, but the characterization that was made of education. The host of the show described her own experience in college: "When I went to school, I would just pick classes randomly out of a catalog and nothing ever quite fit with what I wanted to do." One of the founders of Gaia agreed and pushed things back beyond college (my quotation here may be inexact): "When humans are children we have a natural zest for learning... we basically go around the world with a great deal of joy learning things. Then they often put us in a box called school that tells us what it is we should know and what it is we need to know and that really shuts down our natural joy and our natural curiosity and that creates a lot of distress."
My first reaction was disagreement with the both of them, because I've always enjoyed learning... well, just about anything. Certainly my college experience was not picking things at random that really didn't interest me. I was a double major because too many things interested me to just pick one, and even then I was happy to take courses outside my majors to fulfill the diversification requirements of a liberal arts university. Psychology, Political Science, Philosophy--even things that didn't start with P like Religion and computer programming were interesting to me. If I could have afforded to have stayed in college for another 4 years, I' quite certain I could have found courses to fascinate me. Heck, I found myself trying and failing to fit in courses in history, foreign languages, and history into my schedule, and those are just the ones that I made a legitimate effort to work into y schedule. When it comes right down to it, there aren't a whole lot of academic subjects that don't hold some interest for me.
However, I do recognize that this isn't the case for everyone. I suppose there's probably a lot of truth in what they were saying, in part because students go to college now as a matter of course, often without any real sense of why they're going. That was true for me, but I think it turned out well enough just because I loved taking classes and was willing to work hard at them. I don't have any illusions that this was the case for everyone. If you're just fulfilling the requirements for some degree so that you can get a job with a Fortune 500 company doing whatever it is that they might hire recent graduates to do, or you don't really have any plans for after college or much enjoyment of the educational process, it could be a fairly mediocre experience (if not for all the partying, of course).
This school touts its "action-learning approach," in which students learn by doing as well as offering an education that is largely self-directed (with the help of a mentor), and I'm sure these are great, but in some ways I'm not sure the critique and the answer quite match each other. The school's students, spread out over the world, range in age from 20-72 (if I'm remembering correctly), with a high concentration in the late 20s. From what I've seen, adults who return to school--even perfectly traditional schools--are typically more motivated than their 18-22-year-old counterparts. They've had life experience which has given them a stronger sense of why they're going to school and what they intend to get out of it; they're also spending their own money on the education, which probably makes a difference too.
I guess I'm not entirely convinced that the problem is traditional education as such. A college major is simply a suggestion for what you need to know if you want to pursue some particular path. If you are an English major, the college is assuming that you want to know an awful lot about literature, and so your studies are directed in such a way that you are forced to learn about various time periods and genres and writers. Often, there's a good bit of flexibility in terms of what particular courses a student takes within a major. The problem, to my mind, isn't so much that colleges force students to take courses they aren't interested in so much as it is that students are putting themselves on a path on which they need to take courses they aren't interested in, because they're going to college without even a vague idea of why they're going and what they will get out of it. One of the big positives about a place like Gaia U. from this perspective is that they offer a lot of non-traditional options to fit a wider variety of interests than a traditional college (and for a much lower price).
Don't get me wrong: I by no means think that a student needs to have his or her life mapped out before applying to college, or that if they do they can't or shouldn't be flexible enough to change. The problem isn't simply that 18-year-olds don't know what they want to do with the rest of their lives, but that as a society we expect them to head off to college and commit tens of thousands of dollars per year to the enterprise whether they really want to or not and that we've structured things in such a way that they often feel they have little choice beyond going to college or taking on a minimum-wage job.
Your thoughts are, as always, most appreciated.