"Only Connect" by William Cronon
In our current educational era, there's so much talk about standards.
If we broaden out a bit, there are larger, more meaningful conversations to have, about objectives, purposes, goals of education. The real ones, the meaningful ones.
William Cronon, MacArthur grant recipient, currently professor at University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote a paper called "Only Connect..." I'd like to propose his paper as a conversation starter for statement of purpose. What are we trying to do as educators, anyhow?
Cronon discusses "what it means to be a liberally educated person.." He asks "how does one recognize liberally educated people?" He speaks eloquently about what all of education must include. (The list begins on page three of the article, if you want to go right to that. But the whole article is well worth reading.)
So "how does one recognize liberally-educated people?" Here's the list by Cronon, in short form:
"1)They listen and they hear.
2)They read and they understand.
3)They can talk with anyone.
4)They can write clearly and movingly.
5)They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.
6)They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth.
7)They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism.
8)They understand how to get things done in the world.
9)They nurture and empower the people around them.
10)They follow E.M. forster's injunction from Howard's End: 'Only connect...'" (Cronon, American Scholar)
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A question: Do we need to add in more goals, or refine what Cronon said, so that the goals mesh with "new-age learning,"or are the goals the same, regardless?
What do you think of Cronon's article, his list of goals?
If we broaden out a bit, there are larger, more meaningful conversations to have, about objectives, purposes, goals of education. The real ones, the meaningful ones.
William Cronon, MacArthur grant recipient, currently professor at University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote a paper called "Only Connect..." I'd like to propose his paper as a conversation starter for statement of purpose. What are we trying to do as educators, anyhow?
Cronon discusses "what it means to be a liberally educated person.." He asks "how does one recognize liberally educated people?" He speaks eloquently about what all of education must include. (The list begins on page three of the article, if you want to go right to that. But the whole article is well worth reading.)
So "how does one recognize liberally-educated people?" Here's the list by Cronon, in short form:
"1)They listen and they hear.
2)They read and they understand.
3)They can talk with anyone.
4)They can write clearly and movingly.
5)They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems.
6)They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth.
7)They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism.
8)They understand how to get things done in the world.
9)They nurture and empower the people around them.
10)They follow E.M. forster's injunction from Howard's End: 'Only connect...'" (Cronon, American Scholar)
____________________________________
A question: Do we need to add in more goals, or refine what Cronon said, so that the goals mesh with "new-age learning,"or are the goals the same, regardless?
What do you think of Cronon's article, his list of goals?
Tags: Cronon, goals, liberal+education, objectives, purpose, standards
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by ddeubel on
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Wow Connie!
A fine article and a keeper. He is one guy I wish I could have coffee with.... I truly mean that. He made so many excellent points and covered the notion that education is not just "individual" but for a collective and participatory culture. I was also glad he touched upon the notion of humility and "self criticism" which I think is "reflection".
My hero and a guy I actually met, in the realm of "liberal education" was Gyorgy Faludy. If you ever want one great book, read his "notes from the rainforest" which he wrote at the ends of his days.....there he elaborates on the authentic qualities of an educated person and comes to the same realization - it is about "agape" or transcendent love. What the Hindu might term gratitude for all that is or Tvat Tam Asi...thou art that.
I'm still a firm believer in the idea that a real educator is a liberator. He/she fosters the development of the student towards the realization of their own potential/possibility, no matter what the social/cultural/physical barriers in place. If a person realizes their potential and opens doors rather than closes them, in part because of a teacher. Then, that teacher has done their job, their calling. This fits in with my latest self created mantra - "Know less to be more" ....it's not about knowledge anymore but access to knowledge and the process of being....
David
http://eflclassroom.ning.com
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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on
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I like Cronon for his straightforward view of learning. The goals seem to make sense to a variety of folks, including parents of my students. "Oh, so that's what you're after? That makes a lot of sense..." Seeing goals stated in this way provides allowance for diverse formats for learning and instruction...it gives us elbow room within a curriculum, and opportunity to be creative. The goals are both simplified and expanded with Cronon's list--how did he accomplish both of these at once?
So learning is communicating well, thinking well. Also staying humble--how much MORE is there to learn, after all?
Put his view with Carol Dweck's (have an active mindset), and Nel Noddings (have a curriculum of "care"), and I'm feeling set on aspiration and inspiration as a educator.
I'm looking forward to checking out Notes from the Rainforest by Faludy. I have several naturalists' writings on the rainforest, but not his. I look forward to thinking more about "the authentic qualities of an educated person."
Agreed...being a teacher is being a liberator, helping students to reach potentials, assisting in problem-solving, and removal of barriers.
When you get a chance, I'd love to know know about your mantra and what it means to you. I share the view that access to knowledge (which includes ability to find knowledge) has become more important than having any particular set of knowledge. The process of being? There's a lot more to discuss there. "Know less to be more" would be good advice for me if only I knew how to use it. I can't seem to slow down and relax given such extreme and increasing access to knowledge. Always feel I'm "on the hunt," always feel I have to be alert to new pathways. "Know less to be more" reminds me that I get too "heady" at times, and need to attend to my soul by getting out in nature more. Maybe today, with new gore-tex running shoes and deer hunting season over, I can go for a run in the woods. Some time for just "being" would be very nurturing.
Thanks, David!
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Permalink Reply by Ed Jones on
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Good goals, well written. How to recognize a liberally educated person? Hmmm.
The simplicity of the list opens it wide for lots of nice fluffy feel-good implementations that produce anything but a liberally educated person. For instance, a student could graduate with zero learning in science, and still meet the goals.
There is nothing here about freedom. A liberally educated person would understand the history, the ups and downs of individual freedom. They would know a bit about Law. Economics.
And they would know that they and their generation are not the first on the earth. They would know much about many people past. And they would know something of our common culture, so that American Idol, Global Climate Change, and Britney are not the only thing they can Connect via.
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Hi Ed,
The article seems to have a primary focus on freedom.
Here's a section:
"Liberal education is built on these values: it aspires to nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom. So one very simple answer to my question is that liberally educated people have been liberated by their education to explore and fulfill the promise of their own highest talents. But what might an education for human freedom actually look like? There's the rub. Our current culture wars, our struggles over educational standards are all ultimately about the concrete embodiment of abstract values like "freedom" and "growth" in actual courses and textbooks and curricular requirements. Should students be forced to take courses in American history, and if so, what should those courses contain? Should they be forced to learn a foreign language, encounter a laboratory science, master calculus, study grammar at the expense of creative writing (or the reverse), read Plato or Shakespeare or Marx or Darwin? Should they be required to take courses that foster ethnic and racial tolerance? Even if we agree about the importance of freedom and growth, we can still disagree quite a lot about which curriculum will best promote these values. That is why, when we argue about education, we usually spend less time talking about core values than about formal standards: what are the subjects that all young people should take to help them become educated adults?
This is not an easy question. Maybe that is why--in the spirit of E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy and a thousand college course catalogs--our answers to it often take the form of lists: lists of mandatory courses, lists of required readings, lists of essential facts, lists of the hundred best novels written in English in the twentieth century, and so on and on. This impulse toward list making has in fact been part of liberal education for a very long time. In their original medieval incarnation, the "liberal arts" were required courses, more or less, that every student was supposed to learn before attaining the status of a "free man." There was nothing vague about the artis liberalis. They were a very concrete list of seven subjects: the trivium, which consisted of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium, which consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Together, these were the forms of knowledge worthy of a free man. We should remember the powerful class and gender biases that were built into this vision of freedom. The "free men" who studied the liberal arts were male aristocrats; these specialized bodies of knowledge were status markers that set them apart from "unfree" serfs and peasants, as well as from the members of other vulgar and ignoble classes. Our modern sense of liberal education has expanded from this medieval foundation to include a greater range of human talents and a much more inclusive number of human beings, holding out at least the dream that everyone might someday be liberated by an education that stands in the service of human freedom.
And yet when we try to figure out what this education for human freedom might look like, we still make lists. We no longer hold up as a required curriculum the seven artis liberalis of the medieval university; we no longer expect that the classical nineteenth-century college curriculum in Greek and Latin is enough to make a person learned. But we do offer plenty of other complicated lists with which we tly to identify the courses and distribution requirements that constitute a liberal education. Such requirements vary somewhat from institution to institution, but certain elements crop up predictably. However complex the curricular tables and credit formulas may become--and they can get pretty baroque!--more often than not they include a certain number of total credit hours; a basic composition course; at least pre-calculus mathematics; some credits in a foreign language; some credits in the humanities; some credits in the social sciences; some credits in the natural sciences; and concentrated study in at least one major discipline.
We have obviously come a long way from the artis liberalis and yet I worry that amid all these requirements we may be tempted to forget the ultimate purpose of this thing we call a liberal education. No matter how deliberately they may have been hammered out in committee meetings, it's not clear what these carefully articulated and finely tuned requirements have to do with human freedom.
And when we try to state the purpose of such requirements, we often flounder. Here, for instance, is what one institution I know well states as the "Objects of a Liberal Education": "(1) competency in communication; (2) competency in using the modes of thought characteristic of the major areas of knowledge; (3) a knowledge of our basic cultural heritage; (4) a thorough understanding of at least one subject area." This is the kind of language one expects from an academic committee, I guess, but it is hardly a statement that stirs the heart or inspires the soul.
One problem, I think, is that it is much easier to itemize the requirements of a curriculum than to describe the qualities we would like that curriculum to produce. All the required courses in the world will fail to five us a liberal education if, in the act of requiring them, we forget that their purpose is to nurture human freedom and growth." (Cronon)
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Indeed. And the expanded list goes on to say,
we fool ourselves if we think we can avoid acting, avoid exercising power, avoid joining the world's fight. And so we study power and struggle to use it wisely and well.
He also says that a liberally educated person should be able to appreciate the Science page of the NY times, and a farmers field.
In fact, the narrative of the list has quite a few sublists. ...Hmmm.
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Hi Ed,
Yes, it's ironic that in an attempt to get away from lists , there are lists of what maybe shouldn't be listed. So with standards we've got lists of lists, and with Cronon, we may be talking about lists of anti-lists, and that could multiply into lists of anti-lists, and anti-lists of listed lists. Hmmm....indeed! It's all a bit abstract to me.
I like the ideas put forth in Everything is Miscellaneous, that all media and material can be multiply-tagged and approached from any direction.
But where does that leave us educationally? Does curriculum come back down to sequential coverage of some set of ideas, or should our current approach to knowledge itself be evolving along with the capacities of new-age tools and thinking? And if our approach might evolve to something different, what would be the guiding principles? I like the idea of using Cronon's--and add in the strong dose of science, also "they would know that they and their generation are not the first on the earth. They would know much about many people past. And they would know something of our common culture..." as you are wisely suggesting.
Thanks for your thoughts--keep them coming!
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Hey again, Connie,
I always go back to why it was that I got interested in Education to begin with: After making it through 20 years of formal schooling, I simply felt dumb.
Not dumb as in I needed to go out and read the full works of Plato and Freud and Hume and Augustine, but dumb as in I had no idea of anything they contributed. What I knew of writing was diagramming a sentence. I could offer not one piece of information about any of the Rubicon, Mark Antony, the Medici, Cardinal Richelieu, the philosopher's stone, Carthage, the Black Death, Sojourner Truth, or John Brown. I didn't know Nehemiah from Nebuchadnezzar Cady-Stanton from Edwin Stanton.
In short, I couldn't read the Opinion Columns in the Wall Street Journal. Because writers use those things to convey things to us.
Then I got to thinking that if I was that left out--me, graduated top of the class from a decently average middle class high school, a voracious reader, and six plus years at three world-class universities, then...what chance do minorities in our inner city schools have?
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