It was with mixed feelings that I read the article, “CCC flips the switch on electrician’s degree” in the 3/9-10 edition of the PR. On the one hand, to quote a college spokesperson interviewed for the article,”This will be a big stepping stone for those students who think they aren’t interested in attending college...Now they can earn a degree doing what they love --- working with their hands.” Which raises the question, “Why ignore the liberal arts and sciences which involve working with their minds?” Is this really an either-or situation?
Almost 100 years ago, the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, in a
speech celebrating the opening of the Harvard Business School succinctly pointed out that “Education is for life, if not, what is it for?” At the same time there is also a need to offer practical courses which can put food on the table. In a 2015 article in the Washington Post,” What’s the purpose of education in the 21st century?” Arthur H. Camins writes:
“With each new workforce development or economic competitiveness demand on our K-12 schools, there has been push-back from those who want greater emphasis on a broader view of education. But it doesn’t have to be either-or. Education should prepare young people for life, work and citizenship.” I believe that all educational institutions would benefit from and strive toward this three-pronged prescription.
The difficulty in developing a curriculum for our children from Kindergarten through College is that each child is a unique learner and a single pedagogical approach is not effective. However, most subjects can be divided into theory and practice and using a combination of both lectures and laboratory projects is one way to address this issue.
The lab/lecture approach is baked into the Computer Science curriculum --- Lectures lay out the theory and the Labs help the students to apply that theory to a practical problem. It’s a symbiotic relationship: The theory informs the practice and the practice makes the abstract theory more concrete which helps the student to understand the theory. This approach is not new; it has been advocated by John Dewey (born Oct. 20, 1859, Burlington, Vt.) and is usually summarized by the phrase ‘learning by doing” then reflecting on what you’ve done and how you did it.
There is another practical reason for this dual lab/lecture pedagogy. In the lecture hall I ask the questions to determine if the students are understanding me or not, but they are my questions and not the students’. In the Lab however, it’s the students asking the questions so they listen much more intently and thus learn more effectively and enjoyably.
OK, with all that said, why am I worried that the education provided to students choosing a specific career such as Electrician need only take 9 credits in the liberal arts and sciences (3 courses) of their required 60 to graduate? Well, even if those three courses are in fact chosen from the liberal arts curriculum, is that enough exposure for the student to broaden their perspective to include reading and writing as well as many other courses in the liberal arts?
If I had to whittle the liberal arts curriculum down to just two topics, it would be reading and writing. Not only because reading and writing are necessary skills in most of the liberal arts but most of the liberal arts require a careful reading and analysis of ideas. Writing about them allows your teacher to assess your progress and learning level.
But I think that the biggest advantage to careful reading and then writing clearly, correctly and cohesively about what you’ve read is that it forces you to think about what you have written and reading other writers shows you how to become a better writer. You can’t bluff your way through a written piece, you can’t count on a litany of “ya knows’ in a reasoned explanation or argument. Writing not only clarifies your thoughts, it also can generate new ideas. I cannot count the number of times new ideas are born as I write --- the act of writing itself primes the pump so to speak.
Finally as a purely practical consideration, being able to write clearly helps with job interviews and subsequent promotions. Why? Because we are judged by our employers during the job interview on at least three criteria: first, how we look, second, how we speak and third, for promotion --- how we write. Like it or not, how we write is a part of how our intelligence is judged by others and it is the Liberal Arts and Sciences that hone that skill.
As my colleague Doug Skopp used to say, “The purpose of Education is to live a life, not to make a living” Of course, making a living is a large part of living a life. But to live and to flourish we must feed our minds and hearts as well as our bodies. The line from the poem/song, “Bread and Roses” sums it all up: “Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses.”
