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Peer Review, Winter 2004
From the Editor
David Tritelli |
What is the best kind of college
education for today's students? This very basic question--and
the many others that follow from it--has been provoked
anew by transformative changes to the context within which
higher learning takes place and for which graduates must be
prepared.
What kind of learning do students
need to meet emerging challenges in the workplace, in a diverse
democracy, and in an interconnected world? To address this
question--as well as questions about how colleges and universities
can best advance a new vision for learning--AAC&U convened
a national panel comprised of education, business, government,
and community action leaders. Their emphatic answer, given
in the specific context of American higher education, is a
practical and engaged liberal education. Indeed, the panel's
report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning
as a Nation Goes to College, released nearly two years
ago, calls for a dramatic reorganization of higher education
in America to give all students--regardless of institution
or major--a liberal education.
Interestingly, education leaders
the world over are reaching the same conclusion: the education
that best prepares students for the challenges of the twenty-first
century is a liberal education. In the winter 2003 issue of
Liberal Education, Susan Gillespie points to "a burgeoning
liberal education movement abroad" and observes that "new
liberal education programs have emerged in countries as diverse
as Belarus and Dubai, Estonia, Germany, and Hong Kong, Hungary
and Kazakhstan, South Korea and Kyrgyzstan, Poland and Russia,
Tajikistan and Turkey."
A few years ago, the World Bank
and UNESCO formed a joint Task Force on Higher Education and
Society, bringing together education experts from thirteen
countries to explore the future of higher education in the
developing world. The Task Force's report, released
in 2000, makes the case for liberal education at the university
level in developing countries.
The increasingly widespread recognition
of the practical value of a liberal education does not signal
a homogenization of global higher education, however. The
actual practice of liberal education is distinctly local;
it is largely determined by the questions raised--and
the answers reached--in particular national, cultural,
even institutional environments. What, for example, does it
mean to be liberally educated? What kinds of curricula foster
liberal learning? What is the role of the disciplines?
In the United States, the answers
being worked out and explored by colleges and universities
of all types are effectively reinventing liberal education.
As Carol Geary Schneider, AAC&U's president, has
observed recently, "the nation's campuses are
dotted with a vibrant new generation of innovative programs
and pedagogies. The majority of these innovations are indisputably
reinventions of a more traditional liberal education for this
new global era and for today's newly diverse population
of students." Collectively, these innovations indicate
progress toward enacting the Greater Expectations vision of
a new, globally engaged academy.
And it is not only globalization
but also democratization that provokes so many of the questions
to which liberal education is the answer. As Susan Gillespie
notes, "many of the new liberal education programs are
located in countries that are seeking to democratize their
societies." Why? As the joint World Bank and UNESCO
Task Force puts it, the outcomes of a liberal education "are
essential elements of effective participatory democracy."
Moreover, liberal education "foster[s] tolerance and
ethical values, helping to encourage the social awareness
and philanthropy that are vital to a society's health
and stability."
I can think of no better introduction
to what follows. Indeed, in reading this issue of Peer
Review, one is struck by how closely liberal education
and democratic values are intertwined as well as by how appropriate,
even necessary, both are to effective global engagement.
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