Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World

The Ross School Model and Education for the Global Era

Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814741412
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we are living in a global era, yet schooling systems remain generally reactive and slow to adapt to shifting economic, technological, demographic, and cultural terrains. There is a growing urgency to create, evaluate, and expand new models of education that are better synchronized with the realities of today’s globally linked economies and societies.

Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World examines one such model: the ethos and practices of the Ross Schools and their incubation, promotion, and launching of new ideas and practices into public education. Over the last two decades Ross has come to articulate a systematic approach to education consciously tailored for a new era of global interdependence.

In this volume, world-renowned scholars from a variety of disciplines, as well as veteran teachers, administrators, and students, come together to examine some of the best practices in K-12 education in the context of an increasingly interconnected world. Together they explore how the Ross model of education, which cultivates in students a global perspective, aligns with broader trends in the arts, humanities, and sciences in the new millennium.

Contributors: Nick Appelbaum, Ralph Abraham, Antonio M. Battro, Sally Booth, Michele Clays, Elizabeth M. Daley, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Kurt W. Fischer, Howard Gardner, Vartan Gregorian, Christina Hinton, Hideaki Koizumi, Debra McCall, Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, John Sexton, Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, William Irwin Thompson, and Sherry Turkle.

Part I
Rethinking Education in the Global Era

1
Education in an Era of Specialized Knowledge

VARTAN GREGORIAN

This book offers an occasion for both reflecting on and celebrating the immeasurable contributions that Courtney Ross has made to the field of education. The Ross Schools, which embody her efforts to realize an educational vision enriched by an integration of scholarship, culture, science, and the arts, present a model that is vital for today’s students both here and abroad.

How does an individual become educated, cultured, and cultivated in an era of specialization? This is a particularly critical question today because we are in the midst of an information revolution that may well surpass the Industrial Revolution in its impact and far-reaching consequences. For example, according to an IBM study (2006),

It is projected that [by the year 2010] the world’s information base will be doubling in size every 11 hours. So rapid is the growth in the global stock of digital data that the very vocabulary used to indicate quantities has had to expand to keep pace. A decade or two ago, professional computer users and managers worked in kilobytes and megabytes. Now schoolchildren have access to laptops with tens of gigabytes of storage, and network managers have to think in terms of the terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) and the petabyte (1,000 terabytes). Beyond those lie the exabyte, zettabyte and yottabyte, each a thousand times bigger than the last. (2)

Nowhere is this flood of information more apparent than in the university. Never mind that much of it is irrelevant to us and unusable. No matter, it still just keeps arriving in the form of books, monographs, periodicals, Web pages, instant messages, social networking sites, films, DVDs, blogs, e-mails, satellite and cable television shows and news programs, and the constant chirping of our Blackberries.

While it is true that attention to detail is the hallmark of professional excellence, it is equally true that an overload of undigested facts is a sure recipe for mental gridlock. Not only do undigested facts not constitute structured knowledge, but unfortunately the current explosion of information is also accompanied by its corollary pitfalls, such as obsolescence and counterfeit knowledge.

Another phenomenon we are confronting is the “Wikipedia-zation” of knowledge and education. At least in part this is a result of the fact that we are all both givers and takers when it comes to running the machinery of the information age, particularly the virtual machinery. I am referring, of course, to the Internet. A notorious event involving Wikipedia has come to represent how easily false information can virally infect factual knowledge. What has come to be known as the Seigenthaler incident (Seigenthaler 2005) began in 2005 when a false biography of the noted journalist John Seigenthaler Sr., who was also an assistant to Robert Kennedy when he was attorney general in the 1960s, was posted on Wikipedia. Among the scurrilous “facts” in the biography were that “for a short time, [Seigenthaler] was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.”

This horrendous misinformation—represented as truth—existed on Wikipedia for 132 days before Seigenthaler’s son, also a journalist, happened upon it and called his father. Seigenthaler Sr. then had Wikipedia remove the hoax biography, but not before the same false facts had migrated to other sites such as Reference.com, Answers.com, and who knows where else. Probably, somewhere in the estimated twenty-two billion online pages, it still exists. Wikipedia has taken steps to address this problem, but there are an estimated 518 million Web sites on the Internet, with more being created all the time, and there is no central authority, no group, individual, or organization, to oversee the accuracy of the information they purvey.¹

Clearly, therefore, one of the greatest challenges facing our society and contemporary civilization is how to distinguish between information—which may be true, false, or some tangled combination of both—and real knowledge and further, how to transform knowledge into the indispensable nourishment of the human mind: genuine wisdom. As T. S. Eliot said, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” (1963, 147).

Today’s universities—along with our high schools, colleges, libraries, learned societies, and scholars—have a great responsibility to help provide an answer to Eliot’s questions. More than ever, these institutions and individuals have a fundamental historical and social role to play in ensuring that as a society we provide not just training but education, and not just education but culture. We need to teach students how to distill, from the bottomless cornucopia of information that is spilled out before them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, knowledge that is relevant, useful, and reliable and that will enrich both their personal and professional lives.

This is not an easy task, especially in a nation where, as Susan Jacoby (2008) writes in her book The Age of American Unreason,

the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to functional democracy. During the past four decades, America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been grievously exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by an ignorant popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic. This new form of anti-rationalism, at odds not only with the nation’s heritage of eighteenth-century Enlightenment reason but with modern scientific knowledge, has propelled a surge of anti-intellectualism capable of inflicting vastly greater damage than its historical predecessors inflected on American culture and politics. (xi–xii)

What Jacoby so forcefully points out is that ignorance is absolutely not bliss when both the strength of our democracy and the future of our society are at stake. And they may well be, for not only are we distracted and overwhelmed by the explosion of images, news, rumor, gossip, data, and bits of information that bombard us every day, but we also face dangerous levels of fragmentation of knowledge because of the advances of science and the accumulation of several millennia of scholarship. Not so long ago, Max Weber, writing about the fragmentation of knowledge and the advent of specialization, criticized the desiccated narrowness and the absence of spirit of the modern specialist. This same phenomenon prompted Dostoevsky to lament in The Brothers Karamazov (1879) about the scholars who “have only analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole and, indeed, their blindness is marvelous!” In the same vein, as early as the 1930s José Ortega y Gasset, in his Revolt of the Masses (1930/1932, ch. 12), decried the “barbarism of specialization.” Today, he wrote, we have more scientists, scholars, and professionals than ever before, but fewer cultivated ones. To put the dilemma in twenty-first-century terms, I might describe this as everybody doing their own thing, but nobody really understanding what anybody else’s thing really is.

Unfortunately, the university, which was conceived of as embodying the unity of knowledge, has become an intellectual multiversity. The process of both growth and fragmentation of knowledge under way since the seventeenth century has accelerated in our time and only continues to intensify. The modern university consists of a tangle of specialties and subspecialties, disciplines and subdisciplines, within which specialization continues apace. The unity of knowledge has collapsed. The scope and the intensity of specialization are such that scholars and scientists have great difficulty in keeping up with the important yet overwhelming amount of scholarly literature of their own subspecialties, not to mention their general disciplines. Even the traditional historical humanistic disciplines have become less and less viable as communities of discourse. As the late professor Wayne C. Booth (1987/1988, 311) put it wistfully in a Ryerson lecture he gave twenty years ago that still, sadly, sounds like breaking news from the education front: “Centuries have passed since the fabled moment … when the last of the Leonardo da Vincis could hope to cover the cognitive map. [Now], everyone has been reduced to knowing only one or two countries on the intellectual globe. … [In our universities] we continue to discover just what a pitifully small corner of the cognitive world we live in.”²

In that connection, T. S. Eliot, whom I quoted earlier, could have been describing the disconnected aspects of modern higher education when he wrote in a commentary on Dante’s Inferno that “the definition of hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.” If you think that is overreaching for a correlation to our universities, you may have to think again: the fragmentation of knowledge and the continuing proliferation of specialties are unquestionably reflected in the undergraduate and graduate curricula of our universities. Today, many major research universities make available over eighteen hundred undergraduate courses. Although college catalogs may euphemistically describe this as a “curriculum,” a 2002 report from a national panel of educators and business leaders under the auspices of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) instead characterized these offerings as rarely more than a collection of courses, devoid of direction, context, and coherence. The AACU panel noted, moreover, that nothing had changed since 1985, when another association study (AACU 1985, 2) concluded: “As for what passes as a college curriculum, almost anything goes.”

The strength of teaching and learning at today’s universities is further diluted by an overreliance on part-time faculty. If the faculty is the core of the university, as I firmly believe it is, then the university is as strong, or as weak, as its faculty. Anything that fragments or diminishes the faculty also fragments and diminishes the university. But we are moving toward the point where most teachers are part-timers, adjuncts, and graduate students. The growth of part-time faculty has been phenomenal, doubling between 1970 and 2003, from 22 percent of the faculty to 44 percent (Forrest Cataldi, Fahimi, and Bradburn 2005). These individuals have no job security and lack the protective mantle of academic freedom, since the things that tenure-track scholars do with impunity—such as teaching controversial material, fighting grade changes, or organizing unions—can get them severed from their positions with no questions asked. P. D. Lesko, the head of the National Adjunct Faculty Guild, has said that part-timers “are terrified of being rigorous graders, terrified to deal with complaints about the course materials, terrified to deal with plagiarists. A lot of them are working as robots. They go in, they teach, they leave. No muss, no fuss.” But Ms. Lesko adds: “If you’re afraid to give an honest grade or an honest opinion, you’re not teaching” (quoted in Schneider 1999, A18).

With all the pressures they are subject to, university faculty are the people we must rely on to help students learn how to balance analysis and synthesis and to guide them through the confusing maze of course content. They face a Herculean task, however, because the trend toward breaking our expanding knowledge base into smaller and smaller unconnected fragments of academic specialization continues unabated—even as the world looks to higher education for integration and synthesis. The result is that students find it exceedingly difficult to integrate knowledge in multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, or transdisciplinary study.

Personally, I am concerned that if we continue to accept this as a valid approach to education, there will be an ever-increasing blur between consumption and digestion, between information and learning, and often no guidance—or even questioning—about what it means to be an educated and cultured person. This is unmapped territory when it comes to education—one without a focused curriculum to integrate knowledge and train students in synthesis and systemic thinking. I do not believe the nation can afford this trend in the long run. It would lead to higher education becoming an academic superstore: a vast collection of courses stacked up like sinks and lumber for do-it-yourselfers to figure out and try to assemble into something meaningful.

In other words, the commonwealth of learning we have valued over many centuries has fractured. Our commitment to the grand end of synthesis, general understanding, and integration of knowledge continues to evaporate as we wander the aisles of the new university, which all too often resembles an academic Home Depot. The late William Bouwsma, a preeminent historian, lamented the movement away from integration and toward specialization, noting that specialization, “instead of uniting human beings into a general community of values and discourse, by necessity has divided them into small and exclusive categories/coteries, narrow in outlook and interest. This, in turn, tends to isolate and alienate human beings. Social relations are reduced to political relations, to the interplay of competitive and often antagonistic groups. Specialized education makes our students into instruments to serve the specialized needs of a society of specialists.” Bouwsma described “a broad decline in the idea of a general education, which for all practical purposes has become little more than a nostalgic memory. Indeed, the body of requisite knowledge has become so vast that no one can hope to master more than a small segment of it. So in the popular mind, an educated man [or woman] is now some kind of specialist; and in a sense, we no longer have a single conception of the educated [individual] but as many conceptions as there are learned specialists” (Bouwsma 1975, 207).

Nowhere is this better reflected than in the concept of literacy. It, too, has lost its unity. It, too, has been fragmented. According to the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary, literacy is the quality or state of being literate; it means being possessed of education, especially the ability to write and read. Today, however, we are using the term literate to mean knowledgeable about a specific subject: we have proponents of technological literacy, civic literacy, mathematical literacy, geographic literacy, scientific literacy, ethical literacy, artistic literacy, cultural literacy, analytical literacy, and so on. My favorite one is “managerial literacy.” According to the New York Times Magazine’s (1989) assessment of the book Managerial Literacy: What Today’s Managers Must Know to Succeed (Shaw and Weber 1990, 68), this particular “literacy” includes 1,200 terms and concepts. We are told that if you are conversant with at least 80 percent of them you can confidently engage in “meaningful conversations with other experienced managers.”

Erik Erikson once remarked that human beings are the “teaching species” (2000, 203), and if that is so, then we are certainly also the learning species. And it is clear from the literacy boom that we have never before had so much to learn. Learning to learn, then, has become one of the most important lifelong skills that education, especially higher education, can give students. Yet paradoxically higher education continues to provide an antiquated model for acquiring fragments of knowledge rather than modeling a lifelong process for integrated learning and systemic thinking. On this point, we should recall B. F. Skinner’s (1968, 89) wise observation that “education is what survives when a man has forgotten all he has been taught.”

What must survive a student’s higher education today is a facility for lifelong learning. Consider how steep the learning curve has become in the professional workplace. Knowledge has become so ephemeral that management experts have tried to get a handle on the educational challenge by using a yardstick they call the “half-life of knowledge.” This is the amount of time it takes for half of one’s professional knowledge to become obsolete. I’ve seen estimates that, overall, the half-life of knowledge is dwindling down to something like just a few years. For technical fields, it is even less; half of what software developers know now, for example, will likely be irrelevant in just eighteen months (for estimates of the half-life of knowledge, see Kapp and McKeague 2002, 9; Chee Hean 2001). In fact, computer science professors David Lorge Parnas and Michael Soltys (2006, 2) warn that “much of what students learn about [software] products will be irrelevant before they graduate.” As Maryanne Rouse (n.d.) has written, “We used to think of the long run as ten to fifteen years; in many technology-dependent industries the long run may now be six months or less. And while the pace of knowledge-creation is accelerating, the half-life of knowledge becomes shorter each year. What this means for us is that concepts are far more important than facts and the ability to analyze and synthesize has much greater value than the ability to memorize. In short, school may be multiple choice but real life is all essay.” Put another way, there are no boundaries between learning and life, and educators simply cannot emphasize that enough to their students.

Paradoxically, the same information technologies that have been the driving force behind the explosion of information, growth of knowledge and its fragmentation, also present us with the best opportunity and tools for meeting the challenge of that fragmentation. If the new information technologies themselves seem fragmenting, they are also profoundly integrative.

Technology is radically modifying the space/time constraints of communications channels—and it is offering great opportunities for making connections among disciplines and across disciplines. Online communications and even our ubiquitous hand-held electronic devices have provided new tools and opportunities for the scholarly community to share resources, though we must not forget that while the Internet, satellites, and fiber optics have advanced communication, the raw input is still human speech and human ideas. The university remains at the nexus of these developments—the public commons where ideas and technology meet and interact. Thus the process of assimilating new information technologies can help us think hard and deeply about the nature of knowledge and even about higher education’s mission. But progress in using technology to integrate disciplines on campus has often been disappointingly slow. Unless higher education does a better job teaching students how to synthesize and systematize information, our society faces many serious problems. In his book 1984, George Orwell (1949) describes a world in which ...