Tools for Living - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 4 views
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Instead his students see themselves as designers, divorced from the dirty work of making.
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Christian Burge on 28 Feb 12Students don't want to learn practical skills.
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I can't help being reminded of that story when in my daily work as a Chronicle writer I hear the chorus of complaints about the state of higher education. You've heard them, too: Higher education is broken; it needs reinvigoration and reinvention to get students out the door and on their own as soon as possible. Lawmakers say colleges need to make students employable and to create jobs. Some critics say colleges should use technology to scale up; others go so far as to bemoan the physical campus as an unnecessary, expensive burden in an online world. In that cultural and economic climate, liberal-arts colleges have been at pains to articulate their usefulness. They have emphasized that they teach students how to think, how to be engaged, world citizens—not merely how to do a job.
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Instead of viewing the physical campus as a burden, why not see it as an asset, even beyond the aesthetic attractions of the quad? With some imagination, couldn't these colleges use their campuses and rural settings to train students in valuable hands-on skills?
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The professors there routinely tie the skills taught on the farm to the sustainability lessons in the classroom. "Many educational institutions pride themselves on preparing students to lead a life of inquiry,"
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People are quite aware that they are out of touch with the things that make their lives go, and as a result, you see a resurgence of interest in practical skills: Home gardening and raising chickens, for example, have become trendy again in the last few years, perhaps helped by the economic collapse and the embrace of local food.
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Some critics say colleges should use technology to scale up
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Instead of viewing the physical campus as a burden, why not see it as an asset, even beyond the aesthetic attractions of the quad?
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"Many educational institutions pride themselves on preparing students to lead a life of inquiry," writes Philip Ackerman-Leist, an associate professor of environmental studies who founded the college farm, in Up Tunket Road: The Education of a Modern Homesteader, a book about building his home and farm in Vermont. But "few actually challenge and support students to embrace the ecological questions and immediately begin living the possible solutions—not later but in the midst of the educational experience itself."
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"And they don't make the distinction between the liberal arts and skills," he says. "If you become a master electrician in Germany, you will probably read the great classics of German literature as part of your education. ... The notion is that the better educated you are, the better you will be as a worker, the more self-respect you'll have, and so on."
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"Can you imagine Harvard requiring shop class?" he says, chuckling. "To me the real issue is that neglected zone of what happens in junior colleges, community colleges, and trade schools—how to raise the game there, how to make that a more productive site for craftsmanship."
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"Somehow we have this notion that we are going to be this country that has all the idea people—that all the Steve Jobses of the world will live in the United States," Forrant says. "From my vantage point, looking at history, that's rubbish. ... To somehow think that you can dream something up without really understanding what it takes to make it flies in the face of reality."
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"Can you imagine Harvard requiring shop class?" - The author makes emphasis on how crazy would it sound if this truly happened. Clearly opposing the author's argument and using this as a base to later on support his argument. In other words he uses the counter argument as support for his argument.
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Oberlin's environmental-studies program introduced him to the problems of fossil fuels and the notion of alternative fuels
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The author points out that it might be true that people's educational program might lead(with or without learning practical skills in the process) them to some of the same aspects such as alternative fuels. But without having practical skills (or experience) their knowledge is useless.
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Although most people imagine that the future depends on sci-fi technologies, most of the technologies that make our lives possible today are fundamentally very old.
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The Germans, on the other hand, had excellent engineering and specialization, but the run-of-the-mill German did not know how to fix the equipment
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Compare that with the American system, which is "geared up for a service economy, where the idea is that people are going to prosper by getting farther and farther away from the world of skilled craftsmanship," he says. The higher-education elite doesn't value it.
