Staying Three

Never was an educated electorate more urgently needed than in 2020.  The spread of COVID-19 in a matter of months brought a 19th century terror into a 21st century world with apocalyptic vengeance.  Because the growth of the internet had already given us the ability to communicate information worldwide and had flattened information access, what Harold Innis once called “knowledge monopolies”were decimated.  The democratization of information access allowed everyone to become an autodidact.  Whatever their educational level, all Americans struggled to answer the same questions, trying to balance scientific information with political, philosophical, economic, and religious information.  Citizens with doctorates and citizens with a third-grade education from a tiny village in Guatemala and a lifetime of experiential learning acquired through employment tried to evaluate information that came at them filtered and unfiltered, manipulated and raw, visual and verbal, explicit and implicit, targeted and at random.  Whatever their academic background, people all tried equally to assess the credibility of information sources and discern whether information was being delivered truthfully and completely or was being oversimplified, misdirected, or obscured.  A college education offered no advantage when there was no expert vetting.  Since then, all of us in the higher education business have been thinking deeply about what people pay us such vast sums of money to provide.  What is a college education supposed to enable you to do?  

If we agree that the goal of higher education is to teach people to think critically, what are the tools that we need to give them to enable them to do that?  At present we supply them with an agreed-on body of information through the twelfth grade, but we have already been introducing access to the college-level version of that information for some time through AP and IB programs, dual enrollment, and other forms of academic enrichment that allow students to learn the tools and competencies expected of college graduates.

In the United States, education is not federalized.  States determine their own requirements for K-12 and, separately, for colleges and universities.  About a third of every bachelor’s degree is dictated by state requirements that certain disciplines, subject matters, competencies, and skills be represented.  General education occupies the majority of a community college degree; in case a student chooses to stop there, he or she will have studied what the state deems essential for an educated citizen.  These requirements almost universally included writing and mathematics, science, and humanities in some form.  Technological fluency appears on the list in many states, along with information literacy, some social science in addition to the physical and biological sciences, oral communication, and foreign languages.  Institutions of higher education, in response to changing state needs, are constantly reviewing their general education requirements to keep them current.  Conversations are ongoing about what every college graduate should know, now that the gold standard is no longer Latin and Greek and the seven Liberal Arts.  In the four years since Donald Trump assumed the presidency in January of 2017, Americans have struggled to adjust to a chief executive who is not, by nature, a lifelong learner and may know less than they do about any given topic.  Thanks to the first amendment, they are experiencing a barrage of conflicting information from official and unofficial sources and must sort out for themselves who the credible sources in the maelstrom might be.  They must decide if there is truth anywhere within the wild torrent of disassociated facts raining down on them from social media, mingled with unvetted hyperbole, rumor, and innuendo.  They must carefully examine orchestrated appeals to logos and pathos that may be elegant and seem airtight but may also be based on faulty assumptions or logic (such as racism), missing a key piece of evidence, or dangerously equivocal.  I can no longer teach Swift’s A Modest Proposal because it contains no internal evidence that it is not to be taken seriously.  Public policy has become so outrageous, and genocide so common, that students are hesitant to see it as satire.  Pope’s warning “A little learning is a dang’rous thing/Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring” reminds us that the best minds of the eighteenth century, our founders among them, had no illusions about human beings’ tendency to recency bias, confirmation bias, attribution bias, and the lure of a post hoc argument or a faulty dilemma. 

What, then, are the lifetime learning outcomes we desire for college graduates?  What do we expect them to know, or to be able to do, ten years out? Twenty years out? Fifty years out? What problems do we expect college graduates to be able to solve? What do you wish now that you had studied in college?  (For me, it is anthropology.)  Our students are our clients, but they are also our products, and they do not get to dictate the portion of their degree that is devoted to general education.  What subjects from K-12 should be revisited at the college level with deeper thought and greater attention to source bias and faulty sampling?   What subjects not taught in high school should we insist that they take now, so they will have a professional methodology to use when examining facts, inferences, assumptions, and theories drawn from the internet?

Here is my list:

American Government:  No one remembers anything from eighth grade civics because they have had no occasion since to use the information that they memorized for the exam in real life.  The constitutional struggles of both Trump administrations have made everyone aware that we don’t really understand the concepts of separation of powers or balance of power, the difference between a republic and a democracy, the difference between the House and the Senate,  the basics of English common law, the workings of the electoral college, or the processes by which judges are appointed, including Supreme Court justices.  Immigrants studying for the citizenship exam are better versed in this material than most people born and educated in the United States.  Neither Trump administration has been the decorous minuet of statesmanship that we have come to expect from the presidencies of both parties.  These are street fights or, at best, real games in the contact sport that is politics, not the serious business that is government, with yellow cards and red cards, fouls that were called, fouls that were not called but were captured on tape and reported from the stands by whistleblowers, egregious fouls noticed by everyone that were blatantly disregarded by referees with conflicts of interest, calls that have been overturned, faux threats of ejection and all manner of brawling like hockey games that break out into fights.  As we have been saying in Virginia since 1776: Sic semper tyrannis.     

Psychology: Psychology has only recently begun to trickle down into high schools but still, for the most part, only in AP and IB courses.  Everyone now      needs to know what we know about the workings of the human brain and the sources of normal and abnormal behavior: the psychology of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse, the paths to self-harm and suicide, the psychology of abuse, how mood disorders differ from personality disorders, gender and sexuality, the autism spectrum, human development,  the psychology of adolescence and the aging, and the connections between psychology and sociology, the study of the behavior of groups.  High school biology, chemistry and physics give us enough information about those topics to function in the workplace and as members of families. There is no real point in colleges teaching well known interpretations of well-known scientific data, even on such important topics as physiology and genetics; that is what high school is for.  College is the place for the social sciences, where so much of the information is debatable and still emerging.  It is important that people understand the difference between a scientific certainty and an educated scientific postulate. 

Environmental Science, including human health

As humans have built on more and more of our planet, we have become so divorced from nature that we have lost touch with our place in the ecosystem.  When human society was primarily agricultural, or we hunted and fished for food, a basic understanding of natural forces was necessarily for survival.  An industrial society has a supply chain between nature and the consumer, so we can contaminate our water supply, bring about climate change, pollute our air, and commit other environmental atrocities without directly apprehending the consequences until it is far too late.  We won’t notice or care if our burger comes in a plastic clamshell and our drink in a plastic cup with a plastic lid and a plastic straw or if everything is made of paper unless there is a difference in price and we must then make a value judgment about the greater good—in which case it will be useful to have studied philosophy.  If we overfish the Chesapeake Bay until the rockfish disappear, we will just eat something else.  But if we are to understand the interplay between business and government in natural resource management, or the economics and politics of public versus private ownership of land and water (see Economics), we must first understand the underlying science.  And it doesn’t hurt to learn that private ownership of land is a European value brought with imperialism; in many indigenous cultures it is simply impossible for human beings to own the earth.  No discussion.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that we are ignorant of some of the most basic scientific principles underlying human health on which most enlightened public health policies are based.  We know less about the spread of infectious disease than did traditional cultures which devised dietary laws and monogamy to prevent foodborne diseases and those spread by intimate contact from running rampant.  We know less about simple hygiene than they did in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before antibiotics.  A century of technologies that helped us cure diseases are useless against one about which we know nothing because we lack data.   We are so enamored of our ability to kill diseases that we have forgotten how to prevent them, creating a vast public health differential between first world and third world countries and between the privileged population in the United States and those living in poverty, making them vulnerable to pre-existing health conditions that predispose them to infectious diseases as well as to cardiovascular diseases that still kill more of us than anything else.  One of the terrifying aspects of COVID-19 was that it attacked multiple organ systems and caused secondary effects like respiratory failure and stroke.  A century ago, people were well aware that human beings are disease vectors that are just as dangerous as bugs and rodents.  They knew that the best way to survive a disease like pneumonia was not to get it.  They knew that the most powerful weapon against the spread of disease was soap.  This is particularly true in the case of viruses, which feature a lipid layer that can be washed off, causing the virus to die.  Now, people seem generally ignorant of this basic scientific concept and even when wearing masks, which helps prevent giving the disease to others, we touch public surfaces like door handles, toilet flush handles, gas pump handles, and elevator buttons without protecting our selves with gloves or washing or sanitizing our hands immediately afterwards.  My mother, born in 1912, once told my daughter’s Brownie troop: “Why do you think women always used to wear hats and gloves?  Because the sun is bad for you, and you can catch diseases by touching something and then touching your face.” 

Statistics: This is the millennium of analytics.  It is a data-driven world.  The magic of computers has allowed us to do complex mathematics in nanoseconds and has made the high school mathematics curriculum almost entirely obsolete.  Everyone needs arithmetic, enough algebra to understand the concept of solving for an unknown quantity, and all of geometry.  But the “math” that every citizen really needs now is statistics.  Without it, you can’t be an educated consumer of contemporary medicine or psychological services, or understand politics, or education, or sports.  You can’t be on a jury and expect to understand expert testimony.  You can’t be an educated citizen.  Furthermore, statistics is not merely about mathematical operations; it is the underlying analysis of which analytic is appropriate to what purpose and why, with due attention to the underlying limits of what a particular process proves or doesn’t.  Statistics transcends mathematics; it is a philosophical course that looks for the truth, if it can be found. 

Economics

We have a global economy now, with many complicated forces at play that make it difficult for people to hang onto their earnings, save, and invest.  Managing personal finances is starting to be a staple elective in high school, and those practical courses should be buttressed at the next level with the basics of economic theory: resource allocation, supply and demand, value, profit and loss, return on investment, cost-benefit analysis, and consumer behavior.  People are less likely to repeat the same behavior over and over again expecting a different result if they understand the concept of a sunken cost.  College is about ideas. 

History

We have to study history because it repeats and repeats and repeats and we never learn from it.  In particular, we need to learn that history consists not of a factual account of what happened but a narrative of what happened based on factual information where it is available but also largely on firsthand accounts from observers, which are necessarily incomplete and presented from their personal perspective.  Sometimes it is written by the winners and sometimes it isn’t.  So not only are historians themselves seldom neutral, their sources are seldom neutral.  What schools in Massachusetts call the Civil War is called the War Between the States in some Southern states and, in others, the War of Northern Aggression.  However, the details of historical events, looked at with the care that can be learned in a history class, can be enormously enlightening.  It is useful to learn that Trump’s 2020 war with Congress over whether to stimulate the private sector to pull us out of the economic downtown caused by the pandemic, or to have the government do it, is eerily reminiscent of Hoover’s in 1928.  Hoover’s strategy failed, and it cost him the election.  It has also been noted recently that, after responding to the pleas of the 1931 Hunger Army of protesters with stony indifference and directing his attention instead to business leaders, Hoover sent General Douglas MacArthur to Anacostia in 1932 to destroy the first Hooverville, a tent city established in protest by destitute veterans from World War I seeking government benefits they were not scheduled to receive for another sixteen years.  The Battle of Lafayette Square is not without precedent. 

Management

People used to learn about organizational behavior through on-the-job training.  Now they need to enter the workforce with an appreciation of system theory, human relations management, and decision-making concepts.  Stakes are high.  Churches and synagogues, civic, neighborhood, and fraternal associations, alumni associations, fraternities and sororities, condominium boards, arts and environmental nonprofits, PTA’s, and sports leagues are complex entities that may need to do significant marketing and fundraising, negotiate big contracts, handle legal liability and intricate tax issues, navigate government regulation, and manage investments and endowments.  A basic knowledge of management theory among the volunteer leadership on which these organizations depend may mean the difference between success and failure. 

Philosophy, especially Ethics

As we drift toward a society in which more and more people describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” and institutional religion is skewing older and older, the closest thing to a code of ethics with which people may be familiar is the one that governs their profession or perhaps a twelve-step program.  They may have no awareness that these codes are grounded in philosophical concepts that have served the world for centuries.  They may not know that ancient philosophy is global and that many of the value systems in which modern subcultures are grounded have common roots.  Americans are increasingly showing that we care deeply about social justice and that we want some kind of a values infrastructure that informs, for example, the justice system or the health care system, or the tension between for-profit and nonprofit sectors.  Because ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphysics are not taught in K-12, people may not even be aware that they exist.  Yet, as a public, we must make political and legal decisions about abortion, end-of-life management, human rights, and environmental policy that have moral implications.  We have made it clear since 2020 that we do not want decisions about who gets respirators based entirely on economic criteria or decisions about who may be murdered by law enforcement based entirely on political criteria.  The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution is grounded in a philosophical concept that people cannot own other people, which was assumed to outweigh the obvious economic advantage of an agricultural production system built on free labor. 

Rhetoric

Most faculty agree that the primary goal of college is to teach people to think.  As they become adults, they should move up Bloom’s taxonomy all the way from simple information acquisition to the creation of new knowledge.  They should be able to ask a question other than “Will this be on the test?”  They should learn to operate in gray areas where there may be no right answers, only stronger and weaker arguments.  For the first time since kindergarten, they may be asked to engage in creative thinking.  Critical thinking is a sine qua non.  Exposure to classic and contemporary rhetoric, both visual and verbal, teaches them to question authority, identify assumptions, especially those pesky enthymemes, recognize the difference between logos and pathos, demand evidence and backing, cultivate skepticism, scrutinize an argument for fallacies, and contemplate counterarguments and rebuttal even when they agree with the point being made.  These skills will give them the confidence to tell the difference between real news and fake news.

And finally…

Writing

Historically, people have learned to write on the job because only then are the stakes high enough for them to invest the time that it takes to learn.   Writing is a complex, iterative process with a lot of moving parts, and it takes years to master.  When you learn to shift a manual transmission, or read, or perform surgery, or throw a curve ball, you learn a complex process in which you perform all the little subprocesses by rote, without thinking about them.  If you do think about them, you can lose focus and flub the bigger process–in particular, the transitions.  That’s why Olympic gymnasts fall off the balance beam on the easiest move they do, a full turn, and major league infielders fluff an easy ground ball: they are thinking too much about the wrong thing.  Writing is different precisely because you have to think constantly about all the little subprocesses all the time while you are simultaneously engaging in the larger process.  A change from one word to another triggers a change in an earlier word to avoid repetition, and a switch from parallelism to subordination forces a switch in the choice of transitional mechanism because the relationship between the ideas has changed. 

If I were going to try to teach the president to write, I would tell him that it is a lot like golf.   Golf is not just making putts, like minigolf, or hitting balls on a driving range, but it’s putting those skills to use in the real environment of a whole course.  You have a bag full of time-tested clubs and a technical advisor who carries them for you, but you have to make your own choices, constantly, under pressure, about which club to use to attain all the small goals, acing the individual strokes, that add up to accomplishing the bigger goal of getting the ball in the cup on each hole, so as to attain the ultimate goal of doing it 18 times with the greatest possible efficiency.  It is an unrelenting calculus that requires vigilance and the ability to adjust to the changes in the path to the goal that each of your choices, good and bad, will make. In most sports, and in most of the arts, you never attain mastery.  You continue to work on your putting or your swimming stroke, your ball handling, your bow handling, your footwork, your breathing, your articulation, your sightreading, your jetés and your vibrato and all the so-called “fundamentals” while you are learning to perform the entire process at higher levels, faster, in real time, with no redos, for more discriminating judges, with higher stakes.  At its worst and most terrifying, writing is like an episode of Top Chef or Chopped where they give you a pile of unrelated and seldom-used ingredients for which there are no familiar recipes and ask you to create something edible using all of them, under pressure, in thirty minutes, with people watching.  If you can do that, you can handle pretty much anything life throws at you. 

This list salvages the entire trivium, adding the sciences to bring the epistemology up to date. (Aristotle and the Renaissance humanists score a win over the medieval church.)  K-12 can, and should, handle the quadrivium.