Without getting into the out-of-control imbalance and hypocrisy of college sports, higher education makes its appeal to students in an unbalanced and distorting way. It advertises itself in economic language, not in social or cultural or moral language. It sells itself as a producer of professionals, but not as parents, friends, neighbors, and citizens; it touts job, with its title, position, and paycheck, and very seldom does it sell character development. It images itself as an employment agency. Too many professors are high on being information transmitters and stuffers, and teach to credential; too many present themselves as head hunters for a good paying job; too few talk of personal transformation. Higher education has put itself in restricting balkanized containers: departments, colleges, schools, courses, classroom, campus, major, program, degree, tests, grades, GPAs, pedagogy, assessment, technology.
By putting on center stage the vocational "business" and banishing to the wings the human "beingness," the idea that education's goal is to help a person learn how to live the good life has gone into eclipse, overshadowed by the idea that education's sole role is vocational or credential, that is, to help a person earn a good living. Students are asked in word and action, especially at revealing career days and job fairs and Career Services Office, "what do you want to do," and seldom, if ever, "who do you want to become." And so, higher education has generally surrendered a significant part of both its educational and "higher" character.
Whatever makes higher education both education and higher, often ignored "beingness" intensifies it; it focuses; it concentrates. It's the moral core; it's the ethical center; it's the source of integrity and authenticity which goes by the name "character;" it's the name of the game. It's intensely personal; it's very social; it's a resource for questioning, change, development. It is "beingness," not "business" that puts you on a questing life of pilgrimage that takes you out of your world into other worlds and thereby expands your world.
As a guide to myself, almost exactly twenty years ago, in a piece I called "What It Is We Get Paid To Do, I wrote that higher education "is the development of a thoughtful citizen and a compassionate human being who is also a skilled worker. It is a mission that is concerned with the whole person rather than merely the partial wage-earner. It is the mission that seeks to insure that our students will graduate as individuals of character more competent in their ability to contribute to society, more civil in how they think, more respectful in how they talk, more sympathetic in how they act, more sensitive to the needs of the community of which they are a part...."
I believed and lived that then; it believe and live it even more today. But, you know something, you don't get invited if you think this "fluffy," "touchy-feely," "tosh," "junk" way because most academics find it real hard to admit it, grasp it, talk about it, much less believe and live it.
Make it a good day
-Louis-
Louis Schmier http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org
203 E. Brookwood Pl http://www.therandomthoughts.com
Valdosta, Ga 31602
(C) 229-630-0821 /\ /\ /\ /\ /\
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