The purpose of college

Somewhere last night I flew by a blog entry that spoke of the choice that higher education must make to survive: between teaching students to think and training them for employment. The cynical among us (no, not me, never!) would suggest that those are antithetical - because, really, the last thing the Workplace Bosses want is people to think critically: questioning authority and all that. Yet I think it's incredibly dangerous and impoverishing to cast this as a choice. Students need to learn stuff - facts, theories, techniques, skills - but they also need to learn how to place all that in context, which for me is really the substance of critical thinking.

One school is premiering a new way of teaching based on introducing students to disciplinary ways of thinking (read about it here, http://bohemianseacoast.blogspot.com/2009/05/teaching-concepts.html) - and yes, that's the same model of teaching that Harvard just dumped in their revamp of the core curriculum, see my June 2 entry). The questions faculty should be asking themselves in this model go like this:

1. What is the main purpose [goal] of geography?
2. What questions [problems, issues] does geography ask?
3. What information [data, facts, experiences] is most useful to geographers?
4. What possible conclusions [interpretations, inferences] do geographers draw?
5. What concepts [theories, principles, models] are used by geographers?
6. What assumptions do geographers make?
7. What are some of the consequences [implications] of the work of geography?
8. What is the point of view of the geographer?

I find that students are super-bored by this sort of epistemological navel-gazing. Not that that means we shouldn't teach it. But how to teach it effectively? I think you have to model real-world problems or issues in which it is useful to think about these questions.

But really, I don't have many ideas about how to do this. And unfortunately, during the regular academic year, my brain is just not set up to think this way.