Bennington College president Liz Coleman makes one powerful observation after another during her reasoned, eloquent call to reinvent liberal arts education at this year’s TED Conference.
On what’s wrong with the academy:
Simply put: when the impulse is to change the world, the academy is more likely to engender a learned helplessness than to create a sense of empowerment. This brew—oversimplification of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical master, neutrality of a condition of academic integrity—is toxic when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between education and the public good, between intellectual integrity and human freedom […].
On how and why to change it:
[… The] point is not to treat these topics [equity, education, the environment, governance, the uses of force, health] as topics of study, but as frameworks of action. […] A new liberal arts that can support this action-oriented curriculum has begun to emerge. Rhetoric: the art of organizing the world of words to maximum effect. Design: the art of organizing the world of things. Mediation and improvisation also assume a special place in this new pantheon. Quantitative reasoning takes its proper place at the heart of what it takes to manage change where measurment is crucial, as is a capacity to discriminate systematically between what is at the core and what is at the periphery. And when making connections is of the essence, the power of technology emerges with special intensity. But so does the importance of content. […] When improvisation, resourcefulness, imagination are key, artists at long last take their place at the table when strategies of action are in the process of being designed.
3) On the price of standing idle:
There is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators.
