Liberal Art – “purpose to help you learn and reflect in the widest and deepest sense, beyond the requirements of work and career; for the sake of citizenship, for the sake of leaving well with others; above all, for the sake of building a self that is strong and creative and free”.
“Humanistic knowledge relates to our experience of the world, to what reality feels like”.
“Art insist the fundamental moral lesson: that you are not the center of universe, that other were not created for your benefits. Art teaches empathy and cultivates the emotional intelligence; maybe it can make you a better person”.
“Art does not give you information; it gives you life”.
“Today we are suffering from such a cadre of technocrats, with just such a specialized elite. And lack of ability to think outside of disciplinary boundaries”.
Heather Wilson: “As a result, high-achieving students seem less able to grapple with issues that require them to think across disciplines or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why. . . .”
“Teaching is not and engineering problem. It is not a question of transferring a certain quantity of information from one brain to another. “Educate” means “leap forth”.”
“Thinking is the skill you do not learn from the book, video or website, you learned directly from another person”.
“Remember, that the central intellectual ability that you are supposed to develop in college is that of analyzing other people’s arguments and formulating your own”.
The values of seminars. “The purpose of seminar is to enable your professor to mode and shape your mental skill (guided, collaborated, and open-ended discussions about the materials).
College teaching is a slow, painstaking, difficult process”.
Students need mentors (validations and connections).
“The most important job of advisors is to help students understand themselves, to face and take responsibility for their decisions, and to support and free them to make choices that are at odds with the expectations others have for them”.
“Learning is an emotional experience, and mentorship is rooted in the intimacy of intellectual exchange. Something important passes between you, something almost sacred. Socrates remarks that the bond between a teacher and a student lasts a lifetime, even once the two parted company”.
“Between 1960 and 1990, federal research funding quadrupled while average teaching house fell by half. Publish or perish: professors’ loyalties say with the discipline not with their institutions. Teachers do not have the time to spend with students, they dedicate their time to research. “
“One-to-one connection with the teacher is hard to come by, and real intellectual dialogue almost impossible (despite the fact that Yale had a student –teacher ratio 6:1).”
“MOOC – massive open online courses. MOOC has nothing to do with an access to education. Coursera at. al are for profit companies, and the universities with whom they work expect to see a return on their considerable investment. College is not like a cable television, or other online service.”
“Solution to the crisis, is for college to bring back teaching to the center of their mission. Universities need to staff their courses with real professors again, not academic lettuce-pickers.”
“Look at the alternative lists like College That Change Lives, Hidden Ivies or the Washington Monthly College Guide and Ranking, which measures institutions by their commitment to social good. Look for school that is going to care about you, not the new MBA program in the Gulf. Be skeptical of places that tout curricular flexibility rather than intellectual rigor. “
“Forget about the ranking. Rankings lump together very different schools, make meaningless distinctions among essentially identical ones, ad measure market position rather than educational quality. Go to school you connect with, not, as students almost always do, the most prestigious one can let you in.”
Diversity. “Visit any elite campus across our great nation, and you can thrill the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. Kids at the schools like Stanford think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri, another one from Pakistan, or one plays the cello and the other one lacrosse - never mind that all of them have parents who are bankers or doctors. They are not meeting “all kinds of people” as they like to say. They are meeting the same kind of people; they just happen to come from all kinds of places.”
College admission process. “Schools are stoking their students’ ego. It makes for happy customers. It primes the donation pump. The flattery: you are great because you are great.”
“There is nothing wrong with taking pride in your intellect or achievement. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulations that elite schools connive at from the moment that fat envelope arrive in the mail.”
“It is time that the schools need to rethink their concept of merit. If schools are going to train a better class of leaders that the ones we have today, ask themselves what kind of qualities they need to promote and how to select for them,. Time to change the admission criteria. We want kinds with resilience, self-reliance, independence of spirit, genuine curiosity and creativity, and willingness to take risks and make mistakes. “
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