Valuing the ends and the means of a university education
Education is both using and improving knowledge. Education is the process in which we discover that learning adds quality to our lives. Learning must be experienced.
–William Glasser
What I remember most about my first two years as an undergraduate student in the eighties at a large Canadian university is being #146509. Twenty-five years later, I can’t recall much about what I learned there except my student identification number and making nylon and aspirin in an organic chemistry lab. It seemed at the time, and still does today, that I was simply a number and a source of tuition dollars. Used to having been nurtured in small public schools, I was lost in a sea of 35,000 students and no one, nor the institution, looked out for my learning or me as an individual.
Fortunately for my future, I took the large risk to leave home and migrate south to a small liberal arts college in the United States. The move likely saved my undergraduate education. There, I was no longer just a number. Instead, I was welcomed into a community of self-directed learners who signed contracts with our professors on how we would both learn the course material and be evaluated on having learned it. There, I could take a mix of seemingly disparate courses and integrate them into an interdisciplinary undergraduate education which rekindled the flame of my academic and intellectual ability that had been nearly snubbed out as #146509. There, in partnership with my peers and instructors, I learned to think, analyze, critique, create, write, paddle, and climb mountains (both inner and outer).
We were allowed to graduate only when we could prove we were competent in our major area of study along with two breadth areas. Graduating from this unique college, I knew I wanted to teach in such an inspired learning environment and pursued graduate education to do so. I know for certain, had I not changed universities (and therefore my undergraduate experience), that I would have become a statistic of a different sort by adding to already formidable attrition rates and I would not be a 3M Teaching Fellow.
When I think about the future of university education in Canada, I have a view that I “climb” towards in my classroom everyday. Much like scaling a high altitude mountain, I alternate between having this view and taking the necessary footsteps (i.e. actions) toward it. I engage students by creating an active, experiential, and supportive learning community that sees them as a collection of individual learners, each with different goals, backgrounds, and motivations. I overcome their hesitancy and ambivalence using unbridled passion for the subjects I teach. I want every student I teach to have the enlightened undergraduate experience that I had at Prescott College.
As we look forward, we must value both the ends and the means of university education in Canada. We must break our huge (and dehumanizing) institutions into smaller communities in which students can develop their “learning base camp” and in which their professors’ teaching and scholarly contributions are evaluated beyond, and more deeply, than the numbers on their CV. Universities need to advance the current and next generations of philosophers, educators, and scientists using innovative, creative, and experientially driven teaching. University leaders must drop the fault-filled dichotomy of scholarship and teaching by assigning value and resources to both equally and by building more, rather than breaking down, bridges between them. These changes in organizational attitude will propel students to the forefront of university purpose and help mitigate the risk that a student will be only #146509.
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