4 General Education Responses

General education has long been seen as a problem area in the Information Age.  As early as 1977, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching declared it a “disaster area” (Gaff, 1994).  By the 1980s—when the impact of the Information Revolution on daily life was beginning to be felt—several national reports decried the disarray in the undergraduate curriculum.  One, sponsored by the National Institutes on Education, argued that excessive vocationalism had weakened the ability of a baccalaureate degree to “foster the shared values and knowledge that bind us together as a society” (Scully, 1984, p. 1).

In 1999, the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges and the Kellogg Foundation charged a Commission led by 24 public university presidents and provosts to look at the future of public higher education in the Information Age.  The result was a series of six reports, under the general heading Returning to our Roots.  The final report, Renewing the Covenant, noted:

“The mission of our institutions has not changed, but the context in which we pursue it is in every way different. Just as surely as the dawn of the 20th century marked the American transition from agriculture to manufacturing, the 21st will usher in the full flowering of the information and telecommunications age.”  (Renewing the Covenant, 2000, p. 16).

The problems remain.  A 2020 Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officers, conducted by Inside Higher Education, found that, while the vast majority of provosts agree that “a liberal arts education is central to undergraduate education—even in professional programs” and 91 percent agree that “general education is a crucial part of any college degree,” (Scott Jaschik, 2000, para 29) only 25 percent agree that students understand the purpose of general education (para 31) and many, especially at public four-year institutions, are inclined to agree that general education requirements have become too expansive (para 28).

The question remains:  What should be the role of general education in this new and constantly changing context?

In 1994, the American Association of Colleges sponsored a Project on Strong Foundations for General Education.  Project Director Dr. Jerry Gaff noted,

The term “general education” used throughout this monograph admits of no simple—or single—definition. A heuristic one offered by an earlier report (Task Group on General Education, 1988, 1) is “the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that all of us use and live by during most of our lives—whether as parents, citizens, lovers, travelers, participants in the arts, leaders, volunteers, or good Samaritans.”

While avoiding advocacy of any particular content, this definition has the advantage of inviting individuals into a conversation, so that a group, such as a college faculty, can determine what are the essential knowledge, skills, and attitudes for students to acquire. If agreement can be reached, then the group can assess the adequacy of a curriculum to cultivate such qualities, or devise a curriculum that would more intentionally nurture those attributes. (p. 1-2)

The AACU report goes on to describe six principles that should guide institutions as they create general education curricula in the new environment:

Principle #1: Strong general education programs explicitly answer the question, “What is the point of General Education?”

Principle #2: Strong general education programs embody institutional mission.

Principle #3: Strong general education programs continuously strive for educational coherence.

Principle #4: Strong general education programs are self-consciously value-based and teach social responsibility.

Principle #5: Strong general education programs attend carefully to student experience.

Principle #6: Strong general education programs are consciously designed so that they will continue to evolve.

Writing in the Washington Post in 2011, Kathleen Parker noted a study, Academically Adrift:  Limited Learning on College Campuses, in which Richard Arum and Jospia Roksa reported that “Gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills are either ‘exceeding small or nonexistent’ for a larger proportion of students” and that “thirty-six percent of students experience no significant improvement in learning (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) over four years of higher education” (Para 7, 8).  Part of the problem, Parker suggested, is the erosion of the core curriculum.  That suggests that the problem is not simply that the core subjects are no longer being taught, but that, when they are taught, they are taught out of context—as simply introductions to the disciplines—rather than as skills one needs to be successful as an individual and as a citizen.

As the AACU report suggests, the key to improving the curriculum is not simply to focus more on the major areas of study, but to examine the total experience and to develop a unique General Education curriculum that prepares students to be socially responsible professionals and citizens in a new, rapidly evolving social context.  A new approach to pedagogy is part of the solution.  A new approach to the economics of undergraduate education that will allow for a more integrated general education curriculum to be organized beyond the traditional disciplines may also be needed. It is well-past time for the re-envisioning of General Education to be treated as an institution-wide issue.

Civic Engagement as a Goal  

In 2012, The Crucible Moment:  College Learning and Democracy’s Future, a report of The Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement National Task Force, cited the Truman Commission in making its case for re-committing higher education to a curriculum that ensures a “socially cohesive and economically vibrant U.S. democracy and a viable, just global community.”  This goal, notes the report, “will require that civic learning and democratic engagement not be sidelined but central, not an afterthought but an anticipated and integral part of K-12 and college education” (p. 20).

Crucible Moment defines civic-minded campuses as having four characteristics:

“. . . such campuses are distinguished by a civic ethos governing campus life, civic literacy as a goal for every graduate, civic inquiry integrated within majors, general education, and technical training, and informed civic actiondone in concert with others as lifelong practice” (p. 31).

That need was reinforced in Our Common Purpose:  Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, a 2020 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  It explored how society should respond to both technological change and social changes generated by the Information Society:

The major stressors of the twenty-first century—a fragmented media environment, profound demographic shifts, artificial intelligence and other technological advances, economic inequality, centralized power, and climate change—require a fundamental reassessment of U.S. political institutions, civil society ecosystems, and civic norms. If this was not already clear before COVID-19 revealed the strains on the body politic, it is painfully evident now (p. 10).

The report’s six strategies addressed different dimensions of how a democratic society should respond to these changes. The sixth strategy was “Inspire a Culture of Commitment to American Constitutional Democracy and One Another” (p. 9).  Recommendations in this area focused on education, including this:

Invest in civic educators and civic education for all ages and in all communities through curricula, ongoing program evaluations, professional development for teachers, and a federal award program that recognizes civic-learning achievements. These measures should encompass lifelong (K–12 and adult) civic-learning experiences with the full community in mind (ibid.).

 “A constitutional democracy,” the report argues, “requires its citizens not just to be committed to its success and to one another, but also to develop the knowledge, skills, and habits that allow them to participate fully in the democratic process” (p. 63).

Collaboration as a Basic Social Skill 

The continuing acceleration of the global economy is also changing how we work.  Increasingly, work tends to get done by teams. Often, these are virtual teams with members at multiple locations.  This work environment puts greater emphasis on collaboration rather than individual competition.  Similarly, rapid changes in knowledge require an environment of continual, bottom-up innovation.  Collaboration and innovation are both professional and civic skills that need to be taught.  Even on the most informal level—as evidenced by Facebook and Twitter today—students need to develop a social ethos to guide how they interact with social networks so that they can develop and sustain professional, civic, and personal relationships through both face-to-face and virtual networks.

An underlying feature of the Information Society is that technology has removed geography as a delimiting factor in how we live and work in communities.  Members of an Information Society live and work in distributed communities that accomplish much of their work through technology.  This includes virtual working teams, professional associations, and a wide variety of social networks.  The boundaries of these communities tend to blur, as people include both social and professional contacts in the same network.  Inter-cultural understanding takes on a new immediacy: every culture is potentially present in our virtual communities.  General Education, with its emphasis on educating the student for success within the context of his/her society, can help individuals define how to conduct themselves in these new communities.

A New Pedagogy

The Information Revolution has changed the way we think about knowledge and information.  Today, information is ubiquitously available on the web.  In this environment, education is less about the transfer of already organized knowledge than about how to find and evaluate information and turn it into useable knowledge that can be used to solve problems, to innovate, and to provide meaningful insights.  Active inquiry, as a result, becomes both a means and an end of General Education–a core skill of the new curriculum.

Social activist Grace Lee Boggs, writing in 2011, quoted Brazilian activist and philosopher Paolo Freire that “The future isn’t something hidden in a corner.  The future is something we build in the present” (Boggs, 2012, p. 147).  She called for a problem-focused approach to education, noting Freire’s argument that “critical thinking can develop only when questions are posed as problems” (Boggs, p. 148).

Knowledge creation, collaboration, innovation, and community building are workplace and civic skills that should be incorporated into General Education for the Information Society. The challenges of General Education in this new environment become several:

• To develop lifelong learners who can create knowledge
• To instill problem-solving and innovation as both workplace and civic skills
• To develop the skills of collaboration across cultures and across geography
• To help students understand the nature of the communities in which they live and work so that they can become effective members of these communities.

This suggests that the next generation of General Education should not just be a new collection of courses, but courses and other experiences guided by a common pedagogy designed to engage the students in the above goals, regardless of the disciplines being studied.  This new General Education pedagogy should be resource-centered, inquiry-based, and problem-oriented and, perhaps, better integrated with the professional studies part of the undergraduate curriculum.  It should also encourage students to use online technology to collaborate to find information, evaluate it, and turn it into useful knowledge, and then apply that knowledge to solve problems.  These are key elements in preparing students for life in an Information Society.

One new pedagogy that is gaining attention in the online learning community is the Community of Inquiry (http://communitiesofinquiry.com/model).  This approach maintains that the educational experience is the intersection of three factors:  social presence, cognitive presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence.  Social presence is “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities;” teaching presence is the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes;  and cognitive presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001, para 2-5).  All three factors should be used to engage students in a general education curriculum.