liberal arts

School change: does the “classic liberal arts education” still serve a purpose?

by Steve Wyckoff on October 11, 2010

Last week at the the Kansas Education Commission meeting one of the participants commented about “the classic liberal arts education” as if it were given how important, and appropriate, the classic liberal arts education is. As I’ve written before, the most difficult thing to do in school change is to decide what not to do any longer.

I think that it’s time to take a critical look at the “classic liberal arts education” and make some tough decisions about the assumptions we have made for over 100 years, and decide what parts of that education should be abandoned. I know that opinion will rankle more than a few feathers, especially among higher education people, and those who teach in the K-12 core curriculum.

But with the ever changing face of our society it’s imperative that we begin to abandon the least worthy pieces of our traditional education system. I make light of the fact that we seem to think there’s nothing more important than reading the works of dead white European male authors. While I may say it lightheartedly, I am dead serious with my question. What is so important about dead white European male authors that they must be studied by every student.

Not only do I believe that much of what we teach in the classic liberal arts education is no longer appropriate, but I believe it’s the part of our curriculum that students find most boring and irrelevant. At the very least we have to figure out how to make our core curriculum relevant and interesting to our students. In the best possible world we should figure out what to do instead of much of what we do in our core curriculum.

I know this will be hard to swallow for many educators, but at some point we have to begin to abandon something, and somebody’s sacred cow is going to get gored. When we talk about school change we mean exactly that, change! You can’t keep doing everything you’ve always done and pretend that you’re changing. – Steve Wyckoff

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School change: All college degrees are not created equally

by Steve Wyckoff on August 23, 2010

When we talk about school change there is always a discussion about preparing students for college. There is no doubt that in the 21st century those people who are the most successful tend to be those with the highest level of education. But not all college degrees are highly correlated with being successful in the 21st century.

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and in fact later this week I’m going to be visiting with my friend Dr. Jackie Vietti, at Butler Community College to help me make sense of the whole question of college ready. You see, I can give you a whole pile of evidence that we are doing poorly when it comes to preparing kids for college, and that even many of those who make it through college, don’t get jobs that are high paying enough to pay off their college loans. So I am suffering from cognitive dissonance on this issue.

So I’ll tell you what I think I believe up to this point. I’m looking at college degrees from two perspectives. One, is the degree in high demand in society today; and two, is it a high skill degree? I’m still compiling a list of college degrees that I believe are high demand and high skill degrees. In this category I would put engineering degrees, many health science related degrees such as nursing, and some IT degrees. But I also put many two year technical degree, and even some industry certification programs. I’m sure there are others, so if you have some examples send them to me.

So that begs the question, are there some high skill low demand degrees? I think that some degrees in the sciences may fit this category; physics, biology, and chemistry. But I’m not completely sure of this.

And as I was thinking further about these categories I started to wonder if there are high demand and low skill degrees. I think there used to be, but I don’t think there are anymore. I think that liberal arts degrees used to be high demand and low skill. I think now liberal arts degrees are low skill and low demand.

when I graduated from college almost 40 years ago a liberal arts degree, like all college degrees, was the ticket to a good job. Today, that just isn’t true. Graduates with liberal arts degrees are perfectly prepared to go on to graduate school, but the jobs available for most of these degrees are for the most part low skill and sadly, low pay.

And therein lies one of our big problems. All of our K-12 core curriculum, and all of our gen ed courses in post secondary institutions are liberal arts courses. Which means we are spending huge amounts of our time, our most precious educational resource, preparing kids in low skill low demand areas, which the students see as boring and irrelevant. Perhaps it’s time as we talk about school change to begin to deal with the sacred cow of education … the liberal arts degree. – Steve Wyckoff

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Brain drain: And the ones who leave are only the tip of the iceberg

March 17, 2010

I’ve written many times about our obsession in K-12 schools with preparing every student to attend a four-year liberal arts college. The data are clear, we need less than 25% of all of our students to have a four year college degree. In fact only about 23% of all jobs require a four-year degree. In [...]

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Why can’t schools change?

January 31, 2010

Why can’t schools change? It’s an interesting question. If you ask many educators they would say that schools have changed dramatically. I disagree. I think what goes on inside some classrooms has changed dramatically, but not schools. We do use more technology in classrooms; projectors, computers, smart boards, etc. But what we’re doing inside those [...]

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What Does “Well-Educated” Mean?

January 23, 2010

I’ve been preparing for a presentation that I’m going to do for the school board of one of the largest districts in the state. They are involved in strategic planning, and to their credit they are looking at all aspects of their school district with the intent to improve. My presentation is built around my [...]

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What Is School Reform?

January 18, 2010

It’s funny how we carry definitions around in our head and we assume that other people have those same definitions. When we have discussions about school reform, school redesign, and change, we often times think that we are talking about the same thing as other people but in reality we have very different perspectives. So [...]

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