Confronting Challenges to the Liberal Arts Curriculum

Perspectives of Developing and Transitional Countries

Patti McGill Peterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136461873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Comparative research on higher education in developing and transitional countries is often focused on such issues as access, finance, student mobility and the impact of globalization, but there has been little attention to curriculum and the forces that shape it. Confronting Challenges to the Liberal Arts Curriculum fills an important gap in the literature by examining the context, content, challenges, and successes of implementing liberal arts coursework within undergraduate curriculum. In order to fully understand the place of liberal education in each location, chapter authors have employed a wide lens to investigate the influences upon curricular content in China, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey. Thus, this volume explores how curricular content is decided, how educational programs are being structured, and whether countries are viewing higher education as more than just the preparation of students for specialized knowledge.

By providing detailed case studies of these countries at crucial transition points in their higher education systems, each chapter outlines the state of higher education system and the government's role, the impact of imported models, the presence of a liberal education, the curricular formation, and best examples of successful programs. Ultimately, this volume depicts how global influences have come to rest in developing countries and how market forces far removed from faculty and students have shaped the undergraduate curriculum. This valuable book is of interest to scholars and researchers in Higher Education as well as practitioners working to foster student and faculty exchange and raise awareness of curricular issues.

1

A Global Framework

Liberal Education in the Undergraduate Curriculum

Patti McGill Peterson

Introduction

Demand for higher education worldwide is growing exponentially. Much of the enrollment growth in recent years has come from developing and transitional countries. Historically, many students from these countries have been part of a global migration to developed countries for access to high-quality education. While this pattern continues to be a characteristic of international higher education, there are growing indications that sending nations wish to take more direct responsibility for educating future generations of their students. A current sign of economic and political maturation in developing nations is a strong desire to improve and expand their own education infrastructure to meet the burgeoning demand for access to higher education (Altbach & Peterson, 2007).

The strategies to strengthen higher education vary by country, but a common imperative for the development of higher education is to align it with priorities for nation building and modernization. The case was made strongly by post-independence leaders in Africa, such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, who stated clearly that they wanted universities first and foremost to address the interests and priorities of their nations (Mwiria, 2003). Invariably, as part of the emphasis on the centrality of the state’s interests, there are high-level discussions about the need to build “world-class” universities and to promote fields of study deemed essential for economic development (Altbach, 2006). Science, especially applied science, and technology fields receive paramount attention. Allied fields of business and management science, as well as applied economics, also receive special consideration.

Comparative research on higher education in developing and transitional countries is often focused on such issues as access, funding models, the mobility of students, research agendas, public and private institutions, and the impact of globalization. In general, there has been very little focus on the content of academic programs and the kinds of investments governments are making in specific programs and disciplines. This omission was much in evidence at both the 1998 and 2009 UNESCO World Higher Education Conferences, which assembled delegations from all its member nations to discuss the progress of tertiary education worldwide (World Conference on Higher Education, 1998, 2009). Yet curriculum development and the major forces that are shaping it in various national contexts are topics that merit focused attention. Analysis of the variables that influence curriculum development in different national and cultural settings is very scarce in published research. Related issues, such as the role of academic governance, the involvement of faculty in curricular reform, and the relationship between the expansion of higher education and students’ personal and intellectual development, likewise receive scant attention.

This neglect creates a very challenging environment for examining the role of liberal education outside the United States where the topic is often written about and discussed. To understand the presence or absence of liberal education and the liberal arts in a country’s educational system, it is important to understand how curricular content is decided, what forces of choice are at work, whether breadth of exposure to subject matter is considered, and to what extent there is a desire to see one of higher education’s responsibilities as preparing the student for more than specialized knowledge.

To address this omission, in 2008 the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation supported the initiation of a comparative, multinational project: “Liberal Learning in Global Perspective.” It was a direct result of long-term association with liberal arts colleges in the United States and my tenure as head of the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, which administers the worldwide Fulbright Scholar Program. The latter provided an education on the importance of national and cultural context in understanding how higher education is organized, the differing roles of faculty, and the ways students are educated at the undergraduate level. It became clear that the reasons for the presence or absence of liberal education in different countries needed to be examined both in historical terms and also through the lens of more current realities facing higher education. This kind of cross-cultural examination meshed well with the foundation’s long-term interest in liberal education and its efforts to support culturally attuned liberal education initiatives in countries outside the United States.

The choice to focus the project’s case studies in developing or transitional countries was influenced significantly by the World Bank’s 2000 report on higher education in developing countries. After outlining the many pressures facing tertiary education in these countries and addressing the importance of such high-profile issues as science and technology, the report offered a chapter on the importance of general (liberal) education. It began with a quotation from Alvin Toffler, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn,” then went on to deal realistically with the obstacles to liberal education (Task Force on Higher Education and Society, 2000, p. 83). It also argued persuasively for the merits of including some form of general education for all students. The report’s basic premises were that developing nations needed citizens who could help build the nation in many ways and that narrowly educated specialists might find themselves outmoded by rapidly changing economies and the forces of globalization. What was missing in the report, except for a few selected examples, was whether countries were heeding this admonition as they expanded their systems of higher education.

The continued silence in the decade that has passed since this report signals the need for in-depth case studies representing different regions at varying stages of higher education development that would examine these issues and provide insight into whether liberal education could rise above the obstacles in order to grow and flourish beyond the United States. Ultimately, authors were identified for the case studies in China, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey. The charge to these authors was to address several areas as part of their examination of the presence (or absence) of liberal education in their countries, including background on the state of higher education and the nature of secondary education as a prelude to each case study’s major focus: curricular formation and the role of liberal education in higher education.

Bringing together such a richly divergent group of countries, each with its own history of higher education, dictated the importance of finding common ground. Among other things, it meant that choice of terms and their origins had to be carefully understood.

In Search of Meaning: Historical Wellsprings

The concept and practice of the liberal arts has been primarily associated with Classical Greco-Roman and European origins. When searching for answers, we invariably go to the wellsprings in our quest for descriptive language. For those who have not watched the modern morphing of liberal education, the term implies a classical education geared cumulatively to the great works of the West, particularly from the Greco-Roman, Renaissance humanist, and Enlightenment periods of European history. Bruce Kimball (1995) has written a very thorough history of the complicated trajectory of the idea of liberal education, which makes oversimplification about the derivation of terminology a dangerous exercise. What seems clear, however, is that the language referring to liberal education among free Athenians can be identified by the fifth century BCE. There are all kinds of etymological debates and varying degrees of emphasis on different branches of Greek thought during this period as it relates to liberal education.

Those debates notwithstanding, it was the ideals associated with being an educated person that have become interwoven with our modern conceptions of liberal education. These include the ability to be self-aware and self-governing and the capacity to respect the humanity of all human beings (Nussbaum, 2003). Using Socrates as a model yielded two fundamental elements of liberal education: the habit of critical thinking and taking responsibility for one’s own thought and speech. The Socratic notion of the importance of the examined life as well as the Aristotelian sense of the importance of trying to understand the nature and principles of the universe combined to reinforce the idea of critical inquiry in the study of all things. However one interprets the classical history or the players during this period, these ways of learning and habits of mind encouraged by a liberal education had a profound and long-lasting influence on what it meant to be a well-educated and civically involved person.

What began in Greece was reinforced and consolidated by Rome’s succession to global dominance. When Rome took up colonial residence in far-flung parts of the ancient world and encountered the richness of culture and education in such subject colonies as Egypt, it projected to the empire’s subjects the hegemony of Rome backed by the culture and education of Greece. The general education of young Roman elites included a corpus of Greek and Latin epic poetry, history, philosophy, and political oratory that changed little between the first and the fifth centuries CE (MacCormack, 1989).

Later in 16th-century Europe, medieval universities have expanded their offerings to include Judeo-Christian foundations along with those of the Greco-Roman period. The Greco-Roman canon of texts was configured into the seven liberal arts that constituted the core of medieval education, while the Judeo-Christian branch of Europe’s heritage from classical antiquity became the separate discipline of theology. The latter was grounded in the Bible as its principal text. These intellectual, cultural, and religious perspectives constituted liberal education and became the bedrock of “the West” and its educational traditions.

Britain absorbed these traditions and exported them to its colonies—the future United States of America—in the late 17th century. The “Laws, Liberties, and Orders” of Harvard College had their origin in the Elizabethan statutes of the University of Cambridge (Ashby, 1964). Like the young upper-class Romans who looked to Greece for their education, the young men privileged to enter a colonial college focused on Greek and Latin classics as the core of their liberal education. This situation held steady for nearly 200 years. As late as 1828, Yale College issued a report in its defense. Liberal education, it argued, provided the discipline and furniture of the mind and pointed proudly to Yale’s success in training young men from the upper classes who would serve as society’s enlightened leaders and decision-makers (Lane, 1987). This classical curriculum remained remarkably consistent well into the 19th century. In an era when Latin and Greek were believed to be essential to any man who considered himself liberally educated, the forces of stability were a powerful influence in the American college (Bastedo, 2005).

A major point of this mini-history of liberal education is the spectacular tenacity of the core curriculum over a significant period of time. The treasure trove of knowledge came from the West—advanced by the Romans and institutionalized by the medieval universities. What was taught to entering students at America’s first colleges reflected this lineage. There were also other tenacious features. Notably, only a very small proportion of the population was considered eligible for a liberal education. The students were exclusively male, mainly the sons of wealthy colonists. The privileged nature of a liberal education was underscored by the fact that the colonial colleges combined yielded only about 100 graduates annually (Bastedo, 2005). The education they received did not seek wisdom in locally produced knowledge. Rather, liberal education of this vintage was based on the great works and thoughts of other civilizations and held up as the ideal, defining an educated person.

Contemporary Realities/Understandings

Higher education in the United States is currently the largest repository of the modern version of liberal education. Today the nature of liberal education at its universities and colleges is extremely varied—very far in both form and years from the classical liberal arts education of 18th-century Harvard College. American educators use “liberal education” somewhat loosely to describe a variety of educational models. Only vestiges of the classical artes liberales are part of contemporary liberal education in its U.S. manifestations. The ideals of living an examined life and educating enlightened citizens remain, but a core of courses and texts common to many institutions no longer exists. Many, but not all, four-year undergraduate institutions now offer some kind of general education component before students begin their majors. At one extreme, it can consist of a few basic core distribution course requirements; at the other, it can be represented by highly structured programs that integrate curricular with co-curricular offerings. Given this diversity, it is not surprising that its contemporary meaning is difficult to convey in other national settings.

For many colleagues outside the United States, particularly among developing countries, there is little familiarity with the term, which sometimes even has pejorative connotations. The fact that historically it accompanied the domination of one country over another has meant that it is associated with the legacy of colonialism in many places. Reserved for a few elites, it habitually disregarded the local culture. In colonized India, for example, English was deemed more important than Sanskrit; Shakespeare more relevant than the Mahabharata; the teachings of Milton and Burke more appropriate than the teaching of Buddha. It was Thomas B. Macauley as an agent of the British Empire who wanted to create in India through liberal education “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and intellect” (quoted in Ashby, 1964, p. 2). Ironically, many of those who led the fight against colonial domination had been educated in European universities and often quoted the political philosophers of the West in laying out the grounds for civil disobedience. The experience in the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa is generally similar. In addition to its colonial connotation, liberal education is often still seen as superfluous in the context of nation building. Having thrown off the shackles of colonialism, countries dealing with the enormous demands of economic development tended to view liberal education as a luxury reserved for elites, one that the country could ill afford.

In short, in countries with no significant experience with liberal education, the words and the concepts tend to raise more questions than answers in cross-cultural conversations. Does it imply a political orientation? Is it just a superficial hopscotch over a number of subjects? Is it designed for those who do not have the ability to undertake a serious program of study in a particular academic field? Questions about course content are common and are accompanied by inquiries about what exactly the curriculum is and specifically what subjects are taught. After all, for those who know something about the historical origins of liberal education, very specific content and texts were revered over many generations for what they taught, weren’t they? Yet the answers do not lie in the past, nor are they easy to provide, neatly packaged, in the present. Part of the reason is that liberal education in the 20th and 21st centuries in America has always been a work in progress.

A colleague from a German university, pondering the direction of American higher education, remarked that the curriculum of U.S. universities and colleges is always under debate, a marked departure from his experience at his own institution. At the heart of much of this debate is the question of what the nature of undergraduate education should be and how general education should be introduced prior to a student’s undertaking specialized study. A good illustration of the seriousness with which this matter is taken was the debates that began in the 1980s and which continue, though with less intensity, to the present. At their center was the battle over moving from a Western-oriented canon to a more multicultural one.

The Western core and perceived narrowness of the curriculum of liberal education was the object of student protests in the 1980s. This resistance was symbolized by the chant of students at Stanford University: “Hey, hey. Ho, ho. Western Civ has got to go.” As colleges and universities (Stanford among them) became responsive to these protests, the canon of the core curriculum expanded significantly to include a multicultural spectrum of texts (Heller, 2002). The movement away from an exclusive core of Western texts, in turn, caused considerable backlash from conservative academics. They blamed liberal academics for opening the curriculum to an “anything goes” approach and were especially unhappy with interdisciplinary and multicultural studies that supplanted the traditional core curriculum focusing on time-honored classics and a more homogenized West (Heller, 2002).

The so-called “culture wars” of American academe ensued. E. D. Hirsh’s Cultural Literacy (1987) defended what for him were essential texts, including those of the ancient Greeks. Allan Bloom followed shortly with The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and later by Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994). Overall the argument was that liberal education should deliver core information to student...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. A Global Framework: Liberal Education in the Undergraduate Curriculum
• 2. China: General Education Grounded in Tradition in a Rapidly Changing Society
• 3. India: Structural Roadblocks to Academic Reform
• 4. Mexico: Higher Education, the Liberal Arts, and Prospects for Curricular Change
• 5. Pakistan: Liberal Education in Context, Policy, and Practice
• 6. Poland: The Place of Liberal Education in Post-Soviet Higher Education
• 7. Russia: Against the Tide, Liberal Arts Establishes a Foothold in Post-Soviet Russia
• 8. South Africa: Reimagining Liberal Learning in a Post- Apartheid Curriculum
• 9. Turkey: Obstacles to and Examples of Curriculum Reform
• 10. Comparative Observations: Problems and Prospects
• List of Contributors
• Index