The Indispensable Moment: A New Kind of 21st Century Education by President Elizabeth Coleman Bennington College Delivered at Hathaway Brown School’s Education Innovation Summit November 5, 2010 ❋ ❋ ❋
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o talk about innovation in the abstract is not very helpful, and even misleading. Contrary to the buzz that surrounds it, innovation is not an end or a value in itself, nor does it come into being except as a necessary condition for achieving purposes or principles. Moreover while typically praised in the abstract, it is energetically resisted in the concrete. There is, in truth, an inverse proportion between the appeal of innovation and one’s proximity to its consequences. Of the many obstacles to innovation actually happening, the biggest is that people directly in its path don’t like it and those are the ones who have to embrace it if it is to succeed. The resistance to doing things differently makes the power of the ideas innovation is serving especially important— not so much because that power will make people more amenable to change, at least not in the short term, but because those who are leading innovation will need something very special to keep them going. One thing you can count on: there is no need to test the water if you are contemplating genuine innovation—you can be sure that it will be very hot. Hence to understand what Bennington is doing when getting at the dynamics of innovation is of concern, it is especially important to grasp the ideas that drive and inform its efforts, and what is at stake should we succeed or should we fail. That, in turn, means examining the framework of values in which education currently operates—more precisely confronting the absence of a framework of values. Despite widespread enthusiasm for education, we persist in treating it as absent any intrinsic value. Instead its value stems from the extent to which it successfully or unsuccessfully accommodates itself to other interests, whether they be political, economic, or religious. In contrast to every other major social institution in our society—law, health, business, government, media, religion—where we have clear ideas about their distinct purposes, education remains a blank slate on which virtually anything can be written. This orientation to education is particularly unfortunate given what the distinctive purposes of education as an institution actually are: that is to transform possibilities—the very opposite of accommodation. Its job is not to perpetuate a status quo but to make the world in which it occurs a better place than it would be otherwise, both for the individuals fortunate enough to have access to it and for the community of which they are members. No other institution has this definition, this responsibility, this source of legitimacy, this potential power. The depth of our associations between education and the possibilities for a better life undoubtedly account for our persistence in seeing education as the great hope for ourselves and the world despite the unspeakable betrayals of that purpose. Our neglect of the distinctive power and responsibility of education is especially perilous in a democracy. From the beginning of this great American experiment in self-governance, education was universally understood by the founders to be critical in determining the nation’s fate. Thomas Jefferson put it most succinctly: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” He was not alone. George Washington: “In proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” James Madison: “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” Given the historic association between the liberal arts and an education worthy of free men and women, it is not surprising that the United States gave birth to the idea and the ideal of the liberal arts college.
Nor is it surprising that this country succeeded in making public education available to everyone—a stunning accomplishment. But, alas, as access increased the commitment to an education worthy of a great democracy disintegrated—the tendency to dilute, to make accommodations, accelerates. In Helen and Robert Lynd’s Middletown, published in 1929, the president of the Muncie, Indiana, school board sums it up: “For a long time all boys were trained to be President. Then for a while we trained them all to be professional men. Now we are training boys to get jobs.” President Clinton’s State of the Union message of 1994 uncannily echoes the words of our Muncie school board president except they are spoken now in the accents of triumph rather than despair: “We measure every school by one high standard: Are children learning what they need to know to compete and win in the global economy.” That’s it? That’s the whole story? One might reasonably consider economic well-being to be one of the desirable outcomes of a successful education, but that is a very different matter from its becoming the sole objective of such an education—the standard by which everything is to be measured. It is worth taking in the magnitude of the diminishing of values: on the individual level, selfinterest, defined solely in economic terms, replaces the values of human dignity, autonomy, freedom, happiness; on the social, the aggregate of this narrow self-interest supplants the idea of a public life informed by the ideals of justice, equity, social responsibility, and a continual expansion of human possibilities. As president of Bennington College I most certainly appreciate the importance of money; but it cannot be the measure of all things. It is a very thin reed for any civilized world, and catastrophic for a democratic one.
I need hardly document here the consequences of this relentless and crude vocationalism on education in America. Despite endless reports and the spending of untold billions, students continue to drop out of school in droves and businesses increasingly are driven to educate their employees. Mastery of basic skills and a bare minimum of cultural literacy continue to elude vast numbers of our students and that includes large numbers of our college graduates. Despite having a research establishment that is the envy of the world, more than half of the American public demonizes evolution. And don’t press your luck when it comes to estimating how many of those who think they believe in it actually understand it. Nor did the liberal arts establishment, the citadel of our most visionary education, escape the consequences of this impoverishment of value, despite the rhetoric of selfcongratulation and the widely held assumption that liberal education persists as a serious alternative to what are viewed as more pragmatically oriented educational options. The truth is that we have professionalized what passes for liberal arts to the point where they simply do not begin to provide the intellectual breadth of application and the ethical depth that provides a heightened capacity for civic engagement which is their signature. Over the past century the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. While expertise has had its undoubted successes, the price of its unrivalled dominance is enormous. The progression of today’s student is to jettison every interest except one and within that one to continually narrow the focus. Subject matters of study are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, with growing emphasis on the technical and the obscure. The perspective progressively narrows to confront an increasingly fragmented
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world generating a model of intellectual accomplishment that amounts not to learning more and more about less and less—already a dubious accomplishment—but more precisely to learning less and less about less and less. This, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things. Lest you think this is an overstatement, here are the beginnings of the ABCs of Anthropology.
In addition to working in ever narrowing contexts, as one ascends the educational ladder values other than technical competence are viewed with increasing suspicion. Questions such as what kind of a world are we making? what kind of a world should we be making? what kind of a world can we be making? move off the table as beyond our ken. Incredibly, neutrality about such concerns is seen as a condition of academic integrity. Criteria that would make it possible to distinguish between the relative values of the subjects we teach are religiously avoided. Every subject is equal, nothing is more important than anything else. Keeping up with one’s field —furthering the discipline—becomes an end in itself without reference to anything outside of the discipline. The “so what” question is emphatically off limits. This aversion to social values may seem at odds with the explosion of community service programs. But despite the attention paid to service, these efforts remain emphatically extracurricular and have had virtually no impact on the curriculum itself. In effect, civic-mindedness is seen as residing outside the realm of what purports to be serious thinking and adult purposes, more a matter of heart than of mind, a choice, often short-term, rather than a lifelong obligation. We in the academy have in fact institutionalized the very divides that poison our public life—between the most demanding uses of intelligence and civic virtue, between the ideal and the real, between a good and a successful life. In so doing, we, the educators, the guardians of secular democracy, in effect cede any connection between education and values to fundamentalists, who, you can be sure, have no compunctions about using education to further their values—the absolutes of a theocracy. Meanwhile the values and voices of democracy—the very opposite of such certainties—are silent. Either we have lost touch with those values or, no better, believe they need not or can not be taught, with devastating consequences for our political landscape. Yeats nightmare vision come alive: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” This mix—oversimplification of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a condition of academic integrity—is deadly when it comes to pursuing the vital connections between the public good and education, between intellectual integrity and human freedom, between thought and action. Breadth has become equivalent to the shallow and depth to the recondite making a shambles of what had been understood for millennia as an education worthy of free men and increasingly
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of wealth; the potential of global warming to upend human civilization itself; the awesome dimensions of our failure to educate our young; the recent and undisguised assault on the principles that define us as a people—the rule of law, the separation of powers, the relationship between church and state; our predilection for the uses of force. And at a time of such high stakes, demanding challenges, when clarity of thought, respect for evidence, appreciation for complexity, and tolerance for ambiguity are especially critical, the sensationalism of the media— the other major educational institution in our society— continues unabated. The dimensions of the distance we have travelled are best measured by reminding ourselves that the Federalist Papers were published in The Herald Tribune. There is no more damning evidence of the failure of education in this country than the quality of what the public craves or tolerates in its media. Yet despite the enormity, urgency, and longevity of these challenges we, the people, seem unable to do anything but watch and wait, presumably for the experts and the politicians to do something. They have not and they probably can not; it is most unlikely that we can have a viable democracy made up of experts, politicians, zealots, and spectators amidst ever growing concentrations of power devoted to and defined by special interests that have scant relationship to the public interest. Most startling and sobering in this saga is the failure everywhere to draw any connections between what is happening in our public life and what is happening in our educational institutions. We may be at the top of the list in the public’s mind when it comes to influencing access to personal wealth; we aren’t even on the list when
of free women, inclined towards and capable of selfgoverning. The very idea of the educated generalist disappears—the development of our fundamental human capacities to reason, to imagine, to communicate, to understand, to act about things that are of shared human concern. Neither liberal education nor citizenship can survive under these conditions. In such a world, education is a good deal more likely to engender a learned helplessness than a sense of empowerment when the impulse is to change the world. As the purposes of education diminish the idea of a robust citizenship also unravels. Our notion of student as customer perfectly mirrors our current notion of citizen as taxpayer—light years away from Abraham Lincoln’s: “That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”; its resounding reaffirmation by Adlai Stevenson: “As citizens of this democracy you are the rulers and the ruled, the law givers and the law abiding, the beginning and the end.” Voting is today considered a major accomplishment and more often than not defines the extent of our hopes for civic engagement and the outer limits of what we think constitutes democracy. In a moment of clairvoyance, Hannah Arendt, over sixty years ago, characterized citizenship is the “lost treasure” of American political life. Unsurprisingly the consequences of this loss are painfully evident in the deteriorating quality of our public life. The relentless dumbing-down of our political discourse at virtually every level is the most obvious example. There are others: spectacular inequities in the distribution ~4~
cation—one that would enable the challenges from the world to assume a fundamental informing position in the curriculum. We recognized that we could not settle for something that was an add-on if what we were after is the intellectual intensity and ethical vitality that make education and civic life worthy of the name. The strategic challenges were also clear: finding ways to develop an ongoing and deepening dynamic between the world inside the classroom and the world outside; collapsing the divide between thought and action, which the modern university has reified with its “pure” and “applied,” its notion of theory as something distinct from practice, its decided preference for the neat, the orderly, the answerable, the recondite, and its infatuation with what is called scientific method as if it constitutes a virtue in itself, conveniently forgetting its first principle —the very source of its legitimacy—to illuminate the nature of things. Priorities need to be transformed so that enhancing the public good becomes an objective that is a match for private aspirations and the accomplishment of civic virtue is tied to the uses of intellect and imagination at their most challenging. Our current ways of approaching agency and authority need to turn inside out to reflect the reality that no one has the answers to the challenges facing citizens in this century, and everyone has the responsibility to participate in finding them. The central strategy for Bennington turned out to be disarmingly simple and straightforward: to turn the most
it comes to responsibility for the health of this democracy. Business as usual continues within the academic establishment with a complacency and oblivion to the tumult in the world around us that can only be compared to the hauteur of the eighteenth century French aristocrat. We, too, are playing with fire. Democracy is not a romance about the value of folk wisdom, the innate simplicity of problems, or the self-evident nature of the values upon which democracy depends. On the contrary, democracy rests on an appreciation of the inherent messiness and complexities of the world and the limitations of absolutes, and especially of self-righteousness. Not only are axes of evil misplaced, so are axes of good—there is no issue in public life when decisions about what to do must be confronted for which there are not competing goods, competing rights, competing truths. That means no easy answers, no self-evident virtue. The Bennington Response Democracy, in short, requires the same demanding mix of intellect and ethics as does the education that would make it possible. They are two sides of one coin and their fates are deeply intertwined. This is the framework from which Bennington’s innovations emerged—to create anew a robust connection between liberal education and the demands of a vibrant citizenship. Certain things were clear. We needed to find a compelling alternative to the departmentalized, disciplinebased structures that dominate every aspect of higher edu-
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New ways of organizing classroom time are emerging that allow purposes to determine the structure instead of the usual procrustean bed routine we all know so well, starting with the structure as given and fitting whatever we’re trying to do to its measurements. Beyond curriculum, the focus on advancing public action expands the ranks of people who will be teaching at Bennington to include those whose lives give shape to the world of public action: business leaders, journalists, lawyers, soldiers, politicians, professionals, social activists. Residencies of variable duration, varying from a week to a month a term, enable us to bring such people onto campus to engage with students, faculty, and staff about their work in myriad ways. Students, in turn, continue to move outside the classroom to negotiate the world directly now that experience is in an especially dynamic relationship with what is going on within the classroom. In effect these are two sides of a coin—their work in class as preparation for their work off campus, and their work off campus serving to illuminate what is happening in class. We are now in a world where there is a place within the curriculum designed to allow students to express and to deepen what is happening to them in the rich possibilities for discovery outside the curriculum. All of this activity, in its multiple dimensions and forms, does not preclude maintaining opportunities for students and faculty to continue to immerse themselves in traditional disciplines/crafts, but that is now juxtaposed to experiences that emerge out of a very different and equally powerful principle. That principle is defined by the challenges of putting things together rather than differentiating them and focusing on what connects us to a broader community instead of what distinguishes us from one another to define our personal and professional ambitions and dreams. Both are of course profound dimensions of a human life. It is important to appreciate the enormous significance for innovation when the conventions that have so long dominated are no longer the only game in town. As the Bennington community at every level increasingly confronts the rich dynamic between the public and the private good, the individual and the collective, the collaborative and the solo, these dialectics will undoubtedly transform one other. The unifying objective is to change the odds that our graduates will be committed to—and capable of—effective action in the world about matters of great human concern, even more that they will be capable of living both a good and a successful life.
pressing problems of the world themselves into major definers and organizers of the curriculum. They would be accorded the same authority to generate and organize curriculum now held exclusively by the traditional disciplines in the arts and sciences. The objective always to figure out what to do. Making effective action the driving force, rather than understanding absent any necessary connection to action, was absolutely essential. Our assumption was that rethinking the uses of force…how we educate our young...heal the sick… address the growing disparity in the U.S. between the structures of governance and their purposes… come to grips with the consequences of the disparities in the distribution of wealth and our dependence on money as the only way of measuring value…face up to the enormity of human effort it will take to confront and contain global warming without denying the magnitude and power of competing values and interest—that addressing these issues will be every bit as intellectually challenging, educationally responsible, and potentially rich for generating curriculum as the disciplines that currently serve to organize a undergraduate education. Actually we think they are likely to be more so. We also imagined that those capacities fundamental to addressing issues of this urgency, complexity, and magnitude would assume a central importance, generating what is in effect a new liberal arts capable of responding to the contingencies, particularities, and ambiguities of real world situations. The arts of taking things in—seeing, reading, listening, drawing—assume a central role as do those of communicating what has been seen with power and economy. Rhetoric, the art of organizing the world of words to have maximum effect, re-emerges as fundamental; design, the art of organizing the world of things, assumes an equal importance. Mediation, improvisation, and the capacity for empathy also join this new pantheon—their power no longer treated as being limited to particular careers or arts on the one hand or presumed to be unteachable on the other. What we are discovering is that as the stakes and challenges of real world engagement loom large, so too does the difference between ideology and ideas, the importance of evidence, the limitations of unexamined assumptions, the distorting power of preconceptions, and the self-indulgence of treating opinions as the endall of intellectual community. Quantitative reasoning rapidly assumes a prominence because of its importance in grasping and managing change, in discriminating systematically between what is at the core and what is peripheral, and in appreciating scale.
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wise today’s brave new world—however vital and vibrant —is likely to become tomorrow’s bastion of self-perpetuation. This is undoubtedly the greatest challenge—how to build into the conditions that initiate and innovate the sources of self-renewal. There are aspects of the curricular design that emerged at Bennington which exhibit characteristics of structures in and of themselves that are arguably particularly compatible with perpetuating innovation. Think again about that cluster of interlocking circles generated by the topics: they are intrinsically contentious (what makes these six topics sacred? why not…?—i.e. in their very nature, they invite the possibility that there could be a better idea); dynamic and permeable (the interaction between them is fundamental—how can you possibly talk about the uses of force or economics and equity without talking about governance? how can you possibly talk about health without talking about the distribution of wealth? and so on); value laden (continually challenging us to maintain the distinction between a politics of principle and a politics of partisanship—complacency is simply not an option); self-evidently impermanent (the more that disappear and the sooner they disappear the better). It is interesting to note that these characteristics are in marked contrast to the structural virtues much more typically touted and most certainly found in the disciplinary structure, designed to be solid as a rock, impermeable, eternal, value neutral, and seeming to reflect the very nature of things. Managing innovation is of course its own huge subject. It is difficult to talk about abstracted from a host of particulars that make each effort unique. One rule of thumb worth mentioning: it is best typically to enable the world that is currently in place to continue but no longer as the sole reservoir of legitimacy. To survive as an alternative source of educational integrity is a huge accomplishment in itself. And as time passes and more concrete expressions of an idea come into existence the power of the idea reasserts itself, now over those who are being invited to change. Finally, should compelling innovation happen, there are the external constituencies that we hear from when anything that could possibly be construed to be out the ordinary is on the table—most notably parents and the press. What will this mean for my child? Or, that’s all very well but what are you going to do with a degree in…? For me this raises the issue of leadership—to what extent do we follow what we call the market and to what extent do we define it? It would seem to me, given our work, there is no question about
Before closing I’d like to focus on a few aspects of this story that are especially revealing about the challenges and dynamics of innovation. First is the great importance of the honesty and penetration of the analysis of what you are up against and what it will take to make something genuinely new. The temptations of seeing the interdisciplinary as an adequate response to the limitations of the disciplines are evident everywhere we turn; the problem is they perpetuate rather than challenge the hegemony of the disciplines. The language itself of interdisciplinary makes that clear; the interdisciplinary is meaningless without presuming the existence of the disciplines. It is worth noting that the reverse is not true—the disciplines do not depend on the interdisciplinary for their existence. That subordinate role speaks eloquently to their relative power and place. More important, like the disciplines, the interdisciplinary starts with conventionalized perspectives which the world must conform to in order to enter the academic conversation, rather than starting with the world itself. The only difference is that you start with more than one of them. That glosses over the most serious problem of the disciplinary orientation, which is the continual accommodation of the world to a conventionalized, selfreferential perspective and methodology rather than the reverse—starting with the world and using whatever will enable you to see it as clearly as possible and influence it as productively as possible. Moreover the actualities of the interdisciplinary experience are often either to continue to talk past one another, leaving it for the students to somehow do the synthesizing, or in the interests of communication across what are often very strong divides, to be drawn ineluctably towards more diffuse rather than more penetrating insights. Without an analysis that confronts the real price of the hegemony of disciplines the temptation of leaving the status quo intact and treating the change as an add-on is hard to resist. Aside from their intrinsic limitations, add-ons are dependent on continually generating sources of energy and resources for their maintenance and that is often unsustainable. It does not serve us well to perpetuate a status quo by seeming to adequately address its limitations without requiring any genuine innovation. More to the point, genuine innovation is simply impossible without analysis that makes its necessity overwhelmingly clear. While it is, for sure, a challenge to get anything going that is genuinely innovative, sustaining innovation is the great and largely unmet challenge. It means creating a culture of innovation which in turn means building the conditions of such a culture into the design itself. Other-
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what we should do and frankly what most people, even in this crazed consumer culture we live in, expect us to do. If our job stops short of defining what an education is, it is hard for me to know where it begins. What is equally clear is the power we actually have to do just that is often in marked contrast to the power we think we have. In a word, I believe that we have only ourselves to blame when we hand over to anyone else our responsibility to call the shots when it comes to defining our work. Alas we do it again and again, believing that we have no choice. Trust me you have a choice. For those of you who remain tempted to leave well enough alone or to start small, some final thoughts: One: In my experience, you take as much punishment if you dare even to think about change as you do for something approaching revolution. In other words, contrary to what might appear to be reasonable, you get
no credit for moderation when you are doing anything other than applauding the status quo. So… if you are going to enter this arena at all, you might as well go for the gold. Two: It is worth reminding ourselves that doing things in ways that undermine the conditions of intellectual community and narrow our horizons demand as much energy, if not more, and cost as much, if not more, than doing them in ways that create community and extend our sense of what is possible. Three: We, not God or nature, made the schools we currently inhabit; hence, we can unmake and remake them. Finally: The world is correct in its ongoing, passionate commitment to the power of education despite everything. Imagine what could happen if we do it right. Imagine what will happen if we do not.
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