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June 24, 2009, 12:19 PM ET
Elizabeth Coleman of Bennington College on Re-Creating the Liberal Arts -- and the World
Elizabeth Coleman, president of Bennington College, calls for a reinvention of the liberal arts in this stirring talk at the 2009 TED Conference, which was recently released on TED’s Web site. She says the liberal arts should focus on broad subject areas relevant to the problems of today — health, equity, the environment, education, governance, and the uses of force — and colleges should re-engage the communities around them. Her vision shares much with that of some leading sustainability advocates.
The alternative, she explains, is irrelevance — or worse:
We have professionalized the liberal arts to the point where they no longer provide the breadth of application and the enhanced capacity for civic engagement that is their signature. Over the past century, the expert has dethroned the educated generalist to become the sole model of intellectual accomplishment. … The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest except one, and within that one, to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less — this despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things. … As one moves up the 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?” are treated with more and more skepticism, and move off the table. In so doing, the guardians of secular democracy in effect yield the connection between education and values to the fundamentalists, who you can be sure have no compunctions about using education to further their values, the absolutes of a theocracy.
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