What Do Educators Want Students to Be and to Do?

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By CHARLES L. CURRIE

Colleges must decide what we want our students to be and do before we can determine what the roles of the liberal arts and technology are, and how they can help achieve our goals. The liberal arts and educational technology are both means to an end, not ends in themselves.

The goal of education was once to educate the Athenian statesman, then the Renaissance gentleman, and more recently the responsible citizen. What is our goal today? For some, it is to prepare for a meaningful job. While that is a practical reality that can't be ignored, most of us are looking for something more.

In Jesuit schools we profess to educate people of competence, compassion, and commitment. Liberal learning plays an essential role in that, and educational technology is an increasingly valuable resource. Other colleges with different goals, however, may teach liberal arts and apply technology differently.

Both the liberal arts and technology can serve the kind of education we seek. An authentic experience of the liberal arts can broaden one's horizons and help establish linkages, connectedness, and coherence in an often fragmented, yet global, world. Through the liberal arts, students can develop the skill to discern — to separate sense from nonsense — and to effectively use the vast information resources available today. The liberal arts educate both mind and heart; they also stimulate an imagination that frees one from the limitations of the present.

Liberal learning is much more than a set of courses or even an entire curriculum. It includes service learning with reflection, international education and study abroad, and immersion experiences of various kinds. It is a life-long task requiring mentors and role models.

Educational technology not only puts all sorts of information at one's fingertips, but can create an immediacy and interactivity that a lecture can rarely achieve. We have all been blessed by an experience of a great teacher who could make a subject come alive, but even the greatest of teachers can be helped by the power of technology today.

I know one professor, for instance, who uses resources on the Web to help his students participate in an interreligious dialogue with Muslim, Jewish, and Christian clerics in the Middle East. There are countless other examples. On the wall of the new science center at John Carroll University are the words that make my point: "Technology has given you a power of inquiry greater than thinking individuals have ever possessed. Not to use it would be like not breathing."

There are many ways to offer integrated, connected learning. Offering interdisciplinary studies or senior capstone seminars are some traditional examples. Others are newer and tied to technology, such as interactive online courses. Ultimately it is important that technology not be seen or used as gadgetry, but as integrated within sound educational goals. Faculty members should decide what they want to do and then see how technology can help them do it.

The Rev. Charles L. Currie is president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.