BOOKS
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meaning to books and facts for those who take an interest in them.
The problem both ignore is that unless students have some context
for making sense of great books or cultural information, they are not
likely to become interested in either. But then, humanistic education
today contains a multitude of competing contexts, from the tradi–
tional to the radical, and there is no agreement about which of these
contexts should have primacy. As long as this state of disagreement
persists - and there is no end in sight - any approach which assumes
the necessity for a consensus on educational content is a prescription
for continued futility .
Why the consensus-approach is doomed to failure is nowhere
more poignantly illustrated than by another of the recent books that
calls for a return to educational common ground, Ernest
L.
Boyer's
Carnegie Foundation report,
College.
No neoconservative dogmatist,
Boyer is reasonable, balanced, and tolerant, and he respects the
complexities of the educational problem, up to a point.
College
seems
to me a symptomatic book, one whose way of thinking would take
us once more down the garden path which the traditional philosophy
of General Education has so often led in the past.
Boyer succinctly formulates the main premises of
College:
"An
effective college has a clear and vital mission. Administrators, fac–
ulty, and students share a vision of what the institution is seeking to
accomplish." It should always keep in the forefront such fundamen–
tal questions as , "What is most worth knowing? What is it that col–
leges believe students need to know and understand as well as be
able to do?" He goes on to say, "The undergraduate college must
be something more than 'a skillfully coordinated department
store'.... "
Yet Boyer and the Carnegie Foundation researchers who
amassed the materials for his book "found at most colleges in our
study a great difficulty, sometimes to the point of paralysis....
Common goals are blurred ." They found that "colleges are confused
about their mission and how to impart shared values on which the
vitality of both higher education and society depends." They found
"a disturbing gap between the college and the larger world." "The
nation's colleges have been successful in responding to diversity,"
Boyer says, "and in meeting the needs of individual students . They
have been much less attentive to the larger, more transcendent is–
sues that give meaning to existence and help students put their own
lives in perspective."
Boyer recognizes "that these problems are not new, but they
