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without revolutionary changes in the economy as well as the tenor of
professional life.
Seeing no practical way of altering these structural constraints,
Boyer is reduced to repeating the pious wish that special interests
would stop interfering with the need for clear vision, common edu–
cational mission, and agreement on what is most worth knowing.
His book is filled with empty exhortations that, despite the for–
midable forces acknowledged to be going in the other direction,
common ideals "should" not or "must" not be thwarted:
"If
the college
experience is to be worthwhile, there must be intellectual and social
values that it holds in common even as there must be room for pri–
vate preferences." All this is just wishful thinking unless one can sug–
gest how "common intellectual and social values" can be institu–
tionalized in a culture at odds over values.
A more realistic response would be to recognize that they can't
be and, in a democracy, should not be. We should recognize that
there is no salvaging an educational ideal based on some single view
of what is most worth knowing and should start looking for ways to
overcome curricular incoherence without such an ideal. Instead of
idly wishing that the prevailing conflicts of material interests, goals,
philosophies, and specialization would somehow be resolved, a more
useful tactic would be to ask how these conflicts themselves might be
exploited more productively in the curriculum. Rather than seeing
the dissonance of ideologies and research specialties as symptoms of
special interests somehow to be counteracted by doses of "general"
values that are always too little and too late, we would be wiser to
view that dissonance as a potential source of vitality that could be
used to create the coherence everyone is demanding.
In
other words, the alternative to the trivial pluralism of the
department store curriculum lies not in overcoming special interests
in favor of some forced consensus, but in making more productive
use of existing disagreements and specializations. Boyer cannot con–
ceive such an alternative because for him there are only two op–
tions - incoherence or consensus. He assumes that the only way dis–
ciplinary fragmentation could be overcome is by reshaping cur–
riculum around universal human truths.
In
the following passages I
italicize the phrases in which curricular coherence is confused with
universal consensus:
Can the American college, with its
fragmentation and competing
special interests,
define
shared academic goals?
Is it possible to offer
