Neil Postman and Charles Wingartner , Teaching as a Subversive Activity ( New York: Delacorte, 1969), pp. xiii-xiv.
2.
Alvin Toffler , Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 167.
3.
Almost any of the recent writings on education will serve to convince the reader of the intellectual sterility that is pervasive in schools. The literature of education, like all other fields, has proliferated to the point of unmanageability.
4.
Even the way specialties are currently patterned in education may be called into question. Many divisions between specialties are the result of peculiar historical developments or academic rivalries. Even if such a pattern were the best way to deal with knowledge of the past, there is no a priori reason to believe it is the best way to organize to generate the knowledge necessary for the future. Designation of specialties does, of course, change in a university, but only very slowly, and most commonly this involves the splintering of an area into even more highly specialized areas as knowledge proliferates. Interdepartmental competition seems to frequently blockade attempts to reorganize existing specialties, especially when such reorganization involves the meaningful integration of specialties into a newly defined aggregate.
We all recognize that it is potentially dangerous and inappropriate for the educational institutions to be teaching a specific set of values. But like it or not, the educational process does communicate values—presently a rather sterile set of technocratic values. No amount of pretending that education is not in the value business alters this fact. The real goal is to aid the student to develop his own set of values by exposing him to a variety of alternatives from which he may choose as he sees fit. This process exposes the fact that the teacher is not the "possessor of truth," an exposure that many academics cannot tolerate, and they reject the teaching of anything in which they cannot dominate the student.
7.
Peter F. Drucker, Ed., Preparing Tomorrow's Business Leaders Today (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 287.
8.
9.
Bennis, op. cit, p. 51.
10.
The failure of the university to be adaptive enough to meet current needs is most visibly reflected in the spontaneous eruption of the "free university" to meet student needs not met on the campus. These competitive educational opportunities did not even exist seven years ago, and already number over one hundred.
11.
I see nothing wrong in the fact that any course faces continual evaluation and justification. The issue here is that the course in question faces a disproportional burden relative to other parts of the curriculum. A large part of this problem stems from the fact that nearly all specialists see themselves as competent to evaluate these general courses despite their strong reactions to criticisms flowing in the opposite direction.
12.
The perception of incompetence and second class citizenry of the staff members teaching these courses is all too often justified, but this is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Academics who aspire to rewards from the institution, instead of from the students, soon learn that success is more easily obtained by being a specialist. The talented faculty members, therefore, often leave this area to the less talented. Since the number of faculty who place the student's interest above their own is small, the reward structure of the institution needs to be altered if a good job is to be done in this area.
13.
The solution to this pressure to date has been to let training in the sciences and the pseudosciences pre-empt the available student time away from education. It is the general acceptance of this imbalance that precipitates the need for articles such as this one.
14.
Many faculty members react to obsolescence of the traditional lecture with dread, fearing that without the lecture they would have no meaningful role to play. This may be true for many individuals, since lecturing is the only teaching skill they may have developed, but it is certainly not true in general. Students still need other people with whom they can discuss ideas and exercise concepts and analysis, especially if those others offer a uniqueness from which the student can benefit. The value of a good professor lies not in the uniqueness of the information he possesses as much as in the concepts he has, and the ways in which he processes the available information. Faculty members are often surprised, once they get out of the information transmission role, how much they too can learn from the uniqueness the students offer.
15.
Student responsibility is not an easy thing to encourage. Almost the entirety of any student's previous educational experience teaches him to sit passively and let the teacher take the responsibility for his education. The student may not learn much, and is certainly unlikely to learn what he'd like to, but he knows he'll get by and get the degree which says he is educated, even if he is not. Even good students follow this path, for, as things now stand, the exercise of responsibility over one's own education almost certainly means bucking the system and all of its rules and regulations. The university makes the risks of so doing more visible than the potential rewards. 16. Since I am a member of a school of business and the reader is most likely in business, it may surprise the reader to note that this is one of the few references specific to our own area. I have done so purposefully, since I think the thoughts in this paper are more generally applicable, and the observations reflect my experience with several universities, only a small portion of which involves my present position and colleagues.
16.
Harold Taylor , Students Without Teachers: The Crisis in the University (New York: Mc-Graw-Hill , 1969), p. 10.
