首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
For more than 2,000 years, a liberal education has been the ideal of the West—for the brightest, if not for all, students. The t
For more than 2,000 years, a liberal education has been the ideal of the West—for the brightest, if not for all, students. The t
admin
2016-08-19
35
问题
For more than 2,000 years, a liberal education has been the ideal of the West—for the brightest, if not for all, students. The tradition goes back to Plato, who argued in The Republic that "leadership should be entrusted to the philosopher". More recently, in a World War II-era treatise, a Harvard University committee concluded that a liberal education best prepared an individual to become "an expert in the general art of the free man and the citizen. "The report, which led to the introduction of Harvard’s general education curriculum, concluded,"The fruit of education is intelligence in action. The aim is mastery of life. "
In recent years, the fruit has spoiled and such high-sounding rhetoric has been increasingly challenged. Critics have charged that liberal arts education is elitist education, based on undefined and empty shibboleths. Caroline Bird, social critic and author, argues in The Case Against College that the liberal arts are a religion, "the established religion of the ruling class. "Bird writes, "The exalted language, the universalistic setting, the ultimate value, the inability to define, the appeal to personal witness...these are all the familiar modes of religious discourse. "
Students in the 1960s charged that such traditional liberal arts courses as "Western Thought and Institutions" and" Contemporary Civilization" were ethnocentric and imperialistic. Other students found little stimulation in a curriculum that emphasized learning to both formulate ideas and engage in rational discourse. They preferred, instead, to express themselves in experience and action: they favored feeling over thought, the nonverbal over the verbal, the concrete over the abstract. In the inflationary, job-scarce economy of the 1970s,many students argue that the liberal arts curriculum is "irrelevant" because it neither prepares them for careers nor teaches them marketable skills. In its present form, moreover, liberal arts education is expensive education.
Partly in response to these charge and, more immediately to faculty discontent, Harvard recently approved a redesigning of the liberal arts program. Faculty had complained that the growing numbers and varieties of courses had "eroded the purpose of the existing general education program. "Students, they felt, could use any number of courses to satisfy the university’s minimal requirements, making those requirements meaningless. The new core curriculum will require students to take eight courses carefully distributed among five basic areas of knowledge. The Harvard plan proposed to give students " a critical appreciation of the ways in which we gain knowledge and understanding of ourselves. "Plausible as this credo may be, it rests on rhetoric and not solid research evidence— like curriculum innovations of the 1960s.
In an era of educational accounting and educational accountability, it would be helpful to have a way of determining what the essential and most valuable" core" of a university education is and what is peripheral and mere tradition. What are the actual effects of a liberal education, this most persistent of Western ideals? It is sobering to realize that we have little firm evidence.
Against this background, we recently designed and carried out a new study to get some of the evidence. Our findings suggest that liberal arts education does, in fact, change students more or less as Plato envisioned, so that the durability of this educational ideal in western civilization may not be undeserved. In our research, liberal education appears to promote increases in conceptual and social-emotional sophistication. Thus, according to a number of new tests we developed, students trained in the liberal arts are better able to formulate valid concepts, analyze arguments, define themselves, and orient themselves maturely to their world. The liberal arts education in at least one college also seems to increase the leadership motivation pattern—a desire for power, tempered by self-control.
We started our study from two fundamental premises: first, that the evidence to date was probably more a reflection of the testing procedures used than of the efficacy of higher education: and, second, that new tests should be modeled on what university students actually do rather than on what researchers can easily score. If liberal education teaches articulate formation of complex concepts, then student research subjects should be asked to form concepts from complex material and then scored on how well they articulate them, rather than being asked to choose the "best"of five concepts by putting a check mark in one of the boxes. Any study of the effects of higher education has the difficult task of distinguishing educational effects from simply maturational effects. In order to have some control over the effects of maturation, therefore, we tested students who were receiving three different kinds of higher education: A traditional four-year liberal arts education at a prestigious Eastern US institution: A four-year undergraduate program for training teachers and other professionals: A two-year community college that offers career programs in data processing, electronics, nursing secreta-rial skills, and business administration.
At all three institutions, last-year students scored higher than first-year students, but seniors at the liberal arts college far outdistanced their counterparts at the teachers’ and community colleges.
We may infer from the author’s designing of the study that natural maturation with age might______.
选项
A、affect the accuracy of the scoring of the tests
B、lower the score of the tests
C、be a factor to be ignored in the testing
D、be the dominant variable in the tests
答案
A
解析
推断题。倒数第二段第三句指出,所有针对高等教育效果的研究所面对的一个难题是将教育成效与成熟因素区分开来。然后作者指明自己的设计思路:为了对成熟因素有所控制,我们测试了三类接受不同层次高等教育的学生。从这里可以判断出作者在设计时尽量控制了成熟因素,但是并没有说是否能够完全避免,因此还是有可能影响测试结果,故[A]为答案,同时排除[C]。这里只涉及测试结果的精确性,不涉及成绩高低,故排除[B];文中也没有提到成熟因素是决定性因素,故排除[D]。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/5P7O777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
ChicagoPoemsandThePeople,Yesarethemostimportantcollectionsofpoemsby______,theleadingcharacteroftheChicagoSc
Theincreaseininternationalbusinessandinforeigninvestmenthascreatedaneedforexecutiveswithknowledgeofforeignl
Theincreaseininternationalbusinessandinforeigninvestmenthascreatedaneedforexecutiveswithknowledgeofforeignl
ItisthroughtheTreatyofWaitangiin______thattheUnitedKingdomestablishedBritishsovereigntyinNewZealand.
AndrewCarnegie,knownastheKingofSteel,builtthesteelindustryintheUnitedStates,and,intheprocess,becameoneof
Asthe20thcenturybegan,theimportanceofformaleducationintheUSincreasedThefrontierhadmostlydisappearedandin191
Theterm"leadership"isoneofthemostdifficultinan【M1】______educationaladministration.Tosome,aleaderissimpleonew
我在故乡走的地方不多,但古迹、侨乡,到处可见,福建华侨,遍于天下。我所到过的亚、非、欧、美各国都可见到辛苦创业的福建侨民,握手之余,情溢言表。在他们家里、店里,吃着福州菜,喝着茉莉花茶,使我觉得作为一个福州人是四海都有家的。我的父母之乡是可爱的。
维持朋友亲密关系的最好办法是往来有节,互不干涉。(2010年真题)
明天下大雪。
随机试题
试述国际广告与国内广告的差异。
根据合同法律制度的规定,承运人对运输过程中发生的下列旅客伤亡事件,承担赔偿责任的是()。
企业采取宽松的营运资金持有政策,产生的结果是()。
某工程由于发包人原因暂停施工28天后,承包人认为工程已具备复工条件,向监理人提交书面复工通知,但被监理人当场拒绝,则承包人()。
按照资金的来源,个人住房贷款可以分为()。
将静置在地面上,质量为M(含燃料)的火箭模型点火升空,在极短的时间内以相对地面为v0的速度竖直向下喷出质量为m的炽热气体。忽略喷气过程重力和空气阻力的影响,则喷气结束时火箭模型获得的速度是()。
一座不阅读、不懂得尊重文化人的城市,注定是一座_______的城市;一座城市的高品位,来自对文化的崇尚,这种崇尚是由内而外的,无法装扮的,如若不然,哪怕这座城市高楼林立、遗迹丰富,也_______不出真正的品位与内涵。填入划横线部分最恰当
请在【答题】菜单下选择【进入考生文件夹】命令,并按照题目要求完成下面的操作。注意:以下的文件必须保存在考生文件夹下。文君是新世界数码技术有限公司的人事专员,国庆节过后,公司招聘了一批新员工,需要对他们进行入职培训。人事助理已经制作了一份演示文稿的素材“
Doyouforgettoturnoffthelightsandheaterswhenyougooutofaroom?In2040it【C1】______notmatter.Theywillturnthems
雷锋是一位中国人民解放军(thePeople’sLiberationArmyofChina)战士的名字,如今已家喻户晓,成了一个文化符号,象征着无私和奉献。1963年3月5日,毛泽东主席发起“向雷锋同志学习”的活动,鼓励年轻人以雷锋为榜样。自此,
最新回复
(
0
)