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
94
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.
To some critics, liberal arts education is but______.
选项
A、a high-sounding idea of religious people
B、an ideal for a few brightest people
C、the general art of the free man
D、something revered only by philosophers
答案
B
解析
细节题。第二段第二句指出,批评家指责说文科教育是基于不明确的、空洞的陈旧思想基础上的精英教育。[B]符合文意,故为答案。[A]项是对第二段内容的曲解,故排除;[C]和[D]的内容文章没有提及,故排除。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/rP7O777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
Speakingtwolanguagesratherthanjustonehasobviouspracticalbenefitsinanincreasinglyglobalizedworld.Beingbilingua
Theincreaseininternationalbusinessandinforeigninvestmenthascreatedaneedforexecutiveswithknowledgeofforeignl
NewZealandhasapopulationofabout6millionpeople,themajorityofwhomlivein______area.
AndrewCarnegie,knownastheKingofSteel,builtthesteelindustryintheUnitedStates,and,intheprocess,becameoneof
NewZealand’seducationisseenasoneofthebestintheworld,andschooliscompulsoryforallthechildrenagedfrom______ye
Asthe20thcenturybegan,theimportanceofformaleducationintheUSincreasedThefrontierhadmostlydisappearedandin191
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)
一个人的生命究竟有多大意义,这有什么标准可以衡量吗?提出一个绝对的标准当然很困难。但是,大体上看一个人对待生命的态度是否严肃认真,看他对待劳动、工作等等的态度如何,也就不难对这个人的存在意义做出适当的估计了。古来一切有成就的人,都很严肃地对待自己的生命,当
当他们活着一天,总要尽量多工作、多学习,不肯虚度年华,不让时间白白地浪费掉。
我到这个城市出差,昨天下午下榻在这家旅馆。他和他的妻子就住在我的隔壁。这家旅馆的条件不太好,隔墙很薄,一点都不隔音。他们说话的声音总是很清晰地传过来。很快,我就凭直觉得到了一个印象,那女人很懒,不管什么事情都爱支使丈夫:给我倒杯水:给我找双袜子……
随机试题
社会工作者小吴为吸毒人员提供服务,开设了“美沙酮小组”,以达到改变小组组员的行为,重塑其人格,开发其潜能,促使其成为健康、健全的社会人的目标。该小组属于()。
总工期指标是指从()的全部日历天数。
本题中所叙述的这种转关方式应该属于()。该货物在济南海关办理报关手续时,进口报关单的“运输工具名称”栏目的填写规范是()。
班主任王老师经常在班级管理的过程中对学生进行思想品德教育,王老师进行德育的途径是()。
请用150-200字的篇幅,概括给定资料反映的主要内容,要求准确全面,条理清晰。(20分)根据给定资料内容,就如何应对农副产品价格上涨对社会经济和人民生活的影响,提出相关政策性建议或意见,要求观点鲜明,条理清晰,具有针对性和可行性。总字数300-400
人们通常把知识分子家庭称作“书香门第”,这里的“书香”原意指的是:
设z=z(x,y)由方程z+ez=xy2所确定,则dz=________。
Lifeinsuranceisfinancialprotectionfordependentsagainstloss______thebread-winner’sdeath.
Thecommanderorderedthatwe(withdraw)______assoonaspossible.
TheUShasanenduringloveaffairwiththecar.MostAmericanssimplywon’twalkanywhere,hencetherapidincreaseofdrive-in
最新回复
(
0
)