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Flaws in American Education
By Live Digest on Apr 13, 2007 in 国际教育, 教育, 留学, 留学美国Article from missoulian.com, entitled Professor details flaws in American education, by ROB CHANEY of the Missoulian:
Liberal arts may be too liberal for the good of students, history professor and author Patrick Allitt told University of Montana faculty and students Monday.
Allitt is director of Emory University’s Center for Teaching and Curriculum in Atlanta. While much of his expertise is in following how intellectual ideas like conservatism or communism mutate when translated into governments and social movements, he said his recent research into educational policy has drawn considerable public interest.
His UM visit touched both fields, with an afternoon lecture on the fate of the American conservative movement and the evening President’s Lecture on “The Crisis of Education in America.”His latest book is “I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom,” which challenges the idea that teachers and students have any equal footing in the pursuit of education. Teachers ought to be held superior in that relationship, and thinking otherwise has contributed to poor academic performance among overly comfortable students, he said.
Higher education faces similar challenges in deciding who’s in charge. The United Kingdom, Allitt said, has long held that higher education ought to be limited to the elite. He called the United States’ style of encouraging everyone to seek a college degree both “admirable and impossible.”
“It’s true that anyone who doesn’t go to college here puts themselves at a killing disadvantage,” Allitt said. “But at the same time, you wind up with the misplacement of large numbers of people in higher education programs where they don’t really belong, they’re unsuited for what they’re doing or they don’t like what they’re doing.”
Allitt had particular concern for the American liberal arts curriculum, the long-held idea that college students should be exposed to a range of subjects beyond their specific interests. While advocates of liberal arts argue we get better doctors and poets if each knows something of medicine and poetry, Allitt favors a more European style of early specialization.
“That just makes them jump through lots of hoops remote from their area of interest,” he said. “If they don’t want to take courses in history or philosophy, they ought not to have to. Let them specialize as soon as they would like.”
Allitt acknowledged that many people don’t know what their specialty might be, and such people should not be forced to make premature decisions. But those who do know they want to be doctors shouldn’t have to endure four years of pre-med schooling before they take on medicine full time. The greater time spent in more intensive training would result in better professionals, he claimed.
That said, he still prefers the U.S. system of decentralized higher education control to most European models. When colleges and universities are allowed to try different styles and programs, it increases the chances that a given student will find a well-tailored institution for his or her ambitions.
The serious flaw in that decentralized system, both in the U.S. and United Kingdom, is the lack of focus on how professors teach in the classroom. Allitt observed there are more stringent standards for elementary and high school teachers than there are for college professors, as far as the ability to pass information on to a roomful of students.
“But at least Americans are anxious about it,” Allitt said. “The British couldn’t care less. In that way, I like the American decentralized system. At least there, if one system is clearly malfunctioning, there are opportunities to try other methods.”