Higher Education: Curricula in the Wilsonian Tradition (6/6)
In 1945, as the Second World War was drawing to a close, Harvard University issued a book that was destined to become influential in both secondary and college education. With the provocative and promissory title “General Education in a Free Society” the Red Book (as it came to be called), made a case for a broad education in the liberal arts (and sciences). Honoring a distinction that was becoming standard in the educational world, the Red Book labelled and described three areas of knowledge: Humanities, Social Studies, and Science and Mathematics. The sciences were seen as efforts at description, analysis, testing, and explanation, particularly in the areas of physics, chemistry and biology; the humanities (studies in philosophy, history, language, art and music) were characterized as efforts to appraise, judge, and critique—essential components of evaluation. And the social studies—then (and now, I would add with a touch of skepticism) as efforts to apply the approach and the methods of the sciences to human beings and their affairs. Social studies included anthropology, economics, government, psychology and sociology—fields that I myself studied at Harvard some years later.
Of course, this was just a list of departments and courses. How these fields of study were approached, joined, or made distinctive remained to be determined. One could, for example, have survey courses; courses that looked in depth at one or two topics; that featured a single instructor or a team, working together or seriatim; that focused more on content (name the Chinese imperial dynasties); or on approaches (how would you investigate a historical period or figure…); on history, methods, or trends, and so on. And indeed, one could write a history of curricula (and of the notorious ‘curricular wars’) that would reflect the more general history of institutions of higher education in America. In all likelihood, one generalization likely to emerge is that faculty feel the need to re-do the curriculum of their institution at least once per generation.
Our own study of higher education (click here) documents that much of this ‘curricular talk’ is invisible to most students, and, indeed, to most constituencies, except for faculty. And perhaps that’s fine for some purposes. But in a series of blogs on synthesis (of which the Wilson duo have been center-stage for five installments) it seems apt to comment on the place of synthesis in higher education.
One promising way to approach synthesis is to feature experts who can illustrate bodies of knowledge and methods that address each other in one or way another. This was the tack taken in the aforementioned course on “Thinking about Thinking” where expert scholars from three distinct disciplines tackled broad topics—like justice or evidence—from a variety of scholarly perspectives. (Click here to see the introduction to blog five.)
Another promising way is to sculpt courses that look explicitly at the approaches to scholarship, learning, understanding favored in different disciplines—that’s the idea underlying the course on “Theories of Knowledge”(TOK) that has long been featured in the secondary school International Baccalaureate (IB) Curriculum; it’s is also used in other secondary school networks, such as the United World Colleges.
To this conventional list, I propose to add three approaches that are particularly congruent with the development of synthesizing skills:
Begin the college experience with an introduction to tools that can be used across the disciplinary terrain. I have recommended that, as they begin to matriculate,, all students are introduced to two fields of study: 1) philosophy (what are big questions that human beings have pondered over the millennia?) and 2) semiotics (what are the ways in which human beings have thought and discoursed about these big questions—through a study of various signs and means of recording and communicating?)
Not only would all students be able to draw on these tools throughout the college experience; but their instructors would presumably remain cognizant of these tools and would draw on them as appropriate across the curriculum. Perhaps, indeed, in this vision, the president or provost of the college would preside over a cumulative course in the senior year—as allegedly happened in the 19th century. (Click here to read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
2. Present a course on what synthesis is, how it plays out in different areas of life and different disciplines, and how it can be enhanced. In a sense, the few dozen blogs on this site could serve as a prolegomenon to such a course.
Of course, nothing would be drier and more off-putting than a course that simply mouths the virtues of synthesizing. Instead, students would learn to critique various syntheses, to improve them, and to undertake them in areas where they have a curiosity, want to learn more, are ready to share what they’ve learned—much as I have sought to do in these blogs about the Wilson duos.
3. Present a series of puzzles and see how various efforts at synthesize illuminate—or fail to illuminate –each puzzle. With slight malice aforethought, I have here introduced such a puzzle: Is extraordinary talent and accomplishment more likely to occur if creator(s) of extraordinary achievement have earlier in life suffered some kind of profound wound, injury, loss, or injustice—the question raised by Edmund Wilson’s parable of “the Wound and the Bow.”
Presumably students would have some interest in this puzzle—either based on their own lives or on the lives of individuals whom they value or whose accomplishments they treasure (or, more rarely, on figures whom they loathe). And in tackling this puzzle, they could be exposed to the kinds of syntheses that were carried out, respectively, by E. O. Wilson and Edmund Wilson, as well as by others relevant to this task, such as the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (on Leonardo da Vinci) or the historian Thomas Carlyle (on Napoleon), not to mention the literary creations of William Shakespeare—among them, the notorious Richard III .
To sum up: In this series of Wilsonian blogs, I’ve covered a lot of ground—more, admittedly, than I had initially anticipated. I began by signaling my admiration for two masterful synthesizers: (1) the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who—inspired by his childhood reading—synthesized the work of others as a matter of course; and (2) the biologist E.O. Wilson, who long had a penchant for synthesizing, and who eventually ventured beyond the world of his beloved ants, to all of the natural world, to the intellectual, scientific and artistic accomplishments of his fellow human beings.
While admiring the ambit of both Wilsons, I sought to delineate the distinction between Edmund, whose syntheses followed a long-established pattern among Western humanists; and E. O. Wilson, whose synthesizing ambitions grew over the course of time to envelop the full range existing and future knowledge. And while praising the conversational and cooperative facets of such synthesizing, I challenged the concept of modern science as the site and the conqueror of all knowledge.
It is possible, of course, that E. O. Wilson is more correct than I had anticipated. Perhaps many of the themes reflected upon by Edmund Wilson (and his numerous peers across the ages) could be significantly illuminated by the tools and methods of contemporary (and future) science—including the tools of artificial intelligence. Perhaps there will be no issues left in limbo with respect to Richard III (the historical or the Shakespearean version) or the murals on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. That’s the reason for undertaking the sort of empirical investigations that might—or that might not—provide deeper insight into the relation between the wound and the bow.
To conclude: there’s little question that synthesizing is an important human capacity; indeed. that it is likely to remain important—and perhaps even more important—in the period ahead. Here, E. O. Wilson was right! Some individuals can become deft synthesizers, without any format training; and others, no matter how keen their analytic powers, are unlikely to produce syntheses of interest and power. But for the rest, beginning no later than the first year in college, and perhaps much earlier, a formal introduction to the power and the methods of synthesizing seems a worthwhile—and perhaps overdue—investment.