NO ROOM IN THE INS1: GENERAL EDUCATION AND EDUCOLOGISTS + EDWARD KUHLMAN + Professor of Education Messiah College The 1983 publication of the "Nation at Risk Report" marks a watershed in the curriculum reform controversy. Although jeremiads over the state of American education have been perennial and ubiquitous, this report seemed to crystallize the curricular concerns that had surfaced since the 1950's, dramatized and accelerated, of course, by the Sputnik event of 1957. Subsequent to Sputnik, the debate (and dilemma) concerning the nature and function of the school curriculum has focused upon the present, technological nature and needs of society versus the historic, humanizing influences upon individual, personal lives. Is man to be defined as homo scientia (man the technician) or homo sapiens (man the thoughtful)?2 Curricular issues are as much ontological issues as they are epistemological issues. The very definition of and design for humanity are involved. Of course, the respective educational philosophies from Plato to Dewey have sought to provide paradigmatic perspectives on this very point, so the controversy is not a new one. However, the emergence in the 1950's of what Jacques Ellul has described as the "Technological Society"3 has appreciably altered the educative context in which the curriculum is designed and implemented. The traditional assumptions about the "General Education" component, particularly, that placed the onus squarely upon the historic liberal arts are being challenged. General Education was, ipso facto, considered the purview of the academic areas of the humanities (certainly in the Perennialist's construction), or the agreeable symbiosis of arts and sciences (as Essentialism prefers).4 The primacy of these areas of study in curriculum construction may now be called into question. Despite the rhetoric which continues to refer to these liberal arts areas in traditional terms, and which sanctimoniously invests them with a medieval aura, the present approach to academic and curricular organization has transformed these areas of study so that they bear less and less resemblance to their presumed queenly, and scholastic character.5 The curriculum has become the target of attacks from many quarters. Polemics against the traditional Western bias of most college curriculums proliferate. DWEMS (dead white European males) has become an acronym of opprobrium. Diane Ravitch of Columbia University, notably, has come to the defense of the traditional content in curriculums.6 Tomes ranging from Bloom's Closing of the American Mind7 to Smith's Killing the Spirit8 lament the curricular anomalies that they contend corrupt the pristine stream of inherited wisdom. And so the battle for supremacy in curriculum construction has been joined, and let us hope that the victory is not a pyrrhic one. Christian college curriculums have not been aloof from the controversy nor will they, it appears, be spared the casualties that result from serious academic conflict. Christian Higher Education in its laudable quest for respectability (principally in the post-World War II era), has sought to emulate the academic virtues of the established prestigious universities and the seemingly never-ending attempts at integrating "faith and learning" have placed the liberal arts squarely at the center of their General Education curriculum. Arthur Holmes of Wheaton College has, of course, by now become synonymous with Christian liberal education as he has encouraged a generation of Christian academics to embrace liberal learning.9 In Christian higher education generally and among the so-called Christian liberal arts colleges particularly, acceptance of both the assumptions of the methods of scholarly research and the areas of study from the traditional secular spheres is now unquestioned. If anything, the legitimacy of biblical study apart from the secular scholarly context has become questionable. Nevertheless, the issue in this paper is the role and relevancy of the liberal arts as the single source of input into the General Educational segment of the total curriculum. Are the assumptions about the historic liberal arts upon which General Education is typically based relevant in today's departmentally structured, "discipline-oriented" Christian colleges? Have the increasingly, narrowly circumscribed areas of scholarship transmuted the liberal arts into something other than what they have been? Is Page Smith's indictment of the "inhuman humanities" true?10 Has preoccupation with technique in scholarship, following Engel's law, transformed quality into quantity?11 The panoramic "grand tradition of humanistic scholarship" with its global grasp of the all-embracing nature of truth and beauty has been sacrificed upon the altar of specialization and technique, while reductionism, deconstructionism and a host of similar perversities arising from the ashes of academia now clutter the fragmented curriculum. These are not new concerns. Voices have been raised by secular and Christian critics who have viewed, with justifiable alarm, the erosion of humanizing influences. The capitulation to the ravenous appetite of technique in the name of scholarship will leave little left for General Education programs. It has always been assumed that the clash between the "two cultures."12 would find the humanities' college faculty in the camp which resisted fragmentation and which viewed learning holistically. Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case as the claim of scholarly credibility and the quest for departmental visibility carry discipline-specialists closer to their traditional technician foes. Undeniably, academic scholarship has through methodological refinement and proliferation of subject area specialization drawn tight boundary lines around its borders. The subject structure and mode of inquiry that Jerome Bruner called the critical criteria for a discipline appear,13 in the typical college, to have parsimoniously precluded from consideration topics that were previously and traditionally within that discipline's ken. Even more insidiously, subspecialties have been created which in turn aspire to specialization status. Cries of consternation about the futility of any meaningful conversation among scholarship areas in the self-styled academic community testify to the intensification of these specialty areas. Andreski's facetious characterization of exercises in "cross sterilization" among academics is not far afield from the reality in which attempts at dialogue produce something more akin to mutually exclusive monologues where participants talk to themselves.14 The present concept of disciplines with the connotation of fairly rigid, critically defined, and well-protected areas of scholarship has lost the elasticity that the pre-proliferation specialization era brought to General Education curriculum development. Part of the purpose of the General Education program in Christian colleges was to expose students to the benefits of the wide liberal learning provided by the liberal arts, and to allow students to experience and understand an integrated approach to learning which combined critical thought, passionate belief, and aesthetic appreciation, comprehended within the whole. The problem today is that the narrow approach to the definition of disciplines and the corresponding institutional departmental structures militates against an organic approach to General Education. And there is something sadly ironic if not flagrantly paradoxical in the pretensions of college faculty who with their "discipline expertise" approach claim to develop students who are "liberally educated." These faculty contend they are creating the kind of student which they themselves are not! Should not we expect that the faculty within the Christian liberal arts institution have themselves demonstrated sufficient breadth of study to function comfortably in a curriculum that purports to integrate faith and learning? Insistence upon scholarship and pedagogical practice in tightly restrictive curricular areas does not permit a meaningful integration of learning with learning, let alone faith and learning. Has the hardening of the historic liberal arts into rigid, inflexible scholarly disciplines prevented the colloquia and conversation that should occur in undergraduate education? The very term "discipline" which has become the increasingly preferred appellation for subject area specialties has accrued to it connotations of narrowness, rigidity, exclusiveness, and parochialism. Christian colleges seem intent on aping a university model which is built upon departmental identification which in turn is predicated upon narrowly circumscribed scholarly specialties. Increasingly, it appears, the college apparatus supports and encourages a "departmentism" mentality. Scholarly recognition, comparable to the university research model, creates and confirms esoteric academic expertise expectations. Moreover, the notion of departmental specialties translates into a philosophy of departmentism promoting academic stratification patterns and creating a departmental hierarchy with unfavorable elitist overtones. Certain high profile departments have ascribed to them favored status and their input into curricular matters is considered to be more enlightened and important irrespective of the curricular expertise the department members bring to the task of curricular development. Correspondingly, departmental identification becomes the criterion for participating in critical college-wide decision-making activities, and imprudent, discriminatory practices occur. Sensitivity to all forms of discrimination should be one of the hallmarks of a Christian institution. Favored departments are provided a disproportionate share of the academic resources and participate disproportionately in decision making. The "wholesighted vision" (Palmer) of a cross-disciplinary or, even more preferably metadisciplinary perspective to serve the General Education component (a vision which was gaining favor in the 1960's and 1970's has been either myopically reduced to the Cyclopean task of departmental "wallbuilding," or blinded altogether by the luminary appeal that scholarly stardom brings.15 Must General Education be merely an amalgam of discrete, isolated scholarly elements that are suspended without organic connection among them? Perhaps the time has come to seek other primary sources of input into the General Education program to provide greater integration at the outset. Perhaps the areas of traditional input into General Education have now forfeited their inherited right to shape this critical component of the undergraduate curriculum. Perhaps the time has come for the leadership mantle to fall upon the shoulders of academicians and educators who can comfortably and competently tread the total curricular terrain. The expressed goal of Christian liberal arts education which is to provide an integrated, holistic approach to life and learning continues to be a laudable one to which I subscribe. The early vision of men like Gabelein16 and the continuing tradition by Holmes and the generation he has sired have served to steer a proper course for Christian higher education. I am the grateful beneficiary of this educational legacy and I applaud the tenacious insistence upon placing academic majors and programs within this benign context. As an "educationist," I would resist efforts to remove professional programs from this congenial context. That to which I do object and, indeed, which I strongly oppose is redefinition and reconstruction of the General Education program which results in a fundamental shift in focus and outcome. Vision, grandeur, panoramic, and scope are terms that should be inseparable from the General Education curriculum; specialization, disciplines, expertise should be avoided. I am not opting for a dilettante approach to General Education. Superficiality is not virtue; but neither are the arcane, recondite and mystifying (and often debunking) depths to which students are brought. Christian higher education which in the 1970's promised an alternative to the bureaucratized, fragmented curricular models, and which boasted of its emphasis upon teaching is in danger of becoming indistinguishable from its secular counterparts which continue to promote "disciplinism" within their ivy-covered walls. The vision of Robert Maynard Hutchins for a "Great Books" curriculum17 may be impracticable for today, but the metadisciplinary sources of the General Education curriculum continues to be relevant. One possible corrective for the problem could involve recruitment of General Education faculty who have chosen breadth of interest, learning and experience. This may require the establishment of a General Education team that has no departmental affiliation, but this may serve a useful purpose in that these faculty would not be expected to conform to the scholarship model of specialization that has, in part, prompted the crisis. These faculty could be free (yea, would be encouraged, to study, read and write in a variety of areas) from the straightjacket of the specialization inhibition. Education Departments and other areas of professional studies (business, social work, nursing, etc.) have traditionally been tolerated within the Christian liberal arts curriculum. As departments, they clearly have been assigned low status and often relegated to residual categories often lumped together in something called "professional studies." "Educationist" is the pejorative assigned to faculty who presumably possess no credentials of scholarly expertise and who are excluded from prestigious departmental affiliation. Although such a term as discrimination would not be acknowledged, it does occur within this elitist system and structure. Whatever may have been true of so-called "educationists" in a prior era (and I am not ready to accede to the stereotypes),18 the last several decades have produced notable changes in members of education departments (if not in their images). With Elliott Eisner of Stanford University, I prefer the term "educologist" to characterize faculty who study education, for that is what members of departments of education do.19 It seems to me that educologists are eminently qualified to provide the critical leadership in both designing and implementing General Education programs. I will identify several significant reasons which I feel commend educologists and other so-called professional department members to this task. I cannot presume to speak for other professional curriculum areas but I have been impressed by the erudition and literacy of my academic colleagues. Most of them have been schooled in the liberal arts at some level of their education, and their ongoing contact with the world outside the solitude of academia has required them to pursue, personally and professionally, continuing study in these areas. Educologists, whom I do know, have unfortunately been unable to shed the unfavorable image imposed upon them by the academics during the reactionary era of the sputnik phenomenon. Perhaps it is to this breed of scholar characterized by diversity and discernment we need to look for guidance in general education curriculums. Of necessity, these academics have had to enrich their scope of study as well as engage in depth of specialty. The active demands of the cutting-edge curriculum in precollegiate education requires teachers to sample widely as well as specialize specifically. I have identified what I consider to be virtues that educologists can bring to general education, virtues and vitality that provide a necessary corrective to impoverishment of some general education programs. 1) Professional areas of the curriculum provide faculty who know something about the world outside of academia. It is unsettling to see college faculty whose lives have been lived exclusively within academic institutions. Not uncommonly, the nonprofessional departments recruit faculty who have traveled the undergraduate school, graduate school, college teaching route without ever having "hands-on" experiences in any phase of occupational life. They have lived their lives inside the academic culture which breeds its own kind of pathology. Incestuous inbreeding within the academic womb leads to impotence and sterility. Educologists typically have served in public or private schools at the elementary and/or secondary level for significant periods of time and business faculty normally have had work experiences before they undertake the task of college teaching. Professional contextualization invigorates the teacher and frees him from the danger of academic parochialism and spares him the folly of undue self-importance. 2) Precollegiate education (elementary and secondary) requires cooperation and consensus in curriculum construction. The spiral nature of grade level to grade level growth views the curriculum organically, and precludes either provincial or elitist approaches to knowledge domains. Departments, if they exist, are viewed as functional units for the organization of curriculum areas, not as narrowly circumscribed sectors for curriculum control. Movement among departments occurs frequently and there is not insidious presumption (as often occurs in higher education) that knowledge of "A" precludes knowledge of "B." Clearly involvement in the co-curricular areas in precollegiate education is not limited to or based upon "credentialed expertise." Educologists have, of necessity, become more widely conversant with a number of curricular areas which gives them greater pedagogical flexibility and makes them more sensitive and receptive to the total curricular effort. 3) Awareness of learner development, a function both of academic preparation and teaching experience, provides educologists with the critical knowledge of the "nature of the learner" which John Dewey contended was essential for effective pedagogy.19 Educologists realize students do not arrive at college "full grown from the head of Zeus," and are equally aware that students are not cerebral caverns in which specialized knowledge is stored. The concept of readiness, teachability, and cognitive ability provide frameworks through which pedagogy is filtered. 4) Educologists are required to comprehend the scope of the curriculum in a way collegiate educators are not. Certification requirements for public school educators demand experience with curriculum development, but, additionally, they deal day to day with the total educational program, and this transfers at college level to a much more informed approach to general education. Not uncommonly it appears that faculty who function within general education curriculums are peripheral members who are recruited primarily for scholarly expertise and then are slotted into the general education program to complete their contract assignment. General education is not viewed, therefore, as the major responsibility; indeed, it may be seen as a demeaning, inferior assignment which reduces their scholarly credibility. Typically, educologists are more willing to view their roles as inescapably part of the general education program. That is, for them general education has been the important curricular area and departmental expertise of any kind requires this prerequisite learning. 5) Educologists have learned the discipline (ironically) of accountability to agencies other than their own scholarly cohorts. Epistemic peers within specialized areas of scholarship monitor only each other, and often converse only with each other. The plethora of journals and publications designed and written exclusively for these narrow "peerages" encourage esoteria and exclusivity. Ignorance of and indifference to the larger academic community is a luxury seldom afforded educologists. They are by academic nature and interest multi- and metadisciplinary. When general education is conceived of and constructed as the eventual composition of these diverse elements of scholarship, the result is a synthetic artifact that distorts learning. The concern I have sought to articulate in this paper relates to the critical role the general education curriculum plays in the undergraduate Christian liberal arts programs. I have neither sought to minimize the significance nor reduce the role of General Education. On the contrary, I have sought to underscore its vital function in the undergraduate program. I am not seeking an erosion of its sphere; I am suggesting that it be re-shaped. I am not advocating a diminution of its value for students in so-called professional studies; I am advancing the idea that faculty from these traditionally excluded areas (and educology particularly) may be better suited today to serve the goals and shape the components and share the implementation of the General Education Curriculum. REFERENCES 1Integrated Studies is the principal component of the General Education program in the College at which I teach, and is customarily abbreviated INS. 2These are, of course, the terms C.S. Lewis uses in his polemic against scientism. For a discussion of Lewis on this issue, see Michael D. Aeschliman, The Restitution of Man (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983). 3Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964). 4For a discussion of the terms and the corresponding educational philosophies see Van Cleve Morris and Pai Young, Philosophy and the American School, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). 5Queenly, in the sense that the schoolman Thomas Aquinas along with Albertus Magnus confirmed that the Virgin Mary has perfect knowledge of the seven liberal arts. The Chartes Cathedral symbolized the arts abstractly using queenly female figures. William Fleming, Art, Music and Ideas (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 133. 6Diane Ravitch, "Multiculturalism Yes, Particularism No," The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 24, 1990), A44. 7Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). 8Page Smith, Killing the Spirit (New York: Viking, 1990). 9Arthur F. Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1975), 43. 10Smith contends that the humanities "have lusted after the accolade Science." Page Smith, Killing the Spirit, 253. 11" . . . the law asserting the passage of quantity into quality." John Wilkinson in Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, xv. 12Snow's term has, of course, become part of the popular vocabulary in this ongoing debate. C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: University Press, 1969). 13Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), Chapter 1. 14Andreski is unsparing in his criticism of the follies of academics. Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Society (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1972), particularly Chapter 6, "The Smokescreen of Jargon." 15Parker Palmer, To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), x-xi. 16`Frank Gaebelein, The Pattern of God's Truth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954). 17Certainly the image presented in the 1960's is no longer seriously considered to fit. See James D. Koerner, The Miseducation of American Teachers (Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 1963), and Arthur Bestor, Educational Wastelands, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 18Elliot W. Eisner, The Enlightened Eye (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1991). Eisner's concept of "educational connoisseurship" which he developed in prior works is fleshed out in this book in the context of educology. 19John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: MacMillan Company, 1922), 215. " . . . the instructor needs to have subject matter at his fingers' ends . . . ."