Cathy N. Davidson has been writing about her experiments in education for years (for example here and here and here). She brings to her new book deep understanding of the context, history, successes, and shortcomings of the dominant forms of higher education--college--and highlights several dozen approaches that are more successful. These are more appropriate, she argues, than the conventional forms, which have not changed in more than a hundred years. Conventional colleges have outlived their initial purposes, which were to train managers in a newly industrializing and urbanizing society, when books were scarce and simply ingesting information was challenging enough. They selected only top students and churned them through a disciplinary mill, certified by authorities.
That’s not what we need now.
Davidson provides inspiring and hopeful examples of better forms of education, going far beyond what are now ubiquitous “STEM” or “STEAM” or “digital humanities” or “interdisciplinary” innovations (and rejecting MOOCs entirely). The vision is radical.
That’s not what we need now.
Davidson provides inspiring and hopeful examples of better forms of education, going far beyond what are now ubiquitous “STEM” or “STEAM” or “digital humanities” or “interdisciplinary” innovations (and rejecting MOOCs entirely). The vision is radical.
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