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What makes for an educated person?
The question is older than the oldest university, and maybe as unknowable today
as the first time it was asked. And that is why Senior Associate Dean
Bernadette Gray-Little used it as the topic for a Sept. 22 forum held as part
of an undergraduate curriculum review now under way. It's the first such review
that has been done at the University in 20 years, she said.
Gray-Little's questions: What are the characteristics of an educated person?
What are the habits of mind? The attitudes? The base of knowledge?
The three panelists selected to stir the discussion were Edward Samulski,
Boshamer professor and chair of the chemistry department; Rosa P. Perelmuter,
associate professor in Romance languages; and Timothy Toben, an 1981 alumnus
who is the founder and former chief executive officer of KnowledgeBase
Marketing.
The forum was the third "public conversation" that has been held to solicit a
wide range of views from across the University community about how the
undergraduate curriculum might be changed to better serve students. The first
meeting was with about 60 students. The second meeting was with department
chairs.
Perelmuter said the process of becoming an educated person requires stretching
students beyond their comfort zones by acquainting them with subjects whose
usefulness will not become known to them until much later.
Then she came up with the acronym "CAR" to drive home the point.
"C," she said, stands for curiosity, "A" for an appreciation for cultures and
languages and interests different from one's own, and "R" for recognition of
one's own accomplishments and limitations.
Toben quoted passages from Alfred North Whitehead's The Aims of Education to
get across the idea that carving knowledge into subjects strips it of meaning
or value.
Whitehead wrote of "the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the
vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject-matter for
education, and that is Life in all its manifestations."
Algebra, geometry, history, science -- all are being taught as a single unit
from which nothing follows, Toben said.
To become educated, Toben suggested, might have something to do with searching
for and finding "a proper role in the larger world of meaning."
Samulski said he remembers coming here from the University of Connecticut in
1988, impressed at the serious consideration this University paid to teaching
and how best to do it. Before he joined the faculty here, he viewed this
preoccupation as "cute," he said. Over the years he has taught here, he
understands better the legitimate issue it is.
Samulski's gist of what an educated person should be is this: a person who can
converse with almost anybody in any part of the world on any subject.
An educated person does not have to know everything, Samulski said, but ought
to know enough about what he doesn't know to ask the right questions.
What makes for an educated mind? Samulski asked.
Maybe, he said, the humility that comes from grasping how vast and unknowable
the universe is.
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