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  3. For more than 2,000 years, a liberal education has been the ideal of the Wes

For more than 2,000 years, a liberal education has been the ideal of the Wes

游客2024-11-18  1
问题     For more than 2,000 years, a liberal education has been the ideal of the West—for the brightest, if not for all, students. The tradition goes back to Plato, who argued in The Republic that "leadership should be entrusted to the philosopher". More recently, in a World War Ⅱ-era treatise, a Harvard University committee concluded that a liberal education best prepared an individual to become "an expert in the general art of the free man and the citizen." The report, which led to the introduction of Harvard’s general education curriculum, concluded," The fruit of education is intelligence in action. The aim is mastery of life. "
    In recent years, the fruit has spoiled and such high-sounding rhetoric has been increasingly challenged. Critics have charged that liberal arts education is elitist education, based on undefined and empty shibboleths. Caroline Bird, social critic and author, argues in The Case Against College that the liberal arts are a religion, "the established religion of the ruling class." Bird writes, "The exalted language, the universalistic setting, the ultimate value, the inability to define, the appeal to personal witness...these are all the familiar modes of religious discourse. "
    Students in the 1960s charged that such traditional liberal arts courses as "Western Thought and Institutions" and" Contemporary Civilization "were ethnocentric and imperialistic. Other students found little stimulation in a curriculum that emphasized learning to both formulate ideas and engage in rational discourse. They preferred, instead, to express themselves in experience and action; they favored feeling over thought, the nonverbal over the verbal, the concrete over the abstract. In the inflationary, job-scarce economy of the 1970s, many students argue that the liberal arts curriculum is "irrelevant" because it neither prepares them for careers nor teaches them marketable skills. In its present form, moreover, liberal arts education is expensive education.
    Partly in response to these charge and, more immediately to faculty discontent, Harvard recently approved a redesigning of the liberal arts program. Faculty had complained that the growing numbers and varieties of courses had "eroded the purpose of the existing general education program." Students, they felt, could use any number of courses to satisfy the university’s minimal requirements, making those requirements meaningless. The new core curriculum will require students to take eight courses carefully distributed among five basic areas of knowledge. The Harvard plan proposed to give students "a critical appreciation of the ways in which we gain knowledge and understanding of ourselves." Plausible as this credo may be, it rests on rhetoric and not solid research evidence—like curriculum innovations of the 1960s.
    In an era of educational accounting and educational accountability, it would be helpful to have a way of determining what the essential and most valuable "core" of a university education is and what is peripheral and mere tradition. What are the actual effects of a liberal education, this most persistent of Western ideals? It is sobering to realize that we have little firm evidence.
    Against this background, we recently designed and carried out a new study to get some of the evidence. Our findings suggest that liberal arts education does, in fact, change students more or less as Plato envisioned, so that the durability of this educational ideal in western civilization may not be undeserved. In our research, liberal education appears to promote increases in conceptual and social-emotional sophistication. Thus, according to a number of new tests we developed, students trained in the liberal arts are better able to formulate valid concepts, analyze arguments, define themselves, and orient themselves maturely to their world. The liberal arts education in at least one college also seems to increase the leadership motivation pattern—a desire for power, tempered by self-control.
    We started our study from two fundamental premises: first, that the evidence to date was probably more a reflection of the testing procedures used than of the efficacy of higher education; and, second, that new tests should be modeled on what university students actually do rather than on what researchers can easily score. If liberal education teaches articulate formation of complex concepts, then student research subjects should be asked to form concepts from complex material and then scored on how well they articulate them, rather than being asked to choose the "best" of five concepts by putting a check mark in one of the boxes. Any study of the effects of higher education has the difficult task of distinguishing educational effects from simply maturational effects. In order to have some control over the effects of maturation, therefore, we tested students who were receiving three different kinds of higher education: A traditional four-year liberal arts education at a prestigious Eastern US institution? A four-year undergraduate program for training teachers and other professionals; A two-year community college that offers career programs in data processing, electronics, nursing secreta-rial skills, and business administration.
    At all three institutions, last-year students scored higher than first-year students, but seniors at the liberal arts college far outdistanced their counterparts at the teachers’ and community colleges. [br] What did the author think of the Harvard’s efforts in redesigning liberal arts program?
选项 A、It was carefully designed and therefore should prove effective.
B、It spoiled the purpose of the present general education program.
C、It enabled students to appreciate the ways they gained knowledge.
D、It was not any better than their earlier attempts in effect.
答案 D
解析 推断题。第四段最后两句指出，哈佛建议教给学生批判性地评价获取知识、理解自身的方法。这个想法可能看似有理，但实际上是夸夸其谈，因为它缺乏有说服力的研究证据，这很像20世纪60年代的课程改革。由此可知，作者对哈佛改革不以为然，故[D]为答案。作者对改革持否定态度，[A]和[C]是正面肯定，故排除；文中没有提到改革破坏现在一般教育项目的教学目标，因此排除[B]。
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