New Media, General Education, and the Challenge of Global Stability
Through the 20th century, national crises moved educators to consider how best to nurture the generative values of civilization. Columbia's Core Curriculum took shape through reflections on the educational imperatives arising with World War I and Harvard's General Education in a Free Society followed immediately on the conclusion of World War II. Further, commitment to the study of the essential ideas and values in our tradition arose, not only from the breakdown of civilized order, but as responses to significant changes within leading universities themselves; first, with the rise of the research imperative; and, then with the opening of advanced education to a much broader cross-section of the population. Suddenly we face these same internal and external challenges to the University's education mission a crisis in the civilized order of life and the perception of rapid change in the practice of higher education. Massive murder and destruction in our city demonstrates how vulnerable our way of life leaves us in the face of suicidal terror. How, in an age of global interdependency, in which our lives and livelihood all rely on human intelligence combined with personal and collective self-control, can we make freedom and law flourish together? This question will be a challenge for generations to come and answers to it will spring from universities that are changing rapidly in ways that we cannot anticipate with confident foreknowledge. At the same time, new media transform the creation and use of knowledge, alter the conditions of participation in culture, and vastly amplify the reach, the scope, and the power of individual action, for good and for ill. The question then is: What form of general education do we need to create in order to enable society to be both global and free?
Through the year, the Seminar has attempted to ask the question of what general education, facing significant social and political shift and changes in communications technologies, might become in the 21st Century. Many of the participants have addressed the question from different perspectives. What is clear is the difficulty of even shaping the question. This final seminar in the series is an open discussion to which each seminarian is asked to contribute views.
Freedom in a virtualized world means being able to choose among unlimited options in every sphere of experience and activity because it doesn't really matter what you choose. That is the condition we face as educators. The presentation offered examples of what happens to people in Virtuality, cast in such a way as to expose the implications for education.
How, in an age of global interdependency, in which our lives and livelihood all rely on human intelligence combined with personal and collective self-control, can we make freedom and law flourish together? This question will be a challenge for generations to come and answers to it will spring from universities that are changing rapidly in ways that we cannot anticipate with confident foreknowledge. At the same time, new media transform the creation and use of knowledge, alter the conditions of participation in culture, and vastly amplify the reach, the scope, and the power of individual action, for good and for ill. The question then is: What form of general education do we need to create in order to enable society to be both global and free?
A discussion of the state of new media, general education, and the challenge of global stability.
