One of the fastest growing populations in the US over the past years has been those who are 100 years or older. What changes they have seen during their lifetimes! In 1916, there was no television, movies had no sound, antibiotics had not been discovered, nor had fluorescent lights and even store-bought pre-sliced bread. Many workers worked much more than 40 hours a week; most births took place at home; few teenagers were in high school but instead were working; the number of horses and mules in the country was hitting its peak; few households had electric refrigerators; fewer still had radios.
Enormous changes took place during their lives, and yet, it seems, the rate of change, especially in technology, is vastly much faster now. Imagine what those passing 100 years old in 60 years — today’s forty-year olds — will have experienced in their lives!
All of this is relevant to us in academia, as we attempt to prepare 18-22 year olds for 80 years or more of life after university. It seems clear that when many of the basic features of liberal education were formed, the notion of preparing for a life of 100 years was not in scope. What does this mean for us now?
Many are speculating now about what are the essential ingredients in the design of liberal education. Is it the exposure to the enduring questions of human life? Is it coextensive with the development of deeper understanding of ourselves, as individuals – the sense of interior freedom, insight that allows us to live an authentic life, as Presdient DeGioia stated in his November 20, 2013, launch of Designing the Future(s) of Georgetown? Is it the exposure to a learned, older mentor who guides the synthesis of information in a given field? Is it the acquisition of the thirst and ability to self-teach? (Or, as President DeGioia states – “how to integrate, appropriate, challenge, and critique knowledge—how to see patterns, make connections, identify anomalies.”)
By design, liberal education gives higher odds that the students learn a variety of tools of acquiring, critiquing, and synthesizing new knowledge. They have chances at exposure of different ways to acquiring knowledge — deep reading of text, careful objective observation of events, structured measurement, the randomized experiment, and the simulation. They have chances of alternative expressions of knowledge, with creative and alternative literary forms of writing, with data visualizations, with video demonstrations, with oral presentations
As we discuss the future of liberal education, it would be helpful not to focus on the outcome of a new graduate in their early twenties, but instead, at their 80 year-old self. It is not at all unlikely that they will be engaged in the labor force, working actively to earn a living.
What will they be doing? What attributes of their character will they need to draw upon for energy and meaning? What knowledge will they require to be successful and fulfilled?
It does seem simple to speculate that longer lives lived will be best lived by those who are facile with change. Change will require learning new things. Learning new things requires cognitive tools, precisely those for which liberal education is so well suited. They have a strong chance of creating life-long learning and self-renewal that can maybe even last through age 100.
This article says all about how generations are growing in rapid fast and how the education system is helping and has both advantages and disadvantages. This article is surely gives all the information and provides the truth about society. Looking forward for such more articles.
While adaptation to major scientific advances will surely be an important survival skill, what will be equally important is the ability to confront objective analysis ( say, of a literary or cultural text ) and freely-expressed subjective reactions, including puzzlements and open-ended questions which one is not required to answer in the few minutes following their formulation. When teaching contemporary works of French theater, for example, I have found it helpful to have students keep an intellectual diary ( journal de bord ) in which they have to report from the proceedings of every class period by writing an objective statement on what transpired that day in class ( including analysis of text and possibly performance ) and then, on a facing page of their notebook, their subjective reactions and wonderments. In other words, they are required to initiate a process of ” self-dialectics ” in relation to their material. This can also be a long-term survival skill, faced with a 24/7 news cycle and the ideatic manipulation and scattering to which we are mercilessly subjected in the present times.
One certainty, as people live longer lives, is that they will see more and more scientific advances and technological innovation, likely at an even more dizzying pace than is the case today. Someone 100 yrs old today, when they were of college age, had no concept of the polio vaccine, microwave ovens or even the lowly transistor, let alone a cell phone. The next 80 years will likely see nanoparticles in the cancer clinic, full genome sequencing of individual genomes well before a baby is born, data casually measured in zettabytes (today’s “big” data will be “small” data), etc. To understand the pros and cons of all of this (and much much more) leading global citizens must be armed with scientific critical thinking, else they will be pawns that are even more susceptible to manufactured political agendas than today’s scientifically ill equipped; many of whom are easily conditioned to believe climate change is a myth, evolution is only a theory, and/or that vaccines cause autism. One only needs to look at the current US election cycle to see where our nation’s collective negligence might very well continue to take us. If we are to produce leading global citizens, then our job includes teaching *all* our students how to navigate science and technology (for real, not for show, and not just what is here now but what is yet to come) so that they have a fighting chance to fully understand the rapidly evolving world around them. For most of our students, due to decades of neglect in the sciences, we already do a seriously suboptimal job in this category; a critical question for Georgetown is not just how will we catch up to where we should be now (a tall enough order under current circumstances), but how will we exceed that pace in the years ahead ?
Best
Paul
Ps. Geirgetown forever is getting longer and longer!
Great thoughts by you and our President. One way to summarize is that as faculty and alumni mentors we need to help out 18-22 year old students to think outside the box to prepare to be Hoyas forever which now is getting up to those additional eighty years! Well done!