The Purposes of General Education?

Because Drury has been engaged in a revision of its general education curriculum for awhile, I have been thinking on and off about the purposes of "general education." Without doing a thorough literature review, it seems like there are (at least) three competing ideas about general education.

The first concept is focused on achieving intellectual excellence. To me, this seems to be the oldest form of general education (probably borrowed from the Greek philosophers among others) and one that is focused on critical thinking, communication, finding one's place in the world, and developing the traits and habits of an educated person. Some might be tempted to term this the wisdom approach to general education. If this still exists in the contemporary university, it seems to exist in required seminars for students.

A second concept seems more rooted in the Enlightenment and modernity and is focused on possessing the requisite knowledge of the world. I think of this as a more modern approach because it assumes a fairly stable and masterable amount of knowledge in the world. I also think this version dominates universities and has shifted from common curriculum to a more menu-drive approaches.

The last approach is focused on the skills that students need for the careers (or what Andrew Mills calls the can-opener approach to education). This is frequently tied to service or experiential learning programs as they both "engage" students and provide marketable skills for students. While such experiential and service projects contain the rhetoric of active and applied learning, I guess I am a bit skeptical how much can be achieved if students lack wisdom or knowledge.

In a nutshell, the concept of general education seems to be on a journey from wisdom to knowledge to professional skills. I am not sure what to make of this evolution. Philosophically, this certainly bothers me as I like the concept of universities teaching wisdom and the right kind of habits or dispositions. However, as a practical matter, that does not seem what students or employers want. If colleges (like any other business) do not give people what they want, we cannot force people to pay for and attend the "right" kind of college and then the more traditional colleges will simply go financially bankrupt.

I am beginning to think that if general education merely becomes associated with basic professional skills, then we might need to abandon the concept altogether.

On the bright side, most decisions at colleges and universities are more political than philsophical. As a result, we will likely to see hybrid models that try to do a bit of each of these things. I guess I will need to focus my energies on the parts that focus on wisdom or knowledge