The Poetics and Politics of Integrative Learning

Liberal Education, a magazine published by the Association of American Colleges and University, (see http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/index.cfm) has recently published an issue dedicated to "Integrative Learning at Home and Abroad." Carol Geary Schneider, in her President's Message, criticizes what she sees as the Cold War Curriculum with its focus on breadth and its heavy reliance on distribution requirements. She also laments the recent philanthropic focus on degree completion and the effort to rely on this Cold War Curriculum to facilitate transfer between institutions. Schneider points out this curriculum and recent reform efforts only exacerbate "the fragmentation of knowledge." She, along with other articles in the issue, call for a more integrated learning experience.



As someone who has spent the last 10 to 15 years dedicated to this proposition and general education, I welcome the conversation and Schneider's critique of recent educational reform efforts (frequently funded by high profile philanthropies). I also applaud Bill Newell's article in which he explains that "the challenge of integrative learning is to make sense of the contrasting or conflicting insights by integrating them into a more comprehensive understanding of the situation in its full complexity" (8). I think he articulates precisely what a good education should accomplish.



This being acknowledged, I am growing increasingly skeptical about the rhetoric behind integrative learning and the ability for general education to achieve these lofty goals. More specifically, I wonder who benefits from this kind of paradigm shift and whether these are general education goals or something that really is the province of the major.

The turn toward integrative learning seems to focus increasingly on learning for a particular professional purpose. In his conclusion, Newell argues that "the best undergraduate education asks students to go back and forth between disciplinary and interdisciplinary courses, since interdisciplinary courses need disciplines for depth and disciplinary courses need interdisciplinarity for real-world application" (11). Hidden beneath this rhetoric or perhaps a key element of it is that learning for learning sake is not really the goal of higher education any longer. Education is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve other ends: specifically getting a job and making money. His model supports and makes more valuable disciplinary learning and helps it find a market for its graduates. I get why this is the goal of business and why perhaps politicians would embrace this model of education. I am not sure why AACU or humanities faculty should apply such market logic to their curricula. If education is merely about job training, I suspect that we can train people for jobs much more cheaply than universities and colleges do. We might even want to go back to the old master-apprentice model.

My philosophy of education emphasizes asking critical questions, exploring ideas, gaining insight into myself, and using what I have learned to gain greater autonomy in my life. It does not simply prepare for a career, but multiple careers (I am paraphrasing Andrew Mills's "What So Good About College?" here). I fear that the rhetoric of integrative learning is abandoning these goals in favor of something that is more politically expedient. That rhetoric may extend the life of some programs or universities or few years but may very well lead to contribute to the ongoing demise of universities in American culture and society