WVWC Founders Day Address – October 21, 2005
Liberal Arts Education in an Information Society

President Haden, Members of the Board of Trustees, faculty, students, alumni and other distinguished guests; I am honored to return to the campus for this Founder’s Day Convocation. Last year’s speaker was Senator Rockefeller whose topic was liberal arts and the global community. The subject this year is liberal arts and the information society. Information knows no geographical or political boundaries; it is common to all societies; and it is easily spread. The information society is the foundation for a global community, and the human mind is the foundation upon which the information society stands. The nature of the human mind has engaged thinkers throughout the ages.

My first invitation to speak in this Chapel came from Senator Rockefeller shortly after he became president here. He had just lost an election for governor, although he came back four years later and won. His decision to be President here from 1972 to 1976 was a good political decision for him and a good decision for Wesleyan. At his investiture his father, John D. Rockefeller III remarked that he was very proud of his son. He said: “Like any father I am pleased that my son is no longer out of a job.”

What does the term information society bring to your mind? When I asked this question to some friends, everyone mentioned computers. They are everywhere and are being used for everything. When you visit a gasoline station, information about the type and amount of gas you are getting is monitored electronically. At a restaurant the waiter enters your selections through a computer which then computes your cost and uses your credit card to send information about the cost to your account. Later a computer sends information back to you tabulating all of your monthly costs and you then instruct the bank to change the information in your account to reflect payment of the credit card transactions. Make a telephone call to inquire about your account and you are connected with someone in India. No material matter has changed hands, only information.

Scientific advances in computers and electronics made the information society possible. During the past century the United States has been the undisputed leader in scientific advances. But alarms concerning the future are being raised today. Can our country educate the pool of scientists and engineers that are necessary to sustain this leadership? During the past two decades the number of science and engineering jobs has been growing at four times the rate of the rest of the United States labor force. During the next two decades, retirement of science and engineering workers will increase dramatically. On the education front, enrollment of science and engineering majors is decreasing and the United States stands at the bottom of the list in international comparisons in science performance of fifteen year olds. The picture is equally bleak in mathematics. The United States was the leader in creating an information society, but, history is full of societies that fell behind. Are we slated to be another?

Education for the future is one major problem facing the United States today. Another is which way do we go to meet our energy needs? How do we react to global warming? What is our posture regarding cloning? Finding answers to such questions facing us today requires a combination of scientific understanding and sensitivity to the values held by society. There is both a scientific and a political element in problems of the information society. Science has always been a part of the liberal arts and its importance has never been greater. There is no better preparation for the full range of information needed to function effectively in today’s world than a liberal arts education.

Nearly fifty years ago I received a telephone call from Dean Schoolcraft. He informed me that Dr Hyma had died and that he wanted me to leave industry, come back to Wesleyan and teach chemistry. I gladly returned because a hallmark of Wesleyan has always been to instill in its students a sense of purpose to life and a dedication to helping others. Dedication to those principles is alive at Wesleyan today in trustees and faculty who studied here.

As a professor, I wanted to improve my teaching and increase student understanding. I learned that a good professor must be aware of difficulties that students encounter on their road to understanding and find strategies for helping them overcome those difficulties. The lack of research-based information that was available to help guide a college faculty member was frustrating. Conversations with colleagues exposed a lot of personal ideas about good teaching, but data-based knowledge to support a favored approach to teaching was indeed sparse. Literature about teaching was full of articles that had no basis in research.

I entered my first role as a college dean with a mindset that faculty fell into two categories, good and great. After all, my association with faculty had been at Wesleyan. But I was wrong. As dean I interviewed all seniors and found them to be frank but generous in their remarks about faculty. A common description was that he or she just knows so much about the subject that he can’t bring it to my level. It became increasingly clear to me that being an expert in a field is no guarantee that you will be good at helping students to learn that subject. Obviously content knowledge is necessary, but knowledge about how people learn that subject also is needed. These experiences convinced me that research findings related to learning could increase a professor’s awareness of student difficulties and help in development of better strategies for guiding their learning.

Information society and global community are widely used paradigms to represent the era that we live in today, and there are paradigms for past eras. We call the earliest a hunter-gatherer society; it was followed by the farming or agricultural era. Later came a manufacturing era and today we are in the information era. Each title portrays the work used to meet society’s needs during that era and when the work changed, a new paradigm was used to describe the new time period. We refer to these changes as paradigm shifts. The length of time between the paradigm shifts has steadily decreased. Knowledge is the catalyst for changing the paradigm. As the amount of knowledge increases new knowledge is produced faster. Information accelerates the generation of new knowledge. Today we are generating new knowledge at a faster rate than ever before.

Information is the key resource in our world today. As a resource it is unique because you can’t get rid of. You have it, you use it, you give it away, and yet you’ve still got it. Major changes in our institutions for delivering medical, financial, transportation, and communication services have been brought about by new information. Transformation in these fields has been dramatic, but education stands out as a field that has not changed so remarkably. The institution that is charged with developing the mind is one of the key institutions where the information era has brought only modest change.

K-12 Schools are designed using a model from the manufacturing era. They use a calendar from the agricultural era and hope to produce graduates for an information era. In chemistry we would call this batch processing. Student are handled alike in batches of 20-30 and systematically moved through one grade each year. Textbooks are filled with facts and students are tested on their ability to remember facts. Our science curriculum has been characterized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science as overstuffed and undernourished. That description of a science curriculum fits other subjects as well. School curriculum, as well as teaching techniques and testing methods all emphasize recalling bits of information. A new theory of learning is emerging and it calls for different curriculum materials, teaching techniques and testing methods. Most educators have not tuned in to this information yet.

A revolution in the study of the mind is taking place. It is still in its infancy, but research progress is bringing about an increase in our understanding of learning. This understanding does not come through education or any other single discipline, but through research contributions from many branches of science such as cognitive psychology, philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, developmental psychology and anthropology. Common to all of this research is an emphasis on learning with understanding. We all agree that understanding is good, but we have less agreement about what understanding looks like. How can we recognize it? How do we test for it? How can we help a student build it? In recent years, new techniques and approaches have contributed to studying understanding from a scientific perspective. Remarkable studies also have been made on the brain and that research shows that learning changes the physical structure of the brain. A brain that understands performs differently from one that doesn’t understand. That idea is old hat to any academic. But it is new information that it also has a different structure from a brain that has only memorized information. Learning organizes and reorganizes the brain.

Our concept for what it means to know something is shifting from being able to remember and repeat information to being able to find and use it. That sounds like a liberal arts education to me. Learning with understanding has always been a goal of the liberal arts colleges and now we are gaining insight that this approach to learning should permeate education at all levels. Earlier I mentioned the paradigm shift from a manufacturing to an information society. Today some are calling for a paradigm shift from teaching to learning. That is a way of saying that we need more focus on student understanding and less on the art of teaching. A paradigm shift invites new metaphors for teaching and learning. It is very disturbing to think of students as vessels to be filled of slates to be written upon. Such metaphors violate our current knowledge about the brain and learning. Facilitator of learning comes closer to being a useful metaphor for a k-12 teacher. It also is a useful metaphor for a professor.

Experts are good examples of what successful learning looks like and research involving experts has yielded information about the nature of thinking and problem solving. The manner in which experts organize knowledge has been demonstrated in fields as diverse as physics and history. Their knowledge is not simply a list of facts but is organized around central ideas or core concepts that guide thinking in their area of expertise. Experts not only have abundant knowledge, but are good at retrieving knowledge that is relevant for a particular problem. Their learning affects what they notice. One of the research findings about experts was that they have different levels of flexibility in their approach to new problems. The more rigid experts may be characterized as someone who knows all the answers, but this inhibits further learning. Another example is called an accomplished novice. People who know all the answers are not a good model for a liberal arts college, but accomplished novice may be.

As a graduate student I came to believe that doing research provided the greatest opportunity to lead a life of learning. That view changed when I began teaching at Wesleyan. I became aware that being a professor offered a better opportunity to learn. Learning always has been an important goal for me and teaching at Wesleyan meshed perfectly with that goal. It also led to another insight. I learned a great deal during my four years as an undergraduate student, but now believe that I have learned just as much during any other four-year period of my life. My liberal arts education gave me a foundation and a desire to continue learning throughout my life.

If you wish to probe further into current research about learning, I recommend the book How People Learn. It was published in 1999 by the National Academy Press in a project guided by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine. This publication is the most definitive work covering research on learning that exists. Faculty at a research university will not be the first to adopt these research findings into their own teaching. They are much more concerned with research in their own disciplines and with graduate education of future practitioners for that discipline. Faculty members at a liberal arts college are more likely to investigate these research findings and bring them into undergraduate classrooms. Certainly all faculty members wish to remain connected with research in their own disciplines, but the time has arrived when research on learning also necessitates our attention. A liberal arts college can lead the way in linking instruction with research on learning.

Liberal Arts education has served society well during the 19th and 20th centuries. I am confident that during the 21st century it will continue to do so. The goals of the Wesleyan education as expressed in the current catalogue truly capture the nature of learning. The reference to intellectual vitality is especially inspiring. A vital part of being alive involves use of our brains to respond successfully to new situations. I can think of no greater purpose for an institution than Wesleyan’s goal to instill in graduates the sense that learning never ends and that seeking knowledge and understanding is one of life’s central purposes.