ShareThisAmerican undergraduate education needs to change if college students are going to learn more than just practical skills for chosen careers, according to a report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. If the United States wants highly educated people who understand how to engage in their communities and act responsibly in the world, the undergraduate curriculum must do more than teach them how to carry out a profession competently, conclude authors of "A New Agenda for Higher Education: Shaping a Life of the Mind for Practice.""It's important for students to learn to think, to reason, to interrogate text and understand it; but that is not enough," Carnegie President Lee Shulman said in a statement. "It's also important that students learn to act, to do, to perform -- but this still is not enough. Today's undergraduates must learn to think and act responsibly, with integrity, civility and caring." The report was the result of meetings over two years among 14 scholars from public and private, secular and religious higher education institutions. They represented scientific disciplines, traditional liberal arts, and professions such as law, medicine, teacher education and engineering. In their report -- which is also a book -- they paint a portrait of a compartmentalized higher education system where liberal arts educators are asked to be more "practical and relevant" and professional schools are criticized for focusing too narrowly on the technical aspects of their fields. Instead, higher education needs to integrate itself better, the report concludes.An engineer working with engineers from other countries, for example, needs to know how the profession and its history differs across nations, said William Sullivan, a Carnegie senior scholar and co-author of the report. Or take a human biology course in this time of rapid scientific discovery when people face more decisions than ever in things such as end-of-life care. One way for campuses to begin changing how they teach undergraduates is for their faculty to engage with each other in conversation and writing, the report advises. Faculty members need "a place to ask hard questions about the relationship between their own teaching and its practical contexts." (E-mail Carrie Sturrock at csturrock@sfchronicle.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Changes urged for college curriculums
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