Education: Five Ways to Wisdom

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foremost national education concern of the 1980s, much as equity was the premier issue of the 1960s and 1970s." The counterrevolution has actually been well under way for some time. In 1978 Harvard announced with great fanfare a controversial new core curriculum, and in 1980 Stanford inaugurated an elaborate system of seven tracks that would carry every student through the basics of Western civilization. "A miracle has happened among Stanford undergraduates," Charles Lyons, director of the Western-culture program, proudly told the faculty senate last spring. "They do talk about Plato at dinner and about Shakespeare on the lawns."

Other colleges followed suit. Amherst now requires all freshmen to take an interdisciplinary program called Introduction to Liberal Studies. At Washington University in St. Louis, the science and math requirements, which were cut in half during the heady days of student power, have been restored to the old levels (four semester-long courses). "The students were evading the real purpose of their education," says Associate Dean Harold Levin, adding, in the language of deans everywhere, "The product we were turning out was not what we wanted." All told, according to a survey of 272 universities and colleges last spring, 88% are engaged in revising their curriculums, and 59% of these are increasing their programs of required courses in general education. That, presumably, will improve the "product."

While the educators reorganize their methods, the fundamental goals of the process—truth, knowledge, the understanding of the world—remain somewhere just beyond the horizon. It was said of Goethe, after his death in 1832, that he was the last man to know everything worth knowing. Today's cliche is that 90% of all scientists in the history of the world are alive now. Yet their knowledge has become hopelessly fragmented; the specialist in recombinant DNA feels no more obligation to understand laser surgery than to hear the latest composition by Pierre Boulez.

As scientific specialties spawn subspecialties, the rapidly growing mass of information has confused the arts and humanities as well. Historical research now presupposes a mastery of old tax records and population movements, and anyone who ventures into such popular fields as American literature or impressionist art must wade into a rising tide of studies, analyses, psychographic portraits and sheer verbiage. In addition, all the political trends of the past two decades have tended to multiply the demands for studies in fields once ignored: Chinese history, the languages of Africa, the traffic in slaves, the thwarted ambitions of women.

Not everyone is overawed by the so-called knowledge explosion. "What happens," says Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum of M.I.T., "is that educators, all of us, are deluged by a flood of messages disguised as valuable information, most of which is trivial and irrelevant to any substantive concern. This is the elite's equivalent of junk mail, but many educators can't see through it because they are not sufficiently educated to deal with such random complexity." To many experts, the computer seems a symbol of both the problem and its solution. "What the computer has done," according to Stephen White of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, "is to