New School: How the Web Liberalized Liberal Arts Education
- Posted by: Maria Popova
- on November 19, 2009 at 7:00 am
A look at what the internet is doing for learning, curiosity, and creativity outside the traditional classroom.
The average cost of a Bachelor’s degree at a public, four-year liberal arts university is $26,340. At a private one, it’s $100,520, and the Ivy League commands more than $160,000. And while the value of education is universally indisputable, the emergence of new online tools and platforms has challenged its price tag, empowering us to take charge of our own…
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Thank you for the comments – it’s good to see intelligent debate around the issue.
It seems to me like some people missed the central point: That it isn’t an either-or situation – it’s an evolving and expanding conception of “education” (and, yes, in the case of TED and the like, “edutainment”) wherein the new complements, rather than replaces, the old. It’s also interesting to note the sort of platform we’re having said intelligent debate on. I fail to see how the very opportunity to discuss such issues in more forms and on more platforms is not fostering the cross-pollination of ideas and the development of a healthier, more well-rounded mind – the quintessential objective most people pursue through education. And while many of the points made are based on good insight, they’d only hold true in an either-or framework.
@Trayan; I like the notion of “interactive expertise” vs. “contributory expertise” – what a great way to intuitively communicate a very important distinction. However, wouldn’t you say that curiosity (underlying the “interactive” kind) is the discovery engine for your area of highest interest, which eventually evolves into an area of high expertise (the “contributory” kind)? Without an active curiosity that leads you to explore diverse and wide-spanning disciplines, you’d resort to the defeatist hope that whatever your true calling is will somehow miraculously land on your passive lap. These new tools are just that – a platform for harnessing curiosity, which can then get channeled into something more focused. No one is saying we should spend our entire lives being all over the map, conversationalists in all but experts in none. Which, of course, goes back to central point about supplementation rather than substitution – I thought I had made that clear, but judging by the number of people who completely missed it, I suppose I hadn’t. My bad.
Thanks again for the feedback, keep it coming.