Learning from Wikipedia

Abstract

The jobs of the future require deep understanding of the technologies changing our workplace and our society. That understanding requires experimental and experiential training and the kind of grounded academic thinking that lets big ideas soar. The programs, the faculty, and the universities that understand that challenge will lead us all. (Davidson 132)For cathy n. davidson, university education is equivalent to job preparation, which is not to say that she is talking about vocational training in the usual sense—the training, say, of medical technicians or park rangers, computer programmers or hotel personnel. On the contrary, her “new education” is designed as broadly as possible to be a replacement of the old liberal arts paradigm. The soaring cost of college education, she argues, will not decrease until public officials can be convinced that four (or even two) years of “university” training “can provide exactly the analytical and cross-cutting interdisciplinary thinking and communication skills that are most in demand in a complex workplace” (185). Goodbye, accordingly, to the traditional curriculum that has been in force for over a hundred years, goodbye to “passive, hierarchical models of teaching and learning” (103), to individual majors (and minors) like English, history, economics, or chemistry, with their lecture courses and discussion sessions, their final exams and pop quizzes, and welcome to the new world of “student-centered,” “project-based” “learning,” to the classroom “where students learn how to learn” (263).