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The American Academy had the idea of putting together a group of people drawn from across
American society, and I saw this list of people drawn up who could be potential members, and
you thought, "well, even if every one of them says no, at least it will have been fun to
have made their telephone ring!" (laughter) And I got to make a lot of the calls. And
the fun thing about it was, when you called people, you didn't say, "would you like to
be part of a long bureaucratic exercise generating a report", what you said is, "do you think
that this country has given as much time and trouble to articulating the value of humanistic
disciplines broadly understood, or do you think it would be worth some time and trouble
on your part, to try to figure out how to advocate for this cause more broadly?"
There's a very famous German sociologist of some hundred years ago, Max Faber, and he
took on this challenge of trying to look at the arts and humanities juxtaposed against
science, technology, and math and, as he took this on, he talked about polar opposites,
so, the arts and humanities on one side, science and technology on the other. And he used expressions
about insight versus information, knowledge versus skill, inspiration versus discipline,
and learning for its own sake versus learning for utility. Now, what he concluded, after
struggling with this for many years, is that these, indeed, were not polar opposites: there
was a direct relationship between the two.
There is a common set of skills and competencies that one is going to need in virtually anything
one does, that has to do with reading with comprehension, writing with clarity and precision,
knowing logic, knowing how to, how to make an argument, having some sense of one's history,
and the background of what one is engaged in. I mean, those are common elements of a
good education, a solid education, a serviceable education. No matter what the specialty might
be. After all, there are many, many, people from China, from India, from those competitors
that are seeking out an American education, and when you ask them what do they value about
it, why they regard it so highly, you invariably hear something about the cultivation of creativity
and innovative thinking and the ability to think critically and those are strengths of
American education that we'd be extremely foolish to shortchange.
One of the fears I've had is that we lose sight of the importance of education- and
particularly on higher education- if our only focus is on creating people who we think have
a pathway to a particular job- and I always remember a quote from Secretary *** Riley
and, I don't want to miss it, so I'll put my glasses on and read it, but he said, "We
are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist using technologies that
haven't been invented in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet." So if
you think about that, what he's saying, and what I think all of us would probably agree
upon is that, we don't know what the future is going to be, and what we really ought to
be focused on is preparing students who are adaptable and flexible and who have a set
of competencies and skills that allow them to adjust to a changing world.