Mills Kelly at EdWired:
In the December 2013 issue of Perspectives, AHA Executive Director Jim Grossman wrote a very interesting essay on the future of history education in America: “Disrupting the Disruptors.” I couldn’t agree more with Grossman’s premise that higher education is a public good and deserves to be treated that way. Alas, as a recent report by the GAO makes clear, all across the country legislatures are inexorably defunding public higher education. And there is no reason to believe this reality is going to change.
In his essay Grossman also makes a strong pitch for the value of a traditional liberal arts education in the face of the disruptions in the higher education business model brought to us courtesy of those who would “unbundle” the degree. I too am a passionate defender of the value of a liberal arts education. I think that as a nation we are making a big mistake if we turn our backs on the value of the liberal arts to our economy, our political and social system, and to our citizens.
Where I have to part company with Grossman, however, is where his argument that an unbundled degree is “a narrow and often isolated experience compared to the liberal education that is available in the hundreds of institutions across the nation that offer curricula, rather than courses.” Alas, that ship has already sailed.