The Debate: What Should Colleges Teach?
The article, "Think Again", attempts to point an opinionated finger at the degradation of America's college curriculum. The author, Stanley Fish, begrudgingly uses the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) as a reference to elude to substandard academic skills being instilled by our nations current college graduate programs. He implores anyone who respects his credentials, especially the trustees and alumni of the colleges in question, to revise their substandard curricula and requirements particularly in the faltering lore of today's writers. Stanley believes that writing "should be the real core of any curriculum".
The fact is that Stanley may have a valid point. The cultures of the world florish or die by the information attained by the created archieves of the pen. Knowledge and the recorded information passed from one generation to the next has led to humans becoming the world dominate life form on the planet. There is not one aspect of our lives that hasn't been altered or obliterated by our quest for knowledge and the overwhelming advantages of our survival it provides. But is he wrong in assuming that the college institutions deviation from higher academic standards should be changed? Could we be at an impass in our social evolution that is causing our scholorship programs to tarnish?
The answer lies in the vary structure that nurtures us. The amount of recorded information avaliable to today's modernized human could not be learned in a single life time. The fact is it would take a life time to just read the New York's Metropolitan Library's paper back section, provided you were an exceptionally good reader. The information stored in the computers that can be accessed from the before mentioned library would take thousands of years to review. The information age we live in is also not showing any signs curbing it's avalanche of growing computer records. The storage continues to grow exponentially based on our global population and their ever expanding computer networking in to third world countries.
The bottom line is we have failed to physically evolve our brains at the pace of our inventions and the information they help create and store.