โ Scribed by Robert N. McCauley
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In Tht Great Conversation Robert Maynard Hutchins (1952) argues that the purpose of education is to develop a good mind, which means improving our analytical, critical, and imaginative powers while cultivating the moral and intellectual virtues. The problem with most courses in general and with most introductory courses in particular is that they fail on both counts. They fail to develop good minds, because too often we simply forget that that is what they should do. Instead, we are usually satisfied if they are simply about history or about biology or about some other discipline. In each of these areas, we have the facts, and we are anxious to dispense them. In our enthusiasm to do just that, we tend to overlook the fragmented picture of education and knowledge that is implicitly presented in higher education. In contrast to that picture, which I will discuss at some length in this chapter, I suggest that education resides not in the collection and distribution of the products of our inquiries but rather in the process of inquiring.
The focus on intellectual products instead of their production coheres with a host of modern social (McCauley, 1982) and intellectual prejudices. Not the least of the latter is our empiricist predilection for atomistic accounts of cognitive phenomena. For neariy 300 years, K. I Spear (Ed ). R e p m d i v InlrohrrlorJ 6 w w r . New Dimlions for T h i n g 2nd Iraminc no 20. Sam Francisco: l03uv-B~~. December 1984.
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