A matéria abaixo apresenta uma perspectiva especialmente cara ao Positivismo e presente desde o início nos escritos de Augusto Comte: a afirmação da perspectiva generalista, contrapondo-se à especialização científica.
A visão de conjunto é importante devido a vários motivos.
Em primeiro lugar, porque ela permite que as pessoas tenham uma compreensão geral da realidade, isto é, permite que a realidade seja compreensível para o comum das pessoas a partir de uma perspectiva científica. Nesse sentido, ela desempenha uma função pedagógica e psicológica central para o ser humano. (Em particular, cabe notar que as teologias mantêm sua relevância atual porque elas oferecem aos seus crentes uma visão geral da realidade, ao contrário da ciência - bem entendido, da ciência como tem sido praticada até agora, isto é, fragmentária e fragmentada, oferecendo aos seres humanos apenas perspectivas parciais e irracionais da realidade.)
Em segundo lugar, porque essa visão de conjunto - como o texto abaixo indica com grande clareza - permite que se estabeleçam relações entre áreas do conhecimento que de outra maneira não se relacionariam e que não seria possível relacionar com facilidade: não apenas áreas científicas, mas também considerações morais e filosóficas e mesmo artísticas são passíveis de integração por meio da visão generalista.
Em terceiro lugar, as aplicações práticas (técnicas) são ampliadas. É importante ressaltar que as aplicações práticas devem ser indicadas por último, para não se considerar que a perspectiva generalista é válida apenas ou principalmente devido ao seu valor "pragmático": ao contrário, ela importa antes de mais nada porque tem valor pedagógico e filosófico.
A visão generalista na matéria abaixo é apresentada como uma opção viável para os currículos universitários. Entretanto, essa opção é atualmente mais adequada para os Estados Unidos e para o Canadá que para o Brasil, devido à flexibilidade curricular desses países e ao sistema de "major" e "minor degrees" - isto é, devido à possibilidade de duplas graduações, com dois anos de formação geral à escolha dos estudantes seguidos de dois anos de especialização técnico-acadêmica.
A matéria abaixo, todavia, apresenta dois problemas. O primeiro é considerar a concepção generalista estritamente em termos de aplicação prática, isto é, para "resolver problemas", em vez de considerar também (e acima de tudo) suas implicações filosóficas e morais. O segundo problema liga-se ao caráter jornalístico do texto: a exposição da matéria é recheada de exemplos pessoais, que, a título de apresentar o "interesse humano" da questão, aumentam de maneira desnecessária e cansativa o texto.
Ainda assim, vale a pena a leitura e a reflexão.
O original da matéria pode ser obtido aqui.
* * *
CANADIAN UNIVERSITY REPORT 2014: INNOVATION
The university debate: specialize or be a
generalist?
ERIN
MILLAR
Special to The Globe and
Mail
Published Tuesday,
Oct. 22 2013, 7:11 AM EDT
Last updated Tuesday,
Oct. 22 2013, 9:30 AM EDT
It was one of those
beautiful moments of intellectual revelation that undergraduate education is
all about. Evan Pivnick was reading Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer when he
realized that climate change wasn’t just a problem of science but also of
politics. “I used to think about it in an analog way,” recalls the University
of Victoria political science graduate of his formerly single-channel thinking.
All of a sudden, communication theory, psychology, economics and law seemed
hugely relevant. “I didn’t want to take a narrow look at climate change. I
wanted to study the whole spectrum.”
So Pivnick signed
up for Victoria’s new minor in human dimensions of climate change. “I wouldn’t
have encountered the hard science of climate change chemistry otherwise,” he
says. “It also opened me up to economics. I realized I had certain biases so I
took classes to understand and be conversational with economists.” After
graduating this spring, he scored a job working for Andrew Weaver, a Victoria
climate scientist who was recently elected the first Green Party MLA in British
Columbia.
Pivnick says the
interdisciplinary nature of his education strengthened his ability to consider
problems from different perspectives and communicate with experts from
disparate fields − a type of thinking universities are increasingly attempting
to foster in their students. While interdisciplinary education is not
necessarily new, unique approaches are popping up across the country that
recognize that modern problems such as climate change − messy, complex beasts
that won’t be solved by a single field − require thinkers with a broad wisdom
not limited to a single field.
At McMaster
University in Hamilton, for instance, the honours integrated science, arts and
science, and bachelor of health sciences programs are inherently
interdisciplinary. Since Dalhousie University in Halifax created the College of
Sustainability in 2009, more than 1,000 students from almost every faculty have
enrolled in a double major that involves working on sustainability challenges
in the community with professors in the arts, business, science, engineering,
health and design faculties.
Most of the 60
universities researched for the Canadian University Report offer relatively new
interdisciplinary undergraduate programs in subjects as varied as cognitive
science (Carleton University in Ottawa), peace and justice (University of
Toronto), food systems (Trent University in Peterborough, Ont.) and community
engagement (Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver). These
programs go by many names − applied or integrated, multi- or trans-disciplinary,
inquiry or problem-based − but they all have a fundamental assumption in
common: Innovation, whether an idea for a new product or an approach to
treating illness, often occurs at the intersection of disciplines.
“One of the dangers
of disciplinary thinking is that you can get narrowed into a certain jargon
that is familiar to your group of experts but virtually meaningless to other
people,” says David Leach, director of the technology and society program at
the University of Victoria. “Because we’re not within any faculty, our students
have to find a way of communicating and collaborating with one another.”
Communication and
collaboration, along with analysis, critical thinking, technological literacy
and problem solving, make up a suite of intangibles sometimes called
“21st-century skills,” that educators such as Leach argue students gain from a
broad education.
This view of what
skills are needed to thrive in the 21st century is but one side of a debate
that has dominated discussion about the goals of postsecondary education in the
past year. In reaction to the tough job market many new university graduates
face, a growing chorus of politicians and pundits call for universities to
narrow their focus and produce “job ready” graduates with the latest technical
expertise; in this view, studying humanities or social sciences is seen as a
waste of taxpayers’ money and students’ time because asking unanswerable
questions does nothing to prepare one’s mind for the real world.
Writing in
Maclean’s magazine, columnist Colby Cosh eloquently argued that broadly
educating students amounts to delaying them from entering the work force merely
because of a romantic (read: foolish) attachment to the broad education at the
heart of the liberal Enlightenment ideal: “What you get when you turn this
ideal into a system, however, is a lot like what you get when you transform
articles of Christian faith into the Catholic Church: a powerful, unaccountable
apparatus that abuses large numbers of young people.”
Prime Minister
Stephen Harper has also called for postsecondary institutions to focus on
specific skills, particularly in trades, science and engineering. In a meeting
with a U.S.-Canada business group in Ottawa last November, he said, “For
whatever reason, we know that peoples’ choices, in terms of the education
system, tend to lead us to what appears to be a chronic shortage of certain
skills.” The contention that Canada’s skills shortage is a barrier to economic
recovery is the justification for the Canada Job Grant, a centrepiece of the
government’s 2013 economic plan, which pledged to provide 130,000 workers a
year with skills training.
But, according to
many educators, the set of skills students need to thrive in the modern economy
is about much more than technical expertise. In a speech to the Empire Club of
Canada last March, David Naylor, outgoing president of the University of
Toronto, called the argument for more job-specific education a so-called zombie
idea, “one of those persistent and infectious pieces of misinformation, a meme
that shouldn’t be alive but just won’t die.” He argued that, instead of
focusing on specific technical skills, all people, regardless of their field,
need to be able to think quantitatively, communicate effectively, analyze critically
and reason through ethical and social challenges. Even in applied disciplines
such as health sciences, teachers are replacing narrow skills with what one
might call “renewable competencies,” Naylor said. “After all, our students will
confront challenges – everything from climate change to cyber-security – that
are more intertwined, complex, and social than ever before.”
So what should we
make of this debate? Is this shift toward interdisciplinary teaching that
prioritizes renewable competencies over narrow expertise preparing students to
adapt to fast-changing careers and economies? Or are universities producing
unemployable masters of none?
The tiny, private
Quest University in Squamish B.C., which exemplifies the trend, may provide the
answers to these questions.
Mid-day on a
Wednesday in early May, snowshoe-clad students sit on a snowy shore of frozen
Garibaldi Lake, a glacial lake in the mountains midway between Vancouver and
Whistler, B.C., eating hummus wraps and trail mix. These undergraduates are
camping here for five days. They’ve brought gear such as ice augers and
instruments to measure water flow. The goal? To quantify the amount of water in
the watershed.
In the next three
weeks, they’ll spend time on a river and the ocean, studying different aspects
of water cycles with professors with expertise in fields from geology to
physics to epidemiology. But right now, on this lunch break, they’re thinking
about the assignment at hand. Student Julia Simmerling is frustrated because
her group spent all morning measuring snow density but the instrument kept
maxing out and seemed to be calibrated incorrectly. All her numbers are
meaningless, she complains to physics professor Court Ashbaugh. “There’s a way
around this,” he tells her. After some discussion with Ashbaugh, Simmerling and
her group take a new approach to the problem of quantifying the amount of snow
in the water shed: by measuring water from snow off a roof. They later realize
they were using the snow density instrument incorrectly, but they learned that
there are a lot of different ways to tackle a problem in the field.
The lesson may seem
inconsequential − Simmerling may never again need to reason out how to measure
the amount of water in snow − but this kind of problem-solving is what this
class, and Quest itself, is all about. With no majors or departments, the
unusual university in Squamish is arguably Canada’s most extreme example of
broad, interdisciplinary undergrad education. “If you have a conventional
education, you are trained in how we view the world in 2013,” explains
mathematics professor Glen Van Brummelen. “You might be able to exist in the
current system for a few years, but what will get you far is flexibility in
thinking.” In other words, technology and economies are changing at such a pace
that industry-specific skills learned through higher education are often
obsolete soon after graduation, therefore students are better served by
developing the ability to adapt and continue learning outside formal settings.
Quest buys into an
idea that is gaining momentum at universities around the world: that instead of
being steeped in disciplinary content, students ought to develop adaptable
habits of mind. Traditionally, being educated is most often a process of
narrowing; one would study increasingly specific knowledge to the point of
knowing enough to be considered an expert. But in this new view, what matters
isn’t specific content but the broad strokes of how the world works. Quest is
throwing out the conventions of disciplines in order to get at intangibles. For
example, during the field class at Garibaldi Lake, students argued with each
other about precision and uncertainty while taking measurements – concepts
central to doing science that are difficult to get at in the predictable
confines of a classroom.
But striking the
right balance between teaching habits of mind and disciplinary content is
tricky. While Ashbaugh is a great supporter of learning science by doing, he
worries his students may end up not knowing much about anything. “Experts think
the way they do because they know a lot about something. That keeps me up at
night,” he says, but acknowledges that a liberal arts education like that
offered at Quest isn’t intended to produce experts. Van Brummelen is less
troubled: “The big question in this discussion that never gets addressed is:
How much technical knowledge do conventionally trained students actually have?”
Yet, that question
is being asked. Mere moments after the Harper government announced a cabinet
shuffle last July, MP Jason Kenney, who had just been named Minister of
Employment and Social Development, tweeted, “I will work hard to end the
paradox of too many people without jobs in an economy that has too many jobs
without people.” His comment hints at the view held by the Office of the Prime
Minister, that a lack of jobs isn’t the sole reason for persistently
above-average unemployment. Harper also sees this as an education issue, which
cuts to the heart of the debate about the purpose of universities. Jobs go unfilled
because employers can’t find employees with the right skills, this line of
reasoning goes; if only universities were better at equipping students with
relevant skills demanded by employers, graduates would find jobs. (It’s worth
noting that Don Drummond, former chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank, now
at Queen’s University, told the Toronto Star that he was unable to verify the
unfilled jobs stats used in the 2013 budget.)
Everyone
interviewed for this article agrees that employers are frustrated with
university graduates’ mix of skills, but most say employers aren’t seeking
technical knowledge but instead abstract 21st-century skills or “renewable
competencies.” Ginny Dybenko, former chief executive officer of Bell Advanced
Communications, says, “Whether I asked Procter & Gamble or the banks on Bay
Street or the big consulting firms, without exception, all the s nior people
told me they needed the soft skills. It’s an ability to communicate with
humans. That requires an understanding of how humans think and how they want to
understand the world. It sounds so straightforward that I am almost reluctant
to say it, but it is something that is hard to deliver on.”
After 40 years at
Bell, a stint at a startup, and five years as dean of business at Wilfrid
Laurier University, Dybenko joined the University of Waterloo in Ontario in
2011 as executive director of the Stratford Campus, a new digital media campus.
The idea was to create an interdisciplinary graduate program in which students
work with companies to tackle digital media problems. The course work would
touch on business and technology, but its heart was in the arts – history, fine
arts, psychology.
“What a remarkable
thing – to bring together the geeks and the artists in one site,” recalls
Dybenko,“give them interesting tasks to work on together, provide them with a
creative frame, lots of opportunity to play in that sandbox, and see what
happens.”
Dybenko’s
colleagues hoped 50 students would sign up in the first year, and were
delighted when 100 started the program. The next year 150 qualified students
enrolled. An undergraduate program launched last fall was similarly popular.
The response from business was also enthusiastic. Google and Canadian Imperial
Bank of Commerce were among companies that submitted projects to the program
for students to work on, and all graduates who entered the job market (some
became entrepreneurs) are employed.
What is unusual
about the Stratford Campus is its firm foundation in the arts. (Its academic
director Christine McWebb has a doctorate in French literature.) “In the old
days,what students would be told if they were really passionate about the arts
or the humanities was to become an accountant, and then they could play with
that other stuff in their spare time,” Dybenko says. “If they’re passionate
about the arts, and that can be music or sociology or political science or
geography or history, then we encourage them and give them enough technology so
that they can apply that in the digital age and enough business skills so that
they are actually useful in the workplace.”
Stratford Campus
was established as arts programs were being cut back at many universities. (In
August, the University of Alberta in Edmonton suspended enrolment in 20 arts
programs, from music to languages.) The value of an arts education is at the
heart of the debate about what skills students should gain from a university
education, and it’s an extremely old argument – whether education ought to be
about fostering critical, independent thought has been up for debate at least
since Plato laid out the bones of a Socratic education in his Republic. But new
interdisciplinary programs at universities across the country are lending the
arts new relevance, rooted in a recognition that in our race to invent widgets,
cure diseases and program apps, we may have neglected the human element.
Robert Gifford,
head of the University of Victoria’s human dimensions of climate change
program, says the program grew out of an understanding that there is a
sociological and psychological side to climate change. He argues that graduates
will be valuable to governments and industry dealing with environmental
problems. “Stephen Harper’s people are thinking industrial, productive,
resource-extraction type of jobs – plumbers, electricians, which we need, but
we’re producing people who are job-ready, not for resource extraction, but to
be managers of a very complex problem.”
For Dana Petersen,
one of the first Stratford Campus graduates, the utility of her broad education
is obvious. With her ability to speak the language of designers and engineers
alike, she scored a job as a user experience researcher at Samsung, exploring
how people interact with technology. “For a long time at universities, there
were the sociology and psychology departments, and they were about people.
Way across campus,
there were the engineers who built things. We’re just starting to build
bridges.”
