My friend Michael and I were talking a bit about education the other night. He posted some thoughts on a book he read by Robert Adams that asks if art can indeed be taught in a college/academic setting. As far as teaching art goes, I tended to agree with this quote from Adams:

“Can Photography Be taught? If this means the history and techniques of the medium, I think it can. The latter, particularly, are straightforward. If, however, teaching photography means bringing students to find their own individual photographic visions, I think it is impossible.”

As I commented on Michael’s post, I think that we have gotten too far away from master/apprentice type of education. For an artist this is crucial. Being Immersed with your master, learning what they know and doing what they do. Four years of college can prepare you for some things, like learning how to use a camera, but will never come close to duplicating a master/apprentice type of relationship. During the Renaissance it was not uncommon for students to begin apprenticing at age 12 and, if they were the best, not obtain the title of master until well into their late twenties.

Having said this however, I still very much find myself to be in the camp that holds formal education in high regard. Shane Hipps, in an interview he did, spoke about education. His thoughts have helped me a great deal in understanding why formal education is important in our postmodern, electronic culture, now more than ever before.

Information Glut

In 1911 the Encyclopedia Britannica was considered the “sum of human knowledge,” with 29 volumes. Since 1911 the number of volumes grew exponentially to the point of being irrelevant. And, as a recent study has indicated, information doubles annually. Thus we live in what is now called the “information age.” This is an important issue to recognize. What has happened in the information age is that we now see a fragmentation of knowledge as opposed to a unification of knowledge. In the Middle Ages, people studied absolutely everything under the sun because at the time, there wasn’t all that much to know. Today it’s easy to see how fragmented our knowledge base has become, e.g. the medical profession with it’s limitless sub-specialties. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a medical specialist to know as much about a skin rash as the average person, if their specialty is pediatric dentistry!

My goal in all of this is just to point out that we have available to us much more than 2000 years of commentary, study, analysis, history and philosophy on every subject or topic that you can imagine (and some you can’t). The problem we now face is not lack of information but information glut. So, in a previous era, if there was a medical problem to solve, the challenge faced was not knowing enough information about how to treat an illness. Today we have too many options on how to treat something. Too much information, too many journals that must be read and understood in order to make a decision. Today it is extremely difficult to discern good information from bad information. According to Hipps, this is one of the primary roles of any educational institution, i.e. to serve as a sifter of good information. I tend to agree for the most part, certainly my experience with college is that it did not teach me everything I needed to know. Instead what it did teach me was how to go about learning.

Intellectual Rigor

Hipps believes that one of the things we lose in an image based postmodern, electronic culture, is the intellectual rigor that higher education provides in many ways. Colleges and Universities actually train our brains in ways that we would never think to do on own. Hipps says that it is necessary to have this type of structure, especially in a society where it is easier to go watch a movie than it is to read a book. Hipps goes on to say, responding to a question about seminary training, that in a postmodern age, activities found in academic environments that were developed during the Enlightenment may seem irrelevant and extraneous in a postmodern context. However, what we cannot lose are the absolutely critical thinking patterns that these academic activities nurture which enable us to move forward and discern in a postmodern culture plagued by information glut.

Hipps is mainly referring to Seminary training in his interview, putting forth as an example subjects like systematic theology, which to many would seem to be of no use in real life ministry. On the contrary though, these classes do serve a useful purpose. Hipps describes it as intellectual training, and likens it to that of training performed in preparation for a marathon. Learning to think in abstract, linear, sequential means is necessary in developing the critical, logical and reasoning capacities of the left brain, which are too easily eroded in the right brained, image based electronic culture in which we live.

So in summary, when thinking about these subjects, it’s helpful to me to distinguish between information, knowledge and wisdom. Information is the raw material, which we determined is overwhelming in our society today. Knowledge is essentially sifting that information to make meaning of of it. Wisdom is knowing what to do with that knowledge. Higher Education, in my opinion, helps us sift this information, acquire knowledge and provides us with valuable tools to go about turning that knowledge into wisdom.

Tags:collegeeducationelectronic culuturehigher educationinformationknowledgeShane Hippsuniversity