Bennington President Liz Coleman speaks at the 2009 Ted lectures, pushing for a radical reform in higher education. She says:
The progression of today’s college student is to jettison every interest except one, and within that one to continually narrow the focus, learning more and more about less and less. This despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things.
[…]Questions such as “What kind of a world are we making?” “What kind of a world should we be making?” “What kind of a world can we be making?” are being treated with more and more skepticism and move off the table. In so doing the guardians of secular democracy in effect yield the connection between education and values to fundamentalists, who you can be sure have no compunctions about using education to further their values, the absolutes of a theocracy. Meanwhile the values and voices of democracy are silent.
Watch the video below, and read about Mark C. Taylor’s recent call for the reinvention of the university: