The Indispensable Moment:A New Kind of 21st Century Education

byPresident Elizabeth Coleman

Bennington College

Delivered at Hathaway Brown School’s Education Innovation SummitNovember 5, 2010

To talk about innovation in the abstract is not very helpful, and even misleading. Contrary to the buzz that surroundsit, innovation is not an end or a value in itself, nor does it come into being except as a necessary condition for

achieving purposes or principles. Moreover while typically praised in the abstract, it is energetically resisted in theconcrete. There is, in truth, an inverse proportion between the appeal of innovation and one’s proximity to its conse-quences. Of the many obstacles to innovation actually happening, the biggest is that people directly in its path don’tlike it and those are the ones who have to embrace it if it is to succeed.

The resistance to doing things differently makes the power of the ideas innovation is serving especially important—not so much because that power will make people more amenable to change, at least not in the short term, but becausethose who are leading innovation will need something very special to keep them going. One thing you can count on:there is no need to test the water if you are contemplating genuine innovation—you can be sure that it will be very hot.

Hence to understand what Bennington is doing when getting at the dynamics of innovation is of concern, it isespecially important to grasp the ideas that drive and inform its efforts, and what is at stake should we succeed or shouldwe fail. That, in turn, means examining the framework of values in which education currently operates—more preciselyconfronting the absence of a framework of values.

Despite widespread enthusiasm for education, we persist in treating it as absent any intrinsic value. Instead its valuestems from the extent to which it successfully or unsuccessfully accommodates itself to other interests, whether they bepolitical, economic, or religious. In contrast to every other major social institution in our society—law, health, business,government, media, religion—where we have clear ideas about their distinct purposes, education remains a blank slateon which virtually anything can be written.

This orientation to education is particularly unfortunate given what the distinctive purposes of education as aninstitution actually are: that is to transform possibilities—the very opposite of accommodation. Its job is not to perpetuatea status quo but to make the world in which it occurs a better place than it would be otherwise, both for the individualsfortunate enough to have access to it and for the community of which they are members. No other institution has thisdefinition, this responsibility, this source of legitimacy, this potential power. The depth of our associations betweeneducation and the possibilities for a better life undoubtedly account for our persistence in seeing education as the greathope for ourselves and the world despite the unspeakable betrayals of that purpose.

Our neglect of the distinctive power and responsibility of education is especially perilous in a democracy. From thebeginning of this great American experiment in self-governance, education was universally understood by the foundersto be critical in determining the nation’s fate. Thomas Jefferson put it most succinctly: “If a nation expects to be ignorantand free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” He was not alone. George Washington:“In proportion as the structure of government gives force to public opinion it is essential that public opinion should beenlightened.” James Madison: “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” Given the historicassociation between the liberal arts and an education worthy of free men and women, it is not surprising that theUnited States gave birth to the idea and the ideal of the liberal arts college.

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Nor is it surprising that this country succeeded inmaking public education available to everyone—astunning accomplishment. But, alas, as access increasedthe commitment to an education worthy of a greatdemocracy disintegrated—the tendency to dilute, to makeaccommodations, accelerates. In Helen and RobertLynd’s Middletown, published in 1929, the president ofthe Muncie, Indiana, school board sums it up: “For along time all boys were trained to be President. Then fora while we trained them all to be professional men. Nowwe are training boys to get jobs.”

President Clinton’s State of the Union message of1994 uncannily echoes the words of our Muncie schoolboard president except they are spoken now in the accentsof triumph rather than despair: “We measure every schoolby one high standard: Are children learning what theyneed to know to compete and win in the global economy.”That’s it? That’s the whole story? One might reasonablyconsider economic well-being to be one of the desirableoutcomes of a successful education, but that is a very dif-ferent matter from its becoming the sole objective of suchan education—the standard by which everything is to bemeasured. It is worth taking in the magnitude of thediminishing of values: on the individual level, self-interest, defined solely in economic terms, replaces thevalues of human dignity, autonomy, freedom, happiness;on the social, the aggregate of this narrow self-interestsupplants the idea of a public life informed by the idealsof justice, equity, social responsibility, and a continualexpansion of human possibilities. As president ofBennington College I most certainly appreciate theimportance of money; but it cannot be the measure ofall things. It is a very thin reed for any civilized world,and catastrophic for a democratic one.

I need hardly document here the consequences ofthis relentless and crude vocationalism on education inAmerica. Despite endless reports and the spending ofuntold billions, students continue to drop out of schoolin droves and businesses increasingly are driven to educatetheir employees. Mastery of basic skills and a bare mini-mum of cultural literacy continue to elude vast numbersof our students and that includes large numbers of ourcollege graduates. Despite having a research establishmentthat is the envy of the world, more than half of theAmerican public demonizes evolution. And don’t pressyour luck when it comes to estimating how many ofthose who think they believe in it actually understand it.

Nor did the liberal arts establishment, the citadel ofour most visionary education, escape the consequences ofthis impoverishment of value, despite the rhetoric of self-congratulation and the widely held assumption that liberaleducation persists as a serious alternative to what areviewed as more pragmatically oriented educationaloptions. The truth is that we have professionalized whatpasses for liberal arts to the point where they simply donot begin to provide the intellectual breadth of applicationand the ethical depth that provides a heightened capacityfor civic engagement which is their signature.

Over the past century the expert has dethroned theeducated generalist to become the sole model of intellectualaccomplishment. While expertise has had its undoubtedsuccesses, the price of its unrivalled dominance is enormous.The progression of today’s student is to jettison everyinterest except one and within that one to continuallynarrow the focus. Subject matters of study are broken upinto smaller and smaller pieces, with growing emphasison the technical and the obscure. The perspective pro-gressively narrows to confront an increasingly fragmented

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world generating a model of intellectual accomplishmentthat amounts not to learning more and more about lessand less—already a dubious accomplishment—but moreprecisely to learning less and less about less and less.This, despite the evidence all around us of the intercon-nectedness of things.

Lest you think this is an overstatement, here are thebeginnings of the ABCs of Anthropology.

In addition to working in ever narrowing contexts, asone ascends the educational ladder values other thantechnical competence are viewed with increasing suspicion.Questions such as what kind of a world are we making?what kind of a world should we be making? what kind of aworld can we be making? move off the table as beyondour ken. Incredibly, neutrality about such concerns isseen as a condition of academic integrity.

Criteria that would make it possible to distinguishbetween the relative values of the subjects we teach arereligiously avoided. Every subject is equal, nothing is moreimportant than anything else. Keeping up with one’s field—furthering the discipline—becomes an end in itselfwithout reference to anything outside of the discipline.The “so what” question is emphatically off limits.

This aversion to social values may seem at odds withthe explosion of community service programs. But despitethe attention paid to service, these efforts remain emphat-ically extracurricular and have had virtually no impact onthe curriculum itself. In effect, civic-mindedness is seen asresiding outside the realm of what purports to be seriousthinking and adult purposes, more a matter of heart thanof mind, a choice, often short-term, rather than a lifelongobligation. We in the academy have in fact institutionalizedthe very divides that poison our public life—between themost demanding uses of intelligence and civic virtue,between the ideal and the real, between a good and asuccessful life.

In so doing, we, the educators, the guardians ofsecular democracy, in effect cede any connection betweeneducation and values to fundamentalists, who, you canbe sure, have no compunctions about using education tofurther their values—the absolutes of a theocracy. Mean-while the values and voices of democracy—the veryopposite of such certainties—are silent. Either we havelost touch with those values or, no better, believe theyneed not or can not be taught, with devastating conse-quences for our political landscape. Yeats nightmare visioncome alive: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”

This mix—oversimplification of civic engagement,idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge,emphasis on technical mastery, neutrality as a conditionof academic integrity—is deadly when it comes to pursu-ing the vital connections between the public good andeducation, between intellectual integrity and humanfreedom, between thought and action. Breadth has be-come equivalent to the shallow and depth to the reconditemaking a shambles of what had been understood for mil-lennia as an education worthy of free men and increasingly

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of free women, inclined towards and capable of self-governing. The very idea of the educated generalistdisappears—the development of our fundamental humancapacities to reason, to imagine, to communicate, tounderstand, to act about things that are of shared humanconcern.

Neither liberal education nor citizenship can surviveunder these conditions. In such a world, education is agood deal more likely to engender a learned helplessnessthan a sense of empowerment when the impulse is tochange the world.

As the purposes of education diminish the idea of arobust citizenship also unravels. Our notion of student ascustomer perfectly mirrors our current notion of citizenas taxpayer—light years away from Abraham Lincoln’s:“That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth offreedom—and that government of the people, by thepeople, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”;its resounding reaffirmation by Adlai Stevenson: “As citi-zens of this democracy you are the rulers and the ruled,the law givers and the law abiding, the beginning and theend.” Voting is today considered a major accomplishmentand more often than not defines the extent of our hopesfor civic engagement and the outer limits of what wethink constitutes democracy. In a moment of clairvoy-ance, Hannah Arendt, over sixty years ago, characterizedcitizenship is the “lost treasure” of American political life.

Unsurprisingly the consequences of this loss arepainfully evident in the deteriorating quality of our publiclife. The relentless dumbing-down of our political dis-course at virtually every level is the most obvious example.There are others: spectacular inequities in the distribution

of wealth; the potential of global warming to upendhuman civilization itself; the awesome dimensions of ourfailure to educate our young; the recent and undisguisedassault on the principles that define us as a people—therule of law, the separation of powers, the relationship be-tween church and state; our predilection for the uses of force.

And at a time of such high stakes, demanding chal-lenges, when clarity of thought, respect for evidence,appreciation for complexity, and tolerance for ambiguityare especially critical, the sensationalism of the media—the other major educational institution in our society—continues unabated. The dimensions of the distance wehave travelled are best measured by reminding ourselvesthat the Federalist Papers were published in The HeraldTribune. There is no more damning evidence of the failureof education in this country than the quality of what thepublic craves or tolerates in its media.

Yet despite the enormity, urgency, and longevity ofthese challenges we, the people, seem unable to do any-thing but watch and wait, presumably for the expertsand the politicians to do something. They have not andthey probably can not; it is most unlikely that we canhave a viable democracy made up of experts, politicians,zealots, and spectators amidst ever growing concentrationsof power devoted to and defined by special interests thathave scant relationship to the public interest.

Most startling and sobering in this saga is the failureeverywhere to draw any connections between what ishappening in our public life and what is happening inour educational institutions. We may be at the top of thelist in the public’s mind when it comes to influencingaccess to personal wealth; we aren’t even on the list when

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it comes to responsibility for the health of this democracy.Business as usual continues within the academic estab-lishment with a complacency and oblivion to the tumultin the world around us that can only be compared to thehauteur of the eighteenth century French aristocrat. We,too, are playing with fire.

Democracy is not a romance about the value of folkwisdom, the innate simplicity of problems, or the self-evi-dent nature of the values upon which democracy depends.On the contrary, democracy rests on an appreciation ofthe inherent messiness and complexities of the world andthe limitations of absolutes, and especially of self-right-eousness. Not only are axes of evil misplaced, so are axesof good—there is no issue in public life when decisionsabout what to do must be confronted for which there arenot competing goods, competing rights, competingtruths. That means no easy answers, no self-evident virtue.

The Bennington Response

Democracy, in short, requires the same demanding mixof intellect and ethics as does the education that wouldmake it possible. They are two sides of one coin and theirfates are deeply intertwined. This is the framework fromwhich Bennington’s innovations emerged—to createanew a robust connection between liberal education andthe demands of a vibrant citizenship.

Certain things were clear. We needed to find acompelling alternative to the departmentalized, discipline-based structures that dominate every aspect of higher edu-

cation—one that would enable the challenges from theworld to assume a fundamental informing position inthe curriculum. We recognized that we could not settlefor something that was an add-on if what we were after isthe intellectual intensity and ethical vitality that makeeducation and civic life worthy of the name.

The strategic challenges were also clear: finding waysto develop an ongoing and deepening dynamic betweenthe world inside the classroom and the world outside;collapsing the divide between thought and action, whichthe modern university has reified with its “pure” and“applied,” its notion of theory as something distinct frompractice, its decided preference for the neat, the orderly,the answerable, the recondite, and its infatuation withwhat is called scientific method as if it constitutes avirtue in itself, conveniently forgetting its first principle—the very source of its legitimacy—to illuminate thenature of things.

Priorities need to be transformed so that enhancing thepublic good becomes an objective that is a match forprivate aspirations and the accomplishment of civicvirtue is tied to the uses of intellect and imagination attheir most challenging. Our current ways of approachingagency and authority need to turn inside out to reflectthe reality that no one has the answers to the challengesfacing citizens in this century, and everyone has the re-sponsibility to participate in finding them.

The central strategy for Bennington turned out to bedisarmingly simple and straightforward: to turn the most

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pressing problems of the world themselves into major de-finers and organizers of the curriculum. They would beaccorded the same authority to generate and organizecurriculum now held exclusively by the traditionaldisciplines in the arts and sciences. The objective alwaysto figure out what to do. Making effective action thedriving force, rather than understanding absent anynecessary connection to action, was absolutely essential.

Our assumption was that rethinking the uses offorce…how we educate our young...heal the sick…address the growing disparity in the U.S. between thestructures of governance and their purposes… come togrips with the consequences of the disparities in the distri-bution of wealth and our dependence on money as theonly way of measuring value…face up to the enormity ofhuman effort it will take to confront and contain globalwarming without denying the magnitude and power ofcompeting values and interest—that addressing theseissues will be every bit as intellectually challenging, edu-cationally responsible, and potentially rich for generatingcurriculum as the disciplines that currently serve toorganize a undergraduate education. Actually we thinkthey are likely to be more so.

We also imagined that those capacities fundamental toaddressing issues of this urgency, complexity, and magnitudewould assume a central importance, generating what is ineffect a new liberal arts capable of responding to the con-tingencies, particularities, and ambiguities of real worldsituations. The arts of taking things in—seeing, reading,listening, drawing—assume a central role as do thoseof communicating what has been seen with power andeconomy. Rhetoric, the art of organizing the world of wordsto have maximum effect, re-emerges as fundamental;design, the art of organizing the world of things, assumesan equal importance. Mediation, improvisation, and thecapacity for empathy also join this new pantheon—theirpower no longer treated as being limited to particularcareers or arts on the one hand or presumed to be un-teachable on the other.

What we are discovering is that as the stakes andchallenges of real world engagement loom large, so toodoes the difference between ideology and ideas, theimportance of evidence, the limitations of unexaminedassumptions, the distorting power of preconceptions,and the self-indulgence of treating opinions as the end-all of intellectual community.

Quantitative reasoning rapidly assumes a prominencebecause of its importance in grasping and managing change,in discriminating systematically between what is at thecore and what is peripheral, and in appreciating scale.

New ways of organizing classroom time are emergingthat allow purposes to determine the structure instead ofthe usual procrustean bed routine we all know so well,starting with the structure as given and fitting whateverwe’re trying to do to its measurements.

Beyond curriculum, the focus on advancing publicaction expands the ranks of people who will be teachingat Bennington to include those whose lives give shape tothe world of public action: business leaders, journalists,lawyers, soldiers, politicians, professionals, social activists.Residencies of variable duration, varying from a week toa month a term, enable us to bring such people ontocampus to engage with students, faculty, and staff abouttheir work in myriad ways.

Students, in turn, continue to move outside theclassroom to negotiate the world directly now that expe-rience is in an especially dynamic relationship with whatis going on within the classroom. In effect these are twosides of a coin—their work in class as preparation fortheir work off campus, and their work off campus servingto illuminate what is happening in class. We are now ina world where there is a place within the curriculumdesigned to allow students to express and to deepenwhat is happening to them in the rich possibilities fordiscovery outside the curriculum.

All of this activity, in its multiple dimensions andforms, does not preclude maintaining opportunities forstudents and faculty to continue to immerse themselvesin traditional disciplines/crafts, but that is now juxtaposedto experiences that emerge out of a very different andequally powerful principle. That principle is defined bythe challenges of putting things together rather thandifferentiating them and focusing on what connects us toa broader community instead of what distinguishes usfrom one another to define our personal and professionalambitions and dreams. Both are of course profounddimensions of a human life. It is important to appreciatethe enormous significance for innovation when theconventions that have so long dominated are no longerthe only game in town.

As the Bennington community at every levelincreasingly confronts the rich dynamic between thepublic and the private good, the individual and thecollective, the collaborative and the solo, these dialecticswill undoubtedly transform one other. The unifyingobjective is to change the odds that our graduates will becommitted to—and capable of—effective action in theworld about matters of great human concern, even morethat they will be capable of living both a good and asuccessful life.

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Before closing I’d like to focus on a few aspects ofthis story that are especially revealing about the challengesand dynamics of innovation. First is the great importanceof the honesty and penetration of the analysis of whatyou are up against and what it will take to make some-thing genuinely new.

The temptations of seeing the interdisciplinary as anadequate response to the limitations of the disciplines areevident everywhere we turn; the problem is they perpetu-ate rather than challenge the hegemony of the disciplines.The language itself of interdisciplinary makes that clear; theinterdisciplinary is meaningless without presuming theexistence of the disciplines. It is worth noting that thereverse is not true—the disciplines do not depend on theinterdisciplinary for their existence. That subordinate rolespeaks eloquently to their relative power and place.

More important, like the disciplines, the interdisci-plinary starts with conventionalized perspectives whichthe world must conform to in order to enter the academicconversation, rather than starting with the world itself.The only difference is that you start with more than oneof them. That glosses over the most serious problem ofthe disciplinary orientation, which is the continualaccommodation of the world to a conventionalized, self-referential perspective and methodology rather than thereverse—starting with the world and using whatever willenable you to see it as clearly as possible and influence itas productively as possible.

Moreover the actualities of the interdisciplinaryexperience are often either to continue to talk past oneanother, leaving it for the students to somehow do thesynthesizing, or in the interests of communication acrosswhat are often very strong divides, to be drawn ineluctablytowards more diffuse rather than more penetrating insights.

Without an analysis that confronts the real price ofthe hegemony of disciplines the temptation of leavingthe status quo intact and treating the change as an add-onis hard to resist. Aside from their intrinsic limitations,add-ons are dependent on continually generating sourcesof energy and resources for their maintenance and that isoften unsustainable. It does not serve us well to perpetuatea status quo by seeming to adequately address its limitationswithout requiring any genuine innovation. More to thepoint, genuine innovation is simply impossible withoutanalysis that makes its necessity overwhelmingly clear.

While it is, for sure, a challenge to get anythinggoing that is genuinely innovative, sustaining innovationis the great and largely unmet challenge. It means creatinga culture of innovation which in turn means building theconditions of such a culture into the design itself. Other-

wise today’s brave new world—however vital and vibrant—is likely to become tomorrow’s bastion of self-perpetu-ation. This is undoubtedly the greatest challenge—howto build into the conditions that initiate and innovatethe sources of self-renewal.

There are aspects of the curricular design thatemerged at Bennington which exhibit characteristics ofstructures in and of themselves that are arguably particu-larly compatible with perpetuating innovation. Thinkagain about that cluster of interlocking circles generatedby the topics: they are intrinsically contentious (whatmakes these six topics sacred? why not…?—i.e. in their verynature, they invite the possibility that there could be abetter idea); dynamic and permeable (the interactionbetween them is fundamental—how can you possibly talkabout the uses of force or economics and equity withouttalking about governance? how can you possibly talk abouthealth without talking about the distribution of wealth?and so on); value laden (continually challenging us tomaintain the distinction between a politics of principle anda politics of partisanship—complacency is simply not anoption); self-evidently impermanent (the more thatdisappear and the sooner they disappear the better). Itis interesting to note that these characteristics are inmarked contrast to the structural virtues much more typ-ically touted and most certainly found in the disciplinarystructure, designed to be solid as a rock, impermeable,eternal, value neutral, and seeming to reflect the verynature of things.

Managing innovation is of course its own hugesubject. It is difficult to talk about abstracted from a hostof particulars that make each effort unique. One rule ofthumb worth mentioning: it is best typically to enablethe world that is currently in place to continue but nolonger as the sole reservoir of legitimacy. To survive asan alternative source of educational integrity is a hugeaccomplishment in itself. And as time passes and moreconcrete expressions of an idea come into existence thepower of the idea reasserts itself, now over those who arebeing invited to change.

Finally, should compelling innovation happen, thereare the external constituencies that we hear from whenanything that could possibly be construed to be out theordinary is on the table—most notably parents and thepress. What will this mean for my child? Or, that’s all verywell but what are you going to do with a degree in…? Forme this raises the issue of leadership—to what extent dowe follow what we call themarket and to what extent do we define it? It wouldseem to me, given our work, there is no question about

what we should do and frankly what most people, evenin this crazed consumer culture we live in, expect us todo. If our job stops short of defining what an educationis, it is hard for me to know where it begins.

What is equally clear is the power we actually haveto do just that is often in marked contrast to the powerwe think we have. In a word, I believe that we have onlyourselves to blame when we hand over to anyone else ourresponsibility to call the shots when it comes to definingour work. Alas we do it again and again, believing thatwe have no choice. Trust me you have a choice.

For those of you who remain tempted to leave wellenough alone or to start small, some final thoughts:

One: In my experience, you take as much punishmentif you dare even to think about change as you do forsomething approaching revolution. In other words,contrary to what might appear to be reasonable, you get

no credit for moderation when you are doing anythingother than applauding the status quo. So… if you aregoing to enter this arena at all, you might as well go forthe gold.

Two: It is worth reminding ourselves that doingthings in ways that undermine the conditions of intellec-tual community and narrow our horizons demand as muchenergy, if not more, and cost as much, if not more, thandoing them in ways that create community and extendour sense of what is possible.

Three: We, not God or nature, made the schools wecurrently inhabit; hence, we can unmake and remake them.

Finally: The world is correct in its ongoing,passionate commitment to the power of educationdespite everything. Imagine what could happen if wedo it right. Imagine what will happen if we do not.

B E N N I N GTO N C O L L E G E • O n e C o l l e g e D r i v e • B e n n i n g t o n , Ve r m o n t 0 5 2 0 1 • w w w. b e n n i n g t o n . e d u