Higher Learning

By Derek Bok

Book Overview

What is distinctive, Derek Bok asks, about the American system of higher education, and how well does it perform? In particular, just how good is the education our universities offer? Are they doing all they can to educate their students, or do teaching and learning get lost in the pressure for ever more prestigious research and publication? Bok concludes that the competition characteristic of American higher education--competition for the best students, the most advanced scholarship, the most successful scientific research, the best facilities--has helped to produce venturesome, adaptable, and varied universities. But because the process of learning itself is imperfectly understood, it is difficult to achieve sustained progress in the quality of education or even to determine which educational innovations actually enhance learning.

Despite these problems, the last fifteen years have produced many promising developments, such as experimental curricula, computer-assisted learning, much-expanded offerings for nontraditional students, clinical legal education, schools of public policy to prepare students for public service careers, and many more. Such initiatives need a more secure and central place within the regular curriculum. In addition to the traditional focus on program and curriculum, Bok stresses the need to pay greater attention to improving the effectiveness of teaching and learning. He calls for a number of steps, including a sustained program of research directed toward evaluating educational programs and methods of teaching. Only through careful experimentation and evaluation of its own efforts, through many small improvements and occasional inspired advances, can each university move toward the goal of giving its students the best possible preparation for life in an increasingly complex world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000O62SIM
• ISBN13: 9780674391765
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 206 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Philosophical challenge of learning

This is a philosophical challenge of learning from Derek Bok, the president of Harvard University. It is also a well-written scrutiny of the American system of higher education from the perspective of 1986. (I should admit that the book is a sewed hardcover and manufactured with very high quality)The author questions "the belief in knowledge for its own sake", and admires with the colleges where the faculties have formulated common goals and work collaboratively to achieve them. This concept is called "competency-based learning", where the students are primarily developing effective communication skills, improving analytic abilities, strengthening problem-solving capabilities. Competency-based learning is opposed to memorizing nomenclatural raw data that the students will soon forget if they won't use this data on day-to-day basis. Throughout the book, the author emphasizes on the imperative of measurement of the quality of learning, and shows the difficulties of such measurements: how can it harm the education by orienting it too heavily to fit the measurements.The author shows pros and cons of the American system compared with Italian, German, French and British systems. Admitting the lack of adequate means of measurement here as well, the author judges that the number of foreign students entering American universities may be a trustworthy mark to conclude that the American system is nevertheless the best. The author doesn't take into consideration that these foreign students may use American universities as an opportunity to enter the wealthy job market of the U.S.Interestingly, in 1986, the computers were extremely expensive and did only start to invade the field of education. Nevertheless, the attitudes of the author towards computers were very optimistic. The author did envision that computers will revolutionarize learning, although he admits that "...technology has raised great hopes on several occasions in the past only to disappoint its backers. Thomas Edison once predicted that the phonograph would revolutionarize teaching, and, several prominent foundations and corporations spent large sums in a futile effort to bring radio and later television into widespread classroom use. In each case the new technology foundered because it cost too much, aroused the opposition of teachers, and failed to deliver the pedagogic gains that it enthusiasts had promised."