“Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.”
In 1943, Harvard University President James Bryant Conant published an essay about education in The New York Times where he uses this quote to describe what we all are working towards:
A general education is something apart from a specialized vocational or professional training. It is, if you will, education for citizenship or education of the whole [person] as distinct from the development of certain skills or the acquirement of certain knowledge. It concerns “that which is left after all that has been learned has been forgotten.”
For learning to have occurred, there must be a change in the learner. It is this change that remains, even after one forgets about the details of what one learned.
How does this change begin?
With the smallest piece of the educational process: information. Finding it. Comparing it with other information. Questioning. Analyzing. Evaluating. Synthesizing. Sharing the information in a variety of formats with the intent to create…change. These critical thinking skills are the very foundation upon which the framework for information literacy and our general education curriculum is built. Skills that are scary to learn and terrifying to teach. But all of us make up the safety net for our students (and colleagues!) up on that high wire. We have all worked with students who are unsure, anxious or afraid. It is our job as educators to supply encouragement, information and to model the fearless pursuit of learning to which we hope they aspire.
