Chalk and Talk: Creativity in Literacy-The Ability to Choose

(taken from my weekly class blog: Chalk and Talk [the best blog title I've ever made])

Where do educators draw the line between tradition and new emerging ideas of literacy?

 Should we reinvent the idea of liberal arts and literacy?

In this TED speech, (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/liz_coleman_s_call_to_reinvent_liberal_arts_education.html) Liz Coleman makes the argument that liberal arts education no longer exists in its traditional form and instead, it has become professionalized, losing the True meaning of civic engagement and critical thought. Now, liberal arts education has settled on thought complacency, a sort-of professionalized educational mechanism, with more disparity between disciplines with increased secularism.   I argue  this new form of education for professionalism and secularism, allows many aspects of enrichment to be lost. Personally, I believe we should not be educated because we need a job, we should be educated because we want to become engaged citizens. A job is a necessity, knowledge is not an privilege and the larger civic questions should not be ignored or disregarded.

100 years earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche, in his book “On The Future of Educational Institutions” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28146/28146-h/28146-h.htm,  wrote,

“Every so-called classical education has only one healthy and natural starting point,
the artistic, serious, and rigorous habituation in the use of the mother tongue. . . .
Here where gradually the distinguishing feeling for form and for barbarism awakes,
the wing bestirs itself for the first time that carries to the right and sole home of education, to Greek antiquity. Of course we would not come very far with the help of
that wing all alone in the attempt to bring ourselves close to that castle of the
Hellenic, infinitely distant and enclosed within diamond ramparts: rather anew we
need the same leaders, the same teachers, our German classics, in order ourselves to
become swept away under the wingbeat of their ancient endeavors – to the land of
longing, to Greece.”

In this book, Nietzsche argues that education should be put above all else- economics, culture, politics, capitalism (and other such major governing bodies). Much like Coleman, he argues that something needs to be reformed or changed within the system. While it might be 100 years difference between the two bodies of work, both related directly to Boomer’s  postmodern idea of literacy. How do we as teachers teach literacy effectively? How do we integrate new practices with old tradition? And, take a step back,  What does it mean to educate? 

You are probably wondering where this all fits in?  I keep returning go the idea of  a neo-literacy fusion (hypertext, digital literacy integrated with print text) and reforming the curriculum in the classroom. Students need to be engaged in what they are learning.I can study the different ways behind literacy comprehension, how to build readers and try to facilitate an interpretive reading environment, but, none of this matters if the student’s don’t care about what they’re reading. It all seems obsolete. 

My question is,  how do we as educators recognize the loss of liberal arts education idea- a way in which we no longer emphasize, how to critically assess and become civically engaged and, simultaneously  recognize the need to put education at the top of a cultural priority list, while shifting classroom styles to facilitate new literacy practices?