ISI Faculty Resource Center

I wondered whether you could comment on the relationship between accreditation and process-based education. Although I agree with you that content-based education is superior, it is not recognized by academic administrators, which ultimately creates a problem for the university's accreditation.

I'd like to raise a friendly objection to a small point you made about process-based education. While I don't believe you meant to suggest that process-based education is therapeutic in the truest sense of that term, I still think it's a bad choice of words (unless you put scare-quotes around it). I take it that you mean to suggest that process-based education is something like what Victor Davis Hanson describes as therapeutic education, which aims to be soothing rather than challenging to the student. But this is not therapy! Therapy aims at the student's good, restores health to the student's soul. Therapy is salvific. In this sense teachers ought to regard their art as therapeutic. This is certainly how the ancient philosophers thought of education.

In fact, I think education is trouble today largely because teachers don't take their role as therapists--as men and women whose job involves care for their students' souls--seriously enough. Nobody who truly cares for his or her students will be content to let them persist in ignorance of what it will do them good to know. (Again, I don't think we disagree.)

Process-based education does have that underlying meaning of the therapeutic, but it also refers to developing a skill set that is not rooted in content, e.g., critical thinking skills, lucid communication skills. In fact, it is required we put such language in our syllabi. In other words, what a students knows is less relevant than what he or she can do.

I think there needs to be a balance of process-based and content-based education. Consider an education where content is EVERYTHING, since one has to "fight 'dem relativists," and where process is given no place whatsoever. The teachers of humanities, philosophy, theology, etc., become mere "conservative" catechism instructors, with the students passive receptacles of "truth"--but one quite reactionary, simplistic, but oh-so-anti-relativistic, and replete with sophistical--but "conservative"--shibboleths. It's a program for conservative indoctrination to counter the liberal indoctrination. Bad idea. It's analogous to the "manual" approach to teaching Thomism before Aeterni Patris.

Of course, process with no content is another devil, to be sure, but reacting against this will only produce another devil. The former is questions with no answers, and the latter is answers with no questions.

Thank you all for your responses and for reading my post. Here are my thoughts:

1. It is our task to persuade and convince our administrators regarding the virtues of content-based education. And when we think of employment offers, we should think carefully about the types of administrators for whom we may work. I think persuading them is possible but not necessarily easy. 2. Unless teachers become philosopher or philosophers become teachers, then I am against teachers being therapeutic in the classroom. I agree with you, David, in principle. 3. Content-based education, as Lee suggests, implies a methodology. Understanding it solely in terms of just a type of catechism misses the boat. It implies a dialectic methodology.

I like the phrase, "unless teachers become philosophers or philosophers become teachers." If only . . .