What Should Colleges Teach?

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The nice thing about this benefit is that it can be had no matter what the content of the core curriculum is. It could be the classics of western literature and philosophy. It could be science fiction. It could be globalization. It could be anything so long as every student took it. But whatever it is, please let it include a writing course that teaches writing and not everything under the sun.That should be the real core of any curriculum.
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/?em


August 24, 2009, 9:30 pm
What Should Colleges Teach?

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.

As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research. Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which last week issued its latest white paper, “What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and Universities.”

Click on the square at top right to read the paper.

Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure colleges and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.

The battle between those who actually work in the academy and those who would monitor academic work from the outside has been going on for well over 100 years and I am on record (in “Save The World On Your Own Time” and elsewhere ) as being against external regulation of classroom practices if only because the impulse animating the effort to regulate is always political rather than intellectual.

It is of course true that political motives can also inform the decisions made by academic insiders; the professorial guild is far from pure. But the cure for the politicization of the classroom by some professors is not the counter-politicization urged by ACTA when it crusades for “accountability,” a code word for reconfiguring the academy according to conservative ideas and agendas.

Nevertheless, I found myself often nodding in agreement when I was reading ACTA’s new report. In it, the 100 colleges and universities are ranked on a scale from A to F based on whether students are required to take courses in seven key areas — composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and natural or physical science.

It’s hard to quarrel with this list; the quarrel and the criticism have been provoked by the criteria that accompany it. These criteria are stringent and narrow and have been criticized as parochial and motivated by nostalgia and politics; but in at least four of the seven areas they make perfect sense. Credit for requiring instruction in mathematics will not be given for linguistic courses or computer literacy courses because their “math content is usually minimal.” Credit for requiring instruction in the natural or physical sciences will not be given for courses with “weak scientific content” or courses “taught by faculty outside of the science departments” (i.e., the philosophy or history of science). Credit for requiring instruction in a foreign language will not be given for fewer than three semesters of study because it takes that long to acquire “competency at the intermediate level.” And credit for requiring composition will not be given for courses that are “writing intensive” (there is a significant amount of writing required but the focus is on some substantive topic), or for courses in disciplines other than English and composition (often termed “writing in the discipline” courses), or for courses in public speaking, or for remedial courses. In order to qualify, a course must be devoted to “grammar, style, clarity, and argument.”

The rationale behind these exclusions is compelling: mathematics, the natural sciences, foreign languages and composition are disciplines with a specific content and a repertoire of essential skills. Courses that center on another content and fail to provide concentrated training in those skills are really courses in another subject. You can tell when you are being taught a mathematical function or a scientific procedure or a foreign language or the uses of the subjunctive and when you are being taught something else.

Things are not so clear when it comes to literature and history. Why should the literature requirement be fulfilled only by “a comprehensive literary survey” and not by single-author courses (aren’t Shakespeare and Milton “comprehensive” enough), or by a course in the theater or the graphic novel or the lyrics of Bob Dylan (all rejected in the report)?

With respect to science, composition, foreign language instruction and mathematics, ACTA is simply saying, Don’t slight the core of the discipline. But when the report decrees that only broad surveys of literature can fulfill a literature requirement, the organization is intervening in the discipline and taking sides in its internal debates. Why should trustees and alumni have a say in determining whether the graphic novel — a multi-media art that goes back at least as far as William Blake — deserves to represent literature? (For the record, I think it does.) This part of the report is an effort to shape the discipline from the outside according to a political vision.

This holds too for the insistence that only the study of American history “in both chronological and thematic breadth” can fulfill the history requirement. Here the politics is explicit: such courses, we are told, are “indispensable for the formation of citizens and for the preservation of our free institutions.”

Indispensable I doubt (this is academic hubris); and while the formation of citizens and the preservation of our free institutions may be admirable aims, it is not the task of courses in history to achieve them. The question of how best to introduce students to the study of history should be answered not by invoking external goals, however worthy, but by arguing the merits of academic alternatives; and I see no obvious reason why a course on the Civil War or the American revolution or the French revolution (or both of them together) would not do the job as well as a survey stretching from the landing at Plymouth Rock to the war in Iraq. (At any rate, the issue is one for academic professionals to decide.)

But if I have no problem with alternative ways of teaching literature or history, how can I maintain (with ACTA) that there is only one way to teach writing? Easy. It can’t be an alternative way of teaching writing to teach something else (like multiculturalism or social justice). It can, however, be an alternative way of teaching history to forgo a broad chronological narrative and confine yourself to a single period or even to a single world-changing event. It is the difference between not doing the job and getting the job done by another route.

This difference is blurred in ACTA report because it is running (and conflating) two arguments. One argument (with which I agree) says teach the subject matter and don’t adulterate it with substitutes. The other argument says teach the subject matter so that it points in a particular ideological direction, the direction of traditional values and a stable canon. The first argument is methodological and implies no particular politics; the other is political through and through, and it is the argument the authors are finally committed to because they see themselves as warriors in the culture wars. The battle they are fighting in the report is over the core curriculum, the defense of which is for them a moral as well as an educational imperative as it is for those who oppose it.

The arguments pro and con are familiar. On one side the assertion that a core curriculum provides students with the distilled wisdom of the western tradition and prepares them for life. On the other side the assertion that a core curriculum packages and sells the prejudices and biases of the reigning elite and so congeals knowledge rather than advancing it.

Have we lost our way or finally found it? Thirty-five years ago there was no such thing as a gay and lesbian studies program; now you can build a major around it. For some this development is a sign that a brave new world has arrived; for others it marks the beginning of the end of civilization.

It probably is neither; curricular alternatives are just not that world-shaking. The philosophical baggage that burdens this debate should be jettisoned and replaced with a more prosaic question: What can a core curriculum do that the proliferation of options and choices (two words excoriated in the ACTA report) cannot? The answer to that question is given early in the report before it moves on to its more polemical pages. An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.”

The nice thing about this benefit is that it can be had no matter what the content of the core curriculum is. It could be the classics of western literature and philosophy. It could be science fiction. It could be globalization. It could be anything so long as every student took it. But whatever it is, please let it include a writing course that teaches writing and not everything under the sun.That should be the real core of any curriculum.

[nvha]

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/05/19/failure_to_communicate/

Failure to communicate
The inability of many students to write clear, cogent sentences has costly implications for the digital age
By Kara Miller | May 19, 2010

WHEN YOU teach English to college students, you quickly realize two things.

First, many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school. I initially noticed this as an undergraduate English major at Yale, where I helped peers revise their papers. I saw it again in graduate school at Tufts, where I taught freshman writing classes. And it has also struck me at Babson, where, for the past two years, I have instructed first-year students.

The second thing English teachers realize is that correcting students’ papers is tremendously time consuming. I constantly do battle with myself to spend less than 20 minutes on a paper. At meetings, instructors are often urged not to exceed 15 minutes, but I frequently end up spending double that. This can be a genuinely frustrating experience: 50 papers stacked on the coffee table, 10 in the finished pile, and an entire afternoon gone.

But I can’t help it; there’s so much to correct. Subjects don’t agree with verbs. “Its’’ and “it’s’’ are used interchangeably. “They are’’ is confused with “their.’’ And facts too often function as topic sentences. Many of the students whose work I correct are smart, motivated, and quick to incorporate suggestions. But they have either forgotten the rules of writing, or they never learned them in the first place.

Some of the problem, of course, is carelessness. But much of it is not. I have read seniors’ cover letters — letters that aim to snag them a dream job — and they’re frequently riddled with both grammatical and stylistic mistakes.

Inadequate writing skills have led to concern in colleges across the country. In 2007, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that just 24 percent of 12th-graders scored “proficient’’ or better. That same year, more than 80 percent of students at the City University of New York had to enroll in remedial courses in reading, writing, or math.

Vartan Gregorian, the former president of Brown University, has expressed deep concern about the erosion of solid communication skills. “In an age overwhelmed by information (we are told, for example, that all available information doubles every two to three years), we should view this as a crisis, because the ability to read, comprehend, and write — in other words, to organize information into knowledge — can be viewed as tantamount to a survival skill.’’
Which leads to a serious question: why do so many students come to college without a command of fundamentals?

To some degree, it’s a mathematical problem. If it takes me all weekend to correct 40 papers, how can a high school English teacher begin to tackle 120 papers (four sections, 30 students per section) in a detail-oriented way?

The few teachers who do spend day and night reviewing papers deserve both a medal and a hefty raise. As they know, fixing students’ writing is complex; it simply cannot be boiled down to a multiple-choice test or a series of right-and-wrong answers. Which may mean rethinking the way writing is taught in high school — and, perhaps, the way teachers are compensated.

We often belittle English teachers — if you speak and read English, how hard can it be to teach it? — but those with strong communication skills are both rare and valuable. Recall that when Massachusetts implemented a teachers’ test 12 years ago, the public was shocked to discover that more than 30 percent of prospective teachers failed the literacy portion.

Though the media tend to focus on nationwide shortages of math and science teachers — which are indeed acute — finding, coaching, and retaining good English teachers is an underreported struggle. Indeed, as anyone who has received a poorly written e-mail, assessment, memo, cover letter, or report knows, writing — both good and bad — has real power. The National Commission on Writing (a part of the College Board) has calculated that “remedying deficiencies in writing costs American corporations as much as $3.1 billion annually.’’

In an increasingly digital world, writing acts as a vehicle for knowledge — giving it short shrift in the classroom is a serious mistake.
Kara Miller teaches at Babson College.

READER COMMENTS (270+) http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/05/19/failure_to_communicate/?comments=all#readerComm

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Nhàn
Lý Lan
Thứ Năm, 29/7/2010, 09:06 (GMT+7)

http://www.thesaigontimes.vn/Home/vanhoa/tanvan/38285/


(TBKTSG) - Dạo này tôi sống nhàn: thong thả ăn, thong thả dạo chơi, thong thả đọc, và ngay lúc này là thong thả viết. Có gì mà vội?

Hạnh phúc, theo như tấm thiệp sinh nhật tôi vừa nhận được, không là đích đến, mà là hành trình. Dòng chữ in chìm trên nền thiệp như kiểu chân lý được khắc vào đá núi. Không thấy ghi trích dẫn kinh sách nào. Chắc là chân lý đó được phát hiện ít nhứt trên trăm năm, cho nên công ty in thiệp không cần lo đến vấn đề bản quyền.

Theo phát kiến đó thì càng chậm tới đích, càng kéo dài hành trình, người ta càng hưởng được nhiều hạnh phúc. Hạnh phúc ở trong cái cách mình sống cuộc đời này. Tôi mới sống hết nửa cái trăm năm của đời người, nhưng đã từng quen biết nhiều người sống trước tôi vài ba chục năm đến nửa thế kỷ. Ít nhứt một lần tôi đã nghe những người thượng thọ ấy nói: “Càng sống càng khổ”. Có người, không biết thật tình hay không, còn nói họ mong sớm nhắm mắt xuôi tay cho… khỏe.


Nhưng việc gì tôi phải băn khoăn? Thực tế là sau vài phen suýt chết, tôi đã mường tượng được chân dung tử thần. Cho dù đó là Tử thần, mà mình “biết mặt” vài phen là đủ hết sợ, hay bớt sợ. Ổng đã cho mình một cái hẹn, ở chỗ dù mình không thích, mình cũng không thể không đến.

Nhưng mắc gì phải gấp gáp? Yêu cuồng sống vội là phong trào nửa thế kỷ trước. Những người đã trải qua phong trào đó nay thành ông nội bà ngoại cả. Họ đang chậm lại. Mình đi sau họ, thì cứ thong thả. Qua mặt họ làm gì? Sau lưng mình còn mấy đám trẻ say tốc độ, kệ tụi nó.

Tôi cứ thong thả. Đành rằng tốc độ đáng ngưỡng mộ: nhắp con chuột một cái là bài viết này đang ở trong máy tính của tôi sẽ hiện ra trên màn hình máy tính người biên tập trong nháy mắt, nếu anh/chị ấy cũng cùng lúc nối với mạng toàn cầu.

Nếu trong bài này có chi tiết thông tin nào anh/chị ấy muốn kiểm chứng thì cũng dễ dàng copy một từ hay cụm từ trong văn bản bỏ vô ô tìm kiếm của một hệ thống truy tìm dữ liệu nào đó, như Google chẳng hạn, là sẽ có kết quả đại khái như “108.999 thông tin trong 0,12 giây”. Bây giờ là thời đại gì mà tôi nói chuyện thong thả?

Nào phải tôi trái khoáy ngược đời. Cũng chẳng phải là kẻ tiên phong gì. Phong trào nhàn đang lan tràn ở các xã hội đã qua kỳ hiện đại, như châu Âu và Bắc Mỹ. Những người quan sát những chuyển dịch văn hóa gần đây trong thế giới chúng ta đang sống ắt không lạ gì những từ “slow food”, tôi tạm dịch là nhàn thực, hay “slow travel” tức nhàn du; và gần đây trong giới học giả xuất hiện nỗ lực cổ vũ “slow reading”, diễn nôm là đọc chậm, tức là đọc kỹ.

Nhàn thực được hưởng ứng vì lý do sức khỏe. Không cần tốn nước miếng thuyết phục người có chút tri thức khoa học nào rằng “fast food”, đồ ăn nhanh, hay đồ ăn chế biến sẵn, không lành mạnh bằng đồ ăn tươi, có nguồn gốc thiên nhiên, nấu nướng từ từ trước khi dọn lên ăn thong thả. Chỉ cần lấy thí dụ một gói “mì ăn liền” so với một tô phở với bánh phở tươi chan nước lèo hầm xương 20 tiếng đồng hồ, có rau thơm giá sống tươi rói, ăn tới đâu tùy khẩu vị thêm chanh ớt tương ngò tới đó. “Mì ăn liền” chỉ hơn ở chỗ “nhanh”, chế nước sôi vô một phút là có ăn, có lẽ cũng ngon, và rẻ. Nhưng nếu có thể lựa chọn, tôi chọn ăn phở “tươi”.

Phong trào nhàn du cũng nhấn mạnh vào lợi ích sức khỏe, bên cạnh lợi ích môi trường. Thay vì mỗi cái mỗi nhảy lên xe hơi, dù chỉ 5, 10 phút phóng vù vù trên xa lộ, thì người ta đi xe đạp, hay đi bộ nếu có thể, vừa vận động thể dục, vừa giảm lượng khí cac-bo-nic thải vào không khí. Chính quyền của thành phố tôi đang ở khuyến khích “slow travel” bằng những làn đường dành riêng cho xe đạp, xây những lối đi an toàn và ngoạn mục cho người đi bộ, những đường này vừa quanh co uốn lượn theo sườn đồi, hay cặp sát bờ biển, xuyên qua rừng, công viên, đồng thời do được ưu tiên nên có thể đi tắt đến những trung tâm hành chính, giáo dục, giải trí, thương mại. Những trung tâm đó đều được nối bằng các tuyến xe buýt, và xe buýt luôn luôn có giá để xe đạp ở trước đầu xe. Mình đạp xe mệt thì để xe đạp lên mũi xe buýt, leo lên xe buýt đi tới nơi, dỡ xe đạp xuống, lại thong dong dạo cảnh.

Đọc chậm được các giáo sư đề xuất từ hơn một năm nay trong các trường đại học và nay lan ra công chúng. Đọc chậm mới đọc kỹ, mới thấu hiểu hay thưởng thức được văn bản, nhưng quan trọng hơn là nghiên cứu khoa học cho thấy bộ não con người phát triển tốt hơn khi người ta đọc kỹ. Khoảng mười năm về trước, và lùi đến mấy ngàn năm nữa về thời mới có sách có chữ, người ta đọc sách nói chung là kỹ, hoạt động đọc sách gần như hoạt động tư duy.

Từ thời Internet, người ta không thực sự “đọc” cái gì nữa, chỉ cóc nhảy từ cái tít này đến cái tựa nọ, dùng từ khóa để lướt qua những trích đoạn có liên quan, hoặc liếc qua tóm tắt hay nhận định của người khác về vấn đề cần biết. Một trong những hệ lụy của việc “đọc nhanh” này là một hiện tượng phổ biến không chỉ trên văn đàn tiếng Việt mà cả tiếng Anh, tiếng Hoa: người ta tranh luận về một cuốn sách mình không đọc với những người cũng không đọc cuốn sách đó.

Bây giờ đến viết thong thả. Cái này tôi đặt ra cho riêng mình. Bạn bè độc giả tưởng tôi viết nhiều viết nhanh. Thực ra thao tác viết của tôi rất chậm. Không đến nỗi ba năm mới xong một câu thơ. Nhưng tôi gõ máy tính bằng hai ngón tay, viết một câu xóa hai câu, được 1.200 chữ là mất toi một ngày. Có khi viết xong rồi thì nhận thấy nó nhảm nhí, lạc hậu, cũ xì. (Tôi bắt đầu cảm thấy rồi nha). Cho nên không việc gì phải hăm hở, hùng hục, háo hức viết ra một điều gì đó. Cứ thong thả. Thong thả nghĩ, thong thả viết, đến cuối bài thong thả đọc lại, thấy viết vầy cũng được mà không viết cũng được. Hạnh phúc ở quá trình sáng tác chứ không phải ở sản phẩm. Phải vậy không?

[nvha]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/opinion/31lee.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

March 30, 2011
What I Learned at School
By MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE
Providence, R.I.

THE tumult over state budgets and collective bargaining rights for public employees has spilled over into resentment toward public school teachers, who are increasingly derided as “glorified baby sitters” whose pay exceeds the value of the work they do.

But how exactly do we measure the value of a teacher?

As a writer, I often receive feedback from readers I have never met. But the other day, I received a most unexpected message in response to one of my essays:
“I am so proud of you and all you have accomplished. I shared your opinion from The L.A. Times with my family and reminisced about you as my student at Hibbing High School.”

It was signed Margaret Leibfried, who was my English teacher — a teacher who appeared at a critical juncture in my life and helped me believe that I could become a writer.

Thirty years ago, in Hibbing, a town in northern Minnesota that is home to the world’s largest open-pit iron mine, I entered high school as a bookish introvert made all the more shy because I was the school’s only nonwhite student. I always felt in danger of being swept away by a sea of statuesque blond athletes. By 10th grade, I’d developed a Quasimodo-like posture and crabwise walk, hoping to escape being teased as a “brain” or a “chink,” and then finding being ignored almost equally painful. I spent a lot of time alone, reading and scribbling stories.

Ms. Leibfried taught American literature and composition grammar, which involved the usual — memorizing vocabulary and diagramming sentences — but also, thrillingly, reading novels.

Thrilling to me, that is. Many of my classmates expressed disdain for novels because they were “not real.” For once, I didn’t care what they thought. Ms. Leibfried seemed to notice my interest in both reading and writing, and she took the time to draw me out; she even offered reading suggestions, like one of her favorite novels, “The Bell Jar.”

That year’s big project was a book report, to be read aloud to the class. However, Ms. Leibfried took me aside and suggested I do something “a little different.” Instead of a report, I was to pick a passage from a book, memorize it and recite it in front of the class.
While I longed for the safety and routine of the report, I was curious how this new assignment might work out. By then obsessed with “The Bell Jar,” I chose a passage that I thought showed off the protagonist’s growing depression as well as Sylvia Plath’s sly humor.

The morning of the presentations, I remember my palms sweating so badly as I walked to the front of the class that I held my hands cupped in prayer formation, so I wouldn’t wipe them on my shirt.
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade.

Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.

It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.

It made me tired just to think of it.

I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.
Dr. Gordon twiddled a silver pencil. “Your mother tells me you are upset.”
I finished and, to my surprise, the class broke out in applause. “As a writer and a good reader, Marie has picked out a particularly sensitive piece of prose and delivered it beautifully,” Ms. Leibfried said, beaming. I felt, maybe for the first time, confident.

Ms. Leibfried was followed the next year by Mrs. Borman, quiet, elderly and almost as shy as I was. She surprised everyone when she excused me from her grammar class, saying my time would be spent more productively writing in the library. I took the work seriously, and on a whim submitted an essay I’d come up with to Seventeen Magazine. When they published it, it was big news for the high school — it was even announced on the P.A. system. Mrs. Borman wasn’t mentioned, nor did she ever take any credit; in her mind she was just doing her job.

I can now appreciate how much courage it must have taken for those teachers to let me deviate so broadly from the lesson plan. With today’s pressure on teachers to “teach to the test,” I wonder if any would or could take the time to coax out the potential in a single, shy student.
If we want to understand how much teachers are worth, we should remember how much we were formed by our own schooldays. Good teaching helps make productive and fully realized adults — a result that won’t show up in each semester’s test scores and statistics.

That’s easy to forget, as budget battles rage and teacher performance is viewed through the cold metrics of the balance sheet. While the love of literature and confidence I gained from Ms. Leibfried’s class shaped my career and my life, after only four short years at Hibbing High School, she was laid off because of budget cuts, and never taught again.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, the author of the novel “Somebody’s Daughter,” teaches writing at Brown.

[Torai112]

Rất nhiều bài hay và bổ ích, nhưng chị có thể đưa ra thêm ý kiến cá nhân đánh giá để mọi người cùng đánh giá hơn được nữa không ạh?

[nvha]

http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Should-Teach/130868/

February 19, 2012

Colleges Should Teach Intellectual Virtues


Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle
By Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe

Look at what colleges state as their aims, and you'll find a predictable list: Teach students how to think critically and analytically; teach them how to write and calculate; teach them the skills of their discipline. As important as such goals are, another fundamental goal is largely being neglected—developing the intellectual virtues they need to be good students, and good citizens.

Some academics may cringe at being charged with the task of developing virtue, believing that it's a job for others—especially when there is so little agreement about what "virtue" even means in a pluralistic society like ours. They are mistaken. In fact, we often encourage such development—if a bit unreflectively. We would do much better to take the time to think through what the central intellectual virtues are, why they are so important, and how they should be integrated into our curricula:

The love of truth. Young people need to love the truth to be good students. Without it, they will only get things right because we punish them for getting them wrong. When a significant minority of Americans reject evolution and global warming out of hand, the desire to find the truth rather than "truthiness" cannot be taken for granted.

Honesty. Students need to be honest because it enables them to face the limits of what they themselves know, encourages them to confront their mistakes, and helps them acknowledge uncongenial truths about the world. Most colleges encourage a kind of honesty: Don't plagiarize and don't cheat. But it is uncommon to hear them tell students, "Face up to your ignorance and error" or, "Accept this unpleasant truth and see how you can mitigate its effects instead of denying it."

Courage. Students need courage to stand up for what they believe is true, sometimes in the face of mass disagreement from others, including people in authority, like their professors.

Fairness. Students also need to be fair-minded in evaluating the arguments of others. They need the humility to face up to their own limitations and mistakes. They need perseverance, since little that is worth knowing comes easily. They need to be good listeners because students can't learn from others, or from us, without it. And they need to be able to take the perspective of others, and empathize, especially in an age in which almost all serious published work is collaborative.

Wisdom. Most important, students need what Aristotle called practical wisdom. Wisdom is what enables us to find the balance between timidity and recklessness, between carelessness and obsessiveness, between flightiness and stubbornness, between speaking up and listening up, between trust and skepticism, between empathy and detachment. And wisdom is also what enables us to make difficult decisions among intellectual virtues that may conflict. Being fair and open-minded often rubs up against fidelity to the truth.

So how do we develop the intellectual virtues in our students? Few colleges think systematically about it. Aristotle rightly argued that character and wisdom are developed through practice and by watching those who have already mastered the relevant virtues. Some teachers have structured educational experiences to do exactly that.

Take the approach to education in the Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools that teach thousands of elementary-school children in dozens of poor, inner-city neighborhoods. KIPP has found that developing academic skills demands developing character. With virtues like perseverance and honesty and some of the other intellectual virtues we've described as essential parts of the curriculum, it's been possible for KIPP students to achieve high levels of proficiency in mathematics, English, and science. And these intellectual virtues aren't simply values that are preached. The teachers work hard, and consciously, at figuring out how to incorporate them in what they model in their everyday behavior. For example, in teaching first graders the importance of good listening, and how to listen well, KIPP teachers look intently at a student who is talking, and nod vigorously at what is being said.

At the other end of the academic continuum, the Harvard Medical School doctors Barbara Ogur and David Hirsch redesigned their third-year program at a community hospital in Cambridge, Mass., in order to better develop character. Combating the common erosion of empathy among medical students was one concern; teaching judgment another. Instead of changing course material, they changed the way students, teachers, and patients interacted. Instead of relying on rushed, impersonal encounters in frenetic hospital wards, each student was assigned to work in clinics every morning in close relationships with their doctor-mentors, and each student was assigned 15 patients to work with for the whole year. The aim was to structure learning experiences that simultaneously taught technical skills and encouraged the development of empathy, humility, courage, perseverance, perceptiveness, and reflectiveness.

The Cambridge and KIPP teachers programs do by design what some college professors also do, if often by accident. What questions we ask in class teach students how to ask questions. How we pursue the dialogue with them models reflectiveness. They watch whom we call on, or don't, and learn about fairness. We teach them when and how to interrupt—by when and how we interrupt. We teach them how to listen by how carefully we listen. If they see us admitting that we don't know something, we encourage intellectual honesty as well as humility. We are always modeling. And the students are always watching. We need to do it better.

The mass-production approach to higher education that dominates at most institutions these days is much more focused on the "efficient" transmission of knowledge than it is on the nurturing of intellectual virtue. And when students notice the neglect of intellectual virtue in their own educational experience, they are likely to neglect it themselves when they are leading their adult lives as teachers and professionals. Lecturing college students about intellectual virtues promises to be about as effective as lecturing M.B.A. students about business ethics.

Intellectual virtues are no substitute for disciplinary skills. We have to fill the empty vessel. No one will choose a cardiologist who is brimming with love of truth, honesty, and perseverance but empty of anatomy and physiology. But it takes intellectual virtues to fill that vessel.

Barry Schwartz is a professor of social theory and social action and Kenneth Sharpe is a professor of political science, both at Swarthmore College. They are the authors of Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing (Riverhead Press, 2010).