Elizabeth Coleman Schools Us

Stately, elegant, eloquent Elizabeth Coleman, the president of Bennington College, is a designer of sorts. She redesigned the college 20 years ago into a radically different curriculum that focused on a more broad definition of a liberal arts education. This is an especially big issue for design, which usually has such a focus on technical skills and specialization. Her argument is that design can be a central part of this new kind of education (the other part being critical writing and rhetoric). In fact, she says, you can see evidence of design thinking in philosophers and thinkers as far back as Plato. “Lest you think that Tim Brown is the first to appreciate the value of prototyping,” she says. “If you don’t get the design right, you’re not going to get much else.”

Elizabeth Coleman of Bennington College

Education in general is a mess (no surprise there). But our schools are going in such a direction that we’re too focused on specialization and skill acquisition. This means that instead of learning more and more about more, we’re learning less of less and less. The risks to society are massive: oversimplifications of civic engagement, idealization of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, only technical mastery and neutrality…which all can put people at risk of getting educated by the media, or as she calls it “the ‘other’ educational institution.” She encourages a broader curriculum that focuses not on teaching right and wrong, but engagement. More specifically, civic engagement, and environmentalism, health, ethics, equity and governance. “The point is not to treat these as topics of study but a course of action.” Sounds great, but where do we enroll?

Kurt Andersen interviews Elizabeth Coleman