The liberal arts are struggling, hounded by concerns about rigor and relevance. This creates a big opening for an author ready to reenergize the liberal arts by infusing them with “practical skills.” That’s Angela Bauer’s project in Teaching Life Skills in the Liberal Arts and Sciences: Preparing Students for Success Beyond the Classroom.
Unfortunately, the result is undone by the same soft-headedness, psychobabble, and dogma responsible for so many of liberal education’s travails.
Bauer, provost at Texas Woman’s University, former vice president for academic affairs at High Point University, and one-time professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, thinks teaching “tangible life skills” is the key to resuscitating the liberal arts—and promises she knows how to do this without compromising academic expectations.
It’s no fun to be so critical of a book penned by someone so obviously enthusiastic about her project.
What are these skills, exactly? It’s not entirely clear. At one point, Bauer cites a list penned by former Harvard president Derek Bok; it includes “civic responsibility, global worldliness, ethical reasoning, and interpersonal skills.” A bit later, she name-checks the Carnegie-Pew project on “Liberal Education and America’s Promise.” Their list includes teamwork, ethical action, intercultural competency, and applying knowledge and skills to new settings and problems. If this reads like a stew of the prosaic stirred together with modish 21st-century skills argle-bargle (“global worldliness”?), you’ve got the idea.
While Bauer insists she wants to bolster the liberal arts and not hollow them out, she also calls for the “knowledge-based learning theory” undergirding “traditional higher education” to be “replaced by experiential learning theory.” She urges a “seismic shift” in which colleges ditch “knowledge-based tests” for “contextualized evidence” and warns that “faculty will need to continuously tune in to labor market demands.” She writes that the “paradigm shift required to transition from a content-based curriculum to a life skills-based curriculum has profound ramifications.”
It certainly seems like Bauer wants to replace academics with a faddish set of HR-friendly, experiential “life skills.” Except that’s not quite right, either.
There’s an odd duality to her book: It’s never clear whether Bauer means it. She frequently implies that the liberal arts just need a bit of technocratic tweaking, not an overhaul. For all her grand talk of transformation, she also promises that teaching these new skills “does not require a significant time investment” and “even just 10-15 minutes per week of life skills” can be enough. Ultimately, it’s tough to be sure where Bauer comes down, especially given her affinity for opaque academese (as when she renders “critical thinking” incomprehensible by noting it entails the six skills, sixteen subskills, and nineteen dispositions identified by the “Delphi Committee”).
Bauer’s 21st-century-skills dreck is hardly new. It has a long and sordid history, especially in K-12 education, where progressive pedagogy has a bad habit of crowding out academic mastery and core knowledge. Emotional intelligence, ethical reasoning, and teamwork are all sensible enough on their merits, but it seems like they always wind up justifying less academic instruction and lowered expectations. And it’s hard to take anything Bauer says about the liberal arts seriously after she starts her chapter on “Critical Thinking” with a riff that could’ve been penned by Kamala Harris: “Not only does wise judgment have a positive impact on our professional success, but it also enhances our personal lives, where problem-solving and making informed decisions are equally if not more important.” Gee, ya think?
Meanwhile, Bauer’s anodyne talk of workforce utility frequently reads like a stalking horse for more dubious agendas. The most glaring example may be her chapter on “Cultural Competence.” She shares advice from the author of Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom on how best to explore “power dynamics and system inequities.” She dwells on why faculty should embrace “autoethnography,” “cultural values inventories,” and “implicit bias awareness,” as well as the activities they can use to explore these. It all gets remarkably therapeutic, and I found myself struggling to understand just what this all had to do with life skills—or how a liberal-arts faculty member might incorporate all of this without compromising instructional content.
When Bauer offers snippets of personal experience, it doesn’t help her cause. She recounts that her teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay included a science class on “Ethnic Minorities in Science” that covered “scientists and physicians from a variety of marginalized groups” and was “rich with assignments” on “lived experiences.” Bauer brags that the class significantly boosted “students’ understanding of institutional racism” and “environmental racism.” She explains that this kind of instruction can “challenge students to critically examine our systems,” yielding a “deeper level of cultural competence.” Throughout, she insists there’s nothing ideological or political here—that it’s just a matter of preparing students for “future workplace success.”
The longer Bauer goes on, the harder it is to see what her mélange of buzzwords and progressive nostrums has to do with instruction in literature, science, math, or history. Her extensive list of new skills, activities, and habits of mind seem like they’ll inevitably squeeze out academic rigor and high expectations.
It’s no fun to be so critical of a book penned by someone so obviously enthusiastic about her project. But the book’s flaws are telling. After all, you’d think a how-to book on making the liberal arts more practical would be clear, concrete, and sensitive to concerns about academic exactitude. The fact that it’s the very opposite says something.
Here’s the thing. As a high-school teacher and college professor, I enthusiastically employed many of the practices that Bauer touts. I, too, am an ardent fan of group projects, debates, the Socratic method, team-based exercises, and the like. If I believed that she saw these as sensible ways to enrich liberal education and judiciously incorporate useful skills, I’d be on board. Unfortunately, Bauer’s incoherence, taste for therapeutic argle-bargle, reflexive lapse into progressive tropes, and seeming disinterest in content knowledge left the clear impression that hers is instead a blueprint for yet another academic misadventure. For anyone who’s spent much time around higher education this century, that’s an all-too-familiar sensation.
Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the co-author of Getting Education Right.