ABSTRACT
Let me begin with a quotation from an insightful essay entitled “The Education of the Heart” by James T. Laney, the President of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Laney is a Harvard graduate and wrote this essay for the Harvard Alumni Magazine. 2 He observes:
Until a few decades ago, it was generally agreed that the most important part of the legacy from one generation to another consisted in a kind of wisdom: In what does the good life consist? What is worthy of one's commitment? What is more important than self-gratification? What is good or honorable or true? The second part of that legacy consisted of knowledge and skill, teaching the younger generation how to make a living, how to master a profession, how to become a productive citizen. But through it all education was seen as a moral endeavour - not because it sought to indoctrinate, but because it was a sharing of things that people held to be important. Faculty had authority not only because they were experts in their disciplines, but because they had a common commitment and took seriously the important questions and the responsibility of their answers before a younger generation.
… Within the academic community, that traditional wisdom that we used to try to teach has become embattled because it seems too amateurish, and there is no charge more intimidating for us in the academic world than to be told that we are amateurish. The received wisdom seems too didactic, too preachy. Expertise has now become the necessity. The result is that authority has retreated to that which is more certain, more known, and more demonstrable. A more comprehensive and holistic view of life has given way to specialisation. The shared outlook which that wisdom represented in the past has fragmented.
