2. ELEMENTOS BIBLICOS, TEOLOGICOS Y PASTORALES DEL CATECUMENADO
2.1 Elementos Bíblicos del Catecumenado: El Discipulado en clave Joánica
It is as if the institution had captured the traditional ideals of the community college—access for all, responsiveness to community needs, pipeline to further education and employment opportunities, emphasis upon teaching and learning—and found the prize wanting…In the pursuit of innovative
approaches or simply survival tactics to respond to the various communities and stakeholders, as well as to maintain the reputation and image, community colleges have lost the humanistically meaningful part of their mission while attaining economic and political goals.
—John Levin, The Globalization of the Community College Thus American colleges and universities face the need both for improving the performance of their traditional tasks and for assuming the new tasks created for them by the new internal conditions and external relations under which the American people are striving to live and to grow as a free people. 228
(Emphasis added)
—Gail Kennedy, Introduction to Higher Education for American Democracy A generation ago, our society was affluent, richer than it had ever been, with the prospect that its wealth would be more widely and deeply shared than ever before. The American economy…dominated the global economy. Ours was the only major economy to emerge intact from World War II. Trade barriers limited global competition. Our industrial plant and national infrastructure were the envy of the world. As a people, we believed we could afford practically anything, and we undertook practically everything.
Those days are behind us. Global competition is transforming the economic landscape. Fierce competitors from abroad have entered domestic markets, and one great American industry after another has felt the effects. We have watched with growing concern as our great national strengths have been challenged, as the gap between rich and poor has widened, as the nation’s economic energy has been sapped by budget and trade deficits. We have struggled—so far unsuccessfully—to set the country back on the confident, spirited course we took for granted a generation ago.229
—Wingspread Group, An American Imperative: Higher Expectations for Higher Education.
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”230
—James Madison, Political Observations, 1795 “The impulses that have landed us in a war of no exits and no deadlines come from within. Foreign policy has, for decades, provided an outward manifestation of American domestic ambitions, urges, and fears. In our own time, it has increasingly become an expression of domestic dysfunction—an attempt to manage or defer coming to terms with contradictions besetting the American way of life. Those
contradictions have found their ultimate expression in a perpetual state of war afflicting the United States today….Gauging their implications requires that we acknowledge their source: they reflect the
accumulated detritus of freedom, the by-products of our frantic pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.”231 —Andrew Blacevich, The Limits of Power. History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.232
In April 2007 Dana Grove, JCCC Executive Vice President, commenced a new strategic planning cycle with a brunch meeting for all participating staff. He opened the meeting by showing an audiovisual presentation titled, “Did You Know?”233 Produced for a secondary
education conference in Colorado, the presentation cites several facts concerning world demographics, technological advances, globalization of industry, and exponentially increasing rates of information production. These are connected with rising educational attainment outside the U.S., and the presentation suggests implications from all of this for American educators. For example (emphases in the original):
—China will soon become the NUMBER ONE English speaking country in the world.
—The 25% of India’s population with the highest IQ’s is GREATER than the total population of the United States….TRANSLATION: India has more honors kids than America has kids.
—The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004.
—We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.
—Today’s learner will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38.
—1 in 4 workers have been with their current employer for less than a year; 1 in 2 have been there LESS THAN FIVE YEARS.
—There are over 200 million registered users on MySpace.” 234 If MySpace were a country it would
be the 5TH LARGEST IN THE WORLD (in between Indonesia and Brazil).
—The 19th-ranked country in Broadband Internet Penetration is the U.S.
—There are 31 billion searches on Google every month; in 2006 this number was 2.7 Billion.235 TO
WHOM were these questions addressed Before Google?
—Today, the number of text messages sent and received everyday exceeds the total population of the planet.
—The number of internet devices in 1984 was 1,000. The number in 2008 is 1,000,000,000. —It is estimated that 4 exabytes of UNIQUE INFORMATION will be generated this year. That is
more than the previous 5,000 YEARS.
—The amount of TECHNICAL INFORMATION is doubling every 2 years. For students starting a 4- year technical degree THIS MEANS THAT…half of what they learn in their first year of study WILL BE OUTDATED BY THEIR THIRD YEAR OF STUDY.
—By 2013, a super computer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain; predictions are that by 2049, a $1000 computer will exceed the computational capabilities OF THE ENTIRE HUMAN SPECIES.
The thrust of the audiovisual presentation and, indeed, that of the brunch meeting was to highlight the relevance of progress in technology and progress in other societies’ education of their citizens to JCCC’s own mission. The message: jobs are changing throughout the world, in fact the nature of work itself is changing everywhere; all of this has to do with information; computers and networks are coming to supersede human-oriented society and employment.
The import of the “Did You Know?” presentation was that all of this is, well, important—it has import. What it might import was left unaddressed until the end. The effect of the
presentation was not only to raise big questions but also to beg much bigger questions, a very effective way to launch the organization’s strategic planning. One of the strategic goals taken up in that planning cycle was increasing the organization’s graduation rate, so it is perhaps fair to say that the presentation’s information about foreign countries’ honors students and English speakers illuminated a blunt statistic about our students in a new light. High domestic college drop-out rates at a time when other countries are increasing their numbers of highly educated
citizens is indeed an important issue to consider in strategic planning. However, there is a risk in considering such questions, these big questions that are begged by the coincidence of apparently weakly related phenomena. Digging into such questions usually results in the confirmation of stronger relations between the phenomena than first appreciated, which is itself a qualitatively different kind of realization—it’s the leap from “Hmmm, our graduate numbers are low and theirs are going up” to “Something is going on here…” If the matter is pursued, the resulting insights themselves beg yet bigger questions: Why do so many of our students drop out or cool out? Why do so many of their students succeed or even excel?
The inquiry becomes longitudinal—Are more of ours dropping out or cooling out now than in the past? Are more of theirs going to school than in the past? Correlations are sought—what are the students’ circumstances (family, income, personal security, etc.), the schools’
circumstances (size, number of students in a class and overall in the school, budget and physical resources, etc.), the teachers’ and other staff’s circumstances (pay, teaching load, resources in materials and professional development, support by the community, etc.)? Some correlations turn out to matter, some of the independent variables are “heavy” and so changing them requires larger systemic change, and so then it is systems and cultures that are being looked at. When one starts thinking about cultural dynamics the ensuing realizations are qualitatively much more profound yet:
“Whoah…something is going on here.”
With a strategic planning goal of increasing graduation rates in mind, it would be fair at this point to ask, So what if 21st Century Learning Organizations put aside transfer and liberal arts education? After all, every institution evolves over time or disappears. For example, the medieval European universities and the antebellum liberal arts colleges in America began as thoroughly church-affiliated, but the large majority of these have since become independent of any sects. Using a neologism from social-political philosophy, the 21st Century Learning Organization is firmly and legitimately “situated.”
Is it, then, really appropriate or useful to characterize the situation as a problem, as have the preceding Sections of this paper? What, if any, countervailing interests are ignored or thwarted by the Learning Organization status quo? Or, framed perhaps more validly, even if these thwarted interests are legitimate from some perspective, why is it a problem that these are ignored or thwarted by Learning Organizations? Since it is this paper’s contention that the institution of the 21st Century Learning Organization is problematic, and that the thwarted interests are not only legitimate but also held in common by both advocates for and opponents to 21st Century Learning Organization, and because this contention is supported by covert
premises, it is time to acknowledge and elucidate them as well as restate the overt premises. First, we briefly restate the historical findings upon which the overt premises are grounded. Education has always been inextricably a part of American culture and society. A strong
education ethos accompanied the Cambridge-educated Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founded Harvard College to train the colony’s leaders. Public education enjoys a history of support in America going back to Thomas Jefferson’s plans for a graduated program of publicly subsidized schooling up through college (for exceptionally talented scholars). Since
then, the country has from time to time codified and expanded the scope of this support in the form of legislation including the Morrill Act, the G.I. Bill, the Higher Education Act, etc.
Around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries many public school districts extended their
programs upward through the 14th grade in the form of junior colleges, the mission of which was
to carry out the first two years of the four-year college course of study typical of the time. That is, these were two-year liberal arts colleges.
Beginning in the 1930s, a convergence of interests within and without the junior college industry militated for the shifting of the two-year colleges’ mission to predominately vocational training. However, for some forty years most students at these colleges and their parents
remained refractory to the efforts to vocationalize these institutions that were coming to be called community colleges.
Beginning in the 1970s, during “the Great Transformation,” the proportion of transfer students in community colleges began an abrupt decline coincident with a relative downturn in employment prospects for four-year college graduates, along with a massive expansion in community colleges’ vocational curriculum and the intensive development of direct custom workforce training services and products to employers. This low proportion of transfer students persists to this day, a situation that comports with the community colleges’ long-standing
“cooling out” function.
The last three decades have witnessed an explosive growth of the influence of high technology in industry and daily life. In particular, the advent of microcomputers and the perfusion of networked computers through nearly all aspects of industry and personal life, from medical diagnostics and treatment to automobiles, from graphic design and journalism to personal family snapshots and home movies, from crop and livestock farming to digital library archiving and “e-books,” have transformed the modern world. The pervasiveness of these technologies, and the exponentially accelerating rate of obsolescence of technologies and the jobs associated with them have created a positive feedback loop of ever-shorter training- employment-retraining cycles. The result has been a corresponding explosion of community colleges’ technology training services and products.
Perhaps the most important concomitant impact of the “Information Revolution” on the Comprehensive Community College industry has been its genesis of the 21st Century Learning Organization. Information technology combined with business management philosophy and practices such Total Quality Management in the 1990s to realize the League For Innovation’s and AACC’s aims to “grow the business” by streamlining product delivery and reducing much of the costly and inefficient overhead in “time-and-place-bound” physical facilities and in-house instructional staff. With these innovations, at the end of the 20th century the Comprehensive
Community College industry finally succeeded in recasting student/as consumers in a
competitive service industry (the industry leaders’ own terms) who are expected to direct their own consumption choices.
That is, by 2000 the Comprehensive Community College industry had realized the dreams of Koos, Eells and Campbell, the “elders” of the AAJC: the two-year post-secondary institution had effectively extricated itself from the bottom tier of the higher education hierarchy and claimed the zenith of the vocational training industry.
With this resounding, legitimate success of the vocationalization project in view, then, objections against the “cooling out” function and the industry’s eschewing the role in educating for a free democratic society that Jefferson, Dewey, the Truman and Wingspread Commissions had pressed upon it are seen to be non sequiturs. By its own espoused and enacted mission, the Comprehensive Community College is simply not supposed to do these things anymore. It’s not a college.
Therefore, if proponents of a collegiate function for the Comprehensive Community College might yet have any case, it must rest on hitherto suppressed premises. Moreover, any such premises or assumptions, if they are made explicit, must exert prima facie probative force against the vocationalization doctrine. Comprehensive Community Colleges are vocational training centers; it might be that they are supposed to be colleges, if reasons for this were to be discovered. These reasons are the covert premises.
Several of these premises, while covert, are widely held:
First, it is probably safe to assume that most American parties to this discussion subscribe to an ideal of a free democratic society in which freedom of association, speech and civil action, and opportunities for advancement are equally open to all citizens (appraisals of the degree to which this ideal is presently realized vary a great deal, however).
Second, as was reported in Sections II and III, most observers insist that education is the most important contributing factor in a citizen’s real ability to take advantages of the
opportunities afforded by democratic American society. Along with the ethic of hard work, this is perhaps the universal article of faith in America.
Beyond these axioms of American social life, however, important questions are begged by apologists for the collegiate function:
How, actually, does education facilitate democratic self-governance? What is it about a person’s learnedness that enhances his or her abilities in this capacity? What beneficial traits in this regard are due to one’s education over the span of life spent in college, rather than due to one’s other domains and facets of human development? How, in other words, does college affect students?
What is it about education, as distinguished from training, that accomplishes this?
Proponents of the collegiate function must demonstrate and explain such a distinction because all of this, training and education, is supposedly comprehended by Learning. The assertion by the Comprehensive Community College industry that Learning occurs in the Learning College is not disputed, after all.
If education is indeed something distinct from training, perhaps even something unique and alone to itself, then proponents of the collegiate function must still show that it does not
satisfactorily obtain at the Comprehensive Community College, at least and most importantly in the sense and to the degree proposed by the Truman Commission. This is important to elucidate —few of even the most ardent proponents of a collegiate function for the Comprehensive Community College maintain that the attainment of the bachelor’s degree are required for a person to be able to preserve and advance democratic civilization. Thomas Jefferson and the Truman Commission certainly did not assert this.
Therefore, while the “cooling out function” just is the “diversion function” decried by Brint & Karabel, the “horizontal function” that Eaton insists should be accompanied by the “vertical
function,” it cannot by itself amount to the deficiency in one’s preparation for sustaining
civilization that proponents of the collegiate function ascribe to the Comprehensive Community College. If cooling out is bad for the individual whose aptitude and aspirations call for four years of college and a bachelor’s degree, it’s not as evidently bad for democracy.
The cooling out function is the problem, but it’s not all there is to the Problem.
These are among the education questions begged by those who urge a more prominent, stronger collegiate education function for the Comprehensive Community College. Besides this set of major questions there is another equally important class of questions that are begged by proponents of both missions for the Comprehensive Community College, the education mission and the vocational training mission.
These are the questions of civilization. More precisely, they are the questions of imperiled civilization, which is what education safeguards. Civilization is a relative term, almost by definition contingent. Indeed, what the parabolas depicting historically dominant Mediterranean societies on the following page236 express is the anomalous status of those societies relative to
their contemporaries. An elevated point on a particular parabola does not denote a society’s absolute relation to a baseline condition of a chaotic Hobbesian world, populated by discrete misanthropic individuals, each one of which is in a perpetual state of war with each and every other individual. Instead, the parabolas’ baseline connotes the threshold level of civilization obtaining at that time in all societies, the threshold for civilized societies.
It is the relatively high order of dominant societies’ physical, cultural, economic and social