General Education: The 2 Economies

 
GIVEN:
 
Affective Entropy
also known as Nostalgia:
“agony for the home”--
paradise lost: the sense
of losing IT: things always
circling the drain,
gone
gone
gone
 
 
                                    Negentropy
                          General Education
                                 The 2 Economies
 
PRODUCT                   PROCESS           
 
SACS standards           margins for trial
for Assessing                &  error:  rooms
measurable                     for play, mess &
objectives &                 guess & slip sliding
goals for                         away: what? what the?
Clarity                          clouds of unknowing
Consistency                  confusion
Cohesion                      experiment innovate
Accuracy                      indeterminacy   
Quality Control            unpostponed joy
Grade Point Averages  putting it in play
Rigor Excellence          to see what’s what
Capstone etc.                etcetera etcetera etcetera
 
              <---------------- INTER ESSE ---------->
                                interesting
                              between being
 
Should be obvious how incommensurate and opposed these
two sets of values, and yet complementary: carriage & horses.
 
Should be obvious which set is “dominant” as far as public
opinion and the common sense is concerned: cart before
the horses as it were, in manners of speaking and values..
 
Might not be so obvious how to get these two “economies”
in play amongst our selves and our students in our general
education agenda (not to be confused with majors, minors
and capstone concerns)—but that’s where the interest
might could be.
 
How to do justice to both appropriately “hostile” economies
with out  sacrificing one to the other?   Call it practice of
liberal art  (as opposed to the liberal arts)
 
It’s like trying to build an ice cream parlor in hell with no
slight or insult to either hot or cold –not that they Just Get
Along --o contrary-- but that they are related IF they are
kept separate  and  polarized and uncontaminated &  
everyone’s clued in to what that means and why. 
 
A General Education both rigorous and innovative,
regulated and spontaneous, accountable and indeterminate,
predictable yet generative, negentropic as well as entropic
allowing for specifics and  celebrating diversity etc. without
occluding the patterns that connect and create. 

Need we argue?