David Brooks has a new column out in the New York Times in which he argues that online education will force a transformation of universities. Drawing on Michael Oakeshott, he argues (or really, just states) that universities today offer two kinds of knowledge: technical (the what) and practical (the how). Brooks claims that, because technical knowledge can easily be transmitted online, we will see people gravitating towards MOOCs where they pick up “just the facts, ma’am” from star online teachers. However, since practical knowledge can only be picked up from experience, he thinks that universities will shift increasingly towards offering this sort of irreplaceable knowledge.
Leaving aside the merits and demerits of Brooks’s piece, I am quite intrigued that he ignores another, crucial, kind of knowledge that universities offer: the why. Now sometimes this knowledge seems like anti-knowledge from the outside, because it is about limits, about ends, and about asking the right kinds of questions. But these are critical issues to think about—admittedly, not for everybody, but for society as a whole. A city full of carpenters, or of philosophers, is not a city but an unnatural monoculture.
This is all the more surprising because a threefold distinction of knowledge was known to Aristotle, who called them epistemē, technē, and phronesis. (Of these three, phronesis directly overlaps with Brooks’s practical knowledge; while technē seems to largely make up, but not exactly correspond to, technical knowledge.) A polis needs all three to flourish. I am curious to know where Brooks thinks epistemē will be found in his post-MOOC world.
Leaving aside the merits and demerits of Brooks’s piece, I am quite intrigued that he ignores another, crucial, kind of knowledge that universities offer: the why. Now sometimes this knowledge seems like anti-knowledge from the outside, because it is about limits, about ends, and about asking the right kinds of questions. But these are critical issues to think about—admittedly, not for everybody, but for society as a whole. A city full of carpenters, or of philosophers, is not a city but an unnatural monoculture.
This is all the more surprising because a threefold distinction of knowledge was known to Aristotle, who called them epistemē, technē, and phronesis. (Of these three, phronesis directly overlaps with Brooks’s practical knowledge; while technē seems to largely make up, but not exactly correspond to, technical knowledge.) A polis needs all three to flourish. I am curious to know where Brooks thinks epistemē will be found in his post-MOOC world.
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