Steve Ersinghaus

• This is a fantasy that won’t end well. A goal-based curriculum will be more shallow, less liberal, and less liberating than a discipline-based curriculum. And to be less liberal and less liberating contradicts the deepest end of Catholic higher education, which is to give a reasoned depth to our free assent to God’s offer of friendship in Christ.
• Here is how I measure university-level literacy: Can a student appreciate that authors have other rhetorical means at their disposal than direct statements of the views they hold? I fear that all too few pass this test.
• The danger of goal-based education is that it can generate a culture of “bullshitting” or phoniness among students.
• They don’t learn the geography of any one intellectual place.
• By contrast, in a discipline-based course, literacy is knowing the content and methods of the discipline itself, which must be “occupied” rather than used. We can bullshit about philosophy, to be sure, but we cannot bullshit in philosophy, at least not when a real philosophy professor is running the class.

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• Android and iOS turned idling engines into Uber fleets and preexisting grocery stores into ad hoc distribution centers. As a result, desire is now directly linked with gratification.