York city at the new york public library. Good evening everyone and welcome. I am the director of the Research Library and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the library we are pleased to have Cathy Davidson with us this evening, the author of the critically important book of the new education how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux. The distinguished professor at the City University of new york at the director of the Futures InitiativeProgram Prior to joining the faculty sh she felt they shared a professorship at the Vice President for disciplinary studies at duke university. Serving on the corporation the developer as you probably know on the firefox web browser and the underwriter of a community of open Source Developers appointed by president obama through the National Council on the humanities and was the 2016 recipient of the award for significant contributions to Higher Education. All of that you probably know it in any case you can read it in the program should you wish to refresh your memory. Its important to understand as the grange and its measure, its consequence. It has been emptied of meaning by frequent misuse speaking to my grandson about the robust trucks to turn to dinosaurs or when im refusing to take him to a michael bay movie come as close to religion as i get. [laughter] i note this bias to underscore the intensity of my admiration for the work when i described it as transformative. Here i use the term in its literal sense writing the change is the way we think, ce and believe. Work that alters the perception of the subject in a lasting and fundamental session. She is i would contend in the rich tradition of american pragmatism a cast of mine whose roots extend as emerson run through dewey and james in the way of stephenson and what they have in common is a distrust of the settled belief truth for them is what happens to an idea and the dialectic driver in the process. Certainly, the new education of the book falls within that rubric. Its a book that just resizes the current state of Higher Education. The landscape is the emerging plate of innovation and imagines a future ground di it in but if. But the descriptive resolution of the word for the rise of the novel and the field study in the way that only a small handful of books 36 years as an account of her experience and teaching in japan changed the way that we imagined the crosscultural encounters and mysteries and opportunities for self invention. Closing the life and death of an American Factory taught us to see the tragedy and the comments, both of the future thinking and now you see it in their very different ways change the way we think about how we lived, worked and learned in the digital age. In short, and essential and indispensable mind, squalor that has demanded attention and gratitude and accounted a privilege and joy to be in conversation this evening about the new education. She and i will converse for 45 minutes or so depending upon how selfish i feel and then open up the floor to questions. At the conclusion of the program, kathy will be signing books outside the room and i recommend them to you with a great enthusiasm, so let me move over to sit next to cathy. [applause] and i didnt fall. Good evening. Thank you so much for being with us. It is so hard to hear that about ones self but its lovely to hear it from somebody i admire. Thank you. Let me begin with where you begin in this wonderful book by aligning college with all great quests. We have a long runway to the text and you make the alignment on databases in college and all an obstacle to overcome that the students first going to college then graduates leaving to enter the world work force. Are they the same that the friends in the room experienced . I think it is a little of both. They are big enough going from being dependent to feeling you can support yourself and being a productive and responsible citizen in the world. It is a challenge for all of us. I dont know about all of you here but it is a formidable challenge and i think for people today it is even more formidable than most of us when we went to school. They have become the regimes of standardized testing and i think the stress we put kids under at an early age we have to tell them to prepare for the very best schools or else their life is over if they dont get into the top schools they are not going to be prepared and we exceed this as an ever growing part of the budget on health care and medical care and Mental Health care for younger people who are anxious and worried and sure that there will be failures in the world. If you are complaining about the tuition having to pay for your child now and especially in Public Education or voting did that to this world they had gifts given to us as a public good in the society that our children dont have a. You have to make different choices about how you study and then if you feel like you are graduating debtfree theres a lot of different burdens weve put on kids today. Kids have been given a raw deal and we have to change that. What we use youbut use your e amplify what you said. They want to learn enough about the world to lead it and address the major problems. You ask questions about them and say how can they accomplish the goals and succeed in the world that changes so fast that no one can predict what will happen next. In some ways is that not the heart of the book trying to imagine and education that does better by its students to prepare them to deal with the drive that you just described. Some of them are just not commonsensical. There was a time when i talk about one of the great journalists saying the massive online education. They believe the technology can solve all the problems in the world. I am a Technology Person with a misunderstanding of both learning and technology or thinking we have to get rid of the thrills and education and only focus on skills to make sure every child is interested. For some kids it is great. Science, technology and engineering its great for others it is a nightmare. What an impoverished way to think of science. To all of the aspects that allow it to be adopted or as we know the climate deniers. Take a step back before we talk about the kind of solutions that lead them to deal with this. One of the things that appeals to me the most of the book i alluded to in the introduction is the capacity to store his eyes and recognize education and as a culture not nature. When some think o of how your education is somehow timeless and connected what have you got what you argue is the modern research in which those of us and education lives or have lived is a relatively new organization that arises in the United States and in berlin and it arises in the 1860s. Can you tell us about the american Higher Education and the elements that we take for granted about it that are innovations that come to us in the late 19th century or early 20th century . Higher education hasnt changed, therefore it cannot change and what i love about the detail looking at the archives to find out about the young president of harvard that went on to rule a i pretty powerful t its so great i had a long laundry list of things that didnt exist and then they did basically between 1865 and 1925 from the graduate schools, professional schools, elected. Before that you were thought to have a trust fund set if you talk at harvard you were wealthy enough you didnt need your salary or omissions exam so its a long list of things to. They are still ranked and its basically harbored so even though the United States famously doesnt have a National System of education is a Major Research universities. They still put an infrastructure in place in every colleges ranked and that makes sense each university in each college has a different kind of student an obligation. They all compete with a shadow of the Great University that has an endowment so big that it would be the 18th largest in the world. Part of those are in the students field now and they are being told only if they go to harvard or mit or stanford there are so many ways to succeed in the world. To drive the universities if in fact being at the top of the table was the impetus for the university or arriving at some of the highest places so distorts the way the college operateoperates into this and tn impossible to think about the ways of education outside of that. You pick the title of your book written in 69 called the new education and he is a kind of double figure in this book. On the one hand he is an author of a system that you find instructive for students and faculty for the life and mind of the United States and on the other, there is a strong admiration for his ability to change the system and a dramatic way. Why did you choose to name the book after this 1869 essay that drove him in the atlantic . It would be dishonest to say that i had it in the book there were 20 different titles, but that one struck me because i do believe we need a new education for the world were living in now and what he did that i admired very much, he was a College Professor teaching at harvard as a theoretical chemist. He didnt want to be a practical chemist, and his father lost everything in the panic at 67, the first big Global Financial crisis and eliot thought he would have to go into business and then the grandfather died and he got a little of the trust fund and was able to use that to go to europe and decided to study the european system and many people in 1857 saw the plane on the american education. They said that america lead the world morris code was transmitting information faster than anyone could handle what was going on economically and they said americans were naive and have become technocrats, giddy with their own power but have an educational system that trained them to be a minister. He believed that it went to find out how the european education changed and came back to the United States and really tried to figure out what would work in america at the time. Now i dont exactly look for the people that were his models that there were the most important theorists of the time, so in the standardized testing, the cousin of darwin he also believed and invented the bell curve and that they should be paid and those sterilized and many of the founders believed it. They called this moving forward the tyranny. They saved the meritocracy but a deeply rooted in the race and class assumption on who is entitled to run the country. [inaudible] that is still the question and its more valid now because many of the methods that were x. Bearman told become frozen also for the typical seminar method where we know that in fact who speaks in the seminar room replicates the hierarchy in society that so many believe in a more progressive act of outlooks and others and one of the things i advocate is a method of learning where every student as a researcher and is pushed to be serious to follow their ideas and to think about how the new knowledge comes together rather than a professionalized way that was perfect in 1890 because there were not proficient in the same way. Another point you make about the model in education in the late 19th century is that hes training students not to be ministers, but preparing them to take positions in management. You outlined this with Charles Taylor and you talk about education as a kind of conspicuous consumption and so forth. Whats different about training students for jobs in a technological world that then training them for jobs in a world that is still primarily agricultural and industrial. Whats different about education and what it needs to do for students now. Almost all of those in the last 25 years by technology so they were sure they could never be automated and they are being turned upside down and education simply prepares you for a career and it might get you a first job that might be obsolete from now. In any taxi in new york without somebody talking about what its done or its not Just Technology that the rearrangement of human labor has changed. Others cannot be automated that are terribly resourced. Its terribly important and terribly underpaid. Teaching, social work, healthcare. Those are probabl horribly underresearched professions and thats not an educational problem, that is a social problem we have a Society Students need not only to learn how to think but how to think critically about the society that they are entering. Let me ask a more practical question. But first job depends on which kind of survey you read that anywhere from seven to 11 jobs. How do we train people for the future when we dont know what the future looks like . If we dont know what the student is going to do. A lot of what your argument addresses is preparing students to succeed in the workplace. Can you talk about how we should be preparing students for this world of constant change one thing our educational system does a poore a poor job s giving thethat isgiving them tht for imitating or apprenticing but understanding the process by which you become an expert yourself and that is the process not just of learning, but learning how to learn and how to solve problems with any situation and even to have the kind of pedagogical term how you know just content but why something is counted as content and what makes a good argument and a good way of responding to any situation whether it is in technology or as a taxi driver. How do i take my own confidence and ability to learn and use that to apply to Something Else so some people talk about this as Lifelong Learning and in some ways it is a lifelong unlearning to because it is being able to take a look at ones own habits and own assumptions and think about what has to change in order to move forward. Thats not easy and we are in an educational system to standardize as waythatstandardig that makes it even harder. What in the real world that gives you the choice is to come up with a best possible answer . No one lives their life that way. None of the above. Most of us live in the world of none of the above like oh my goodness what do i do now . So am i allowed to say we taught a class together quick we certainly can. I am proud of that. When they hired me at the Graduate Center and it was in his Research Year and i said i know youre writing a book and that is important but how would you like to teach the craziest class anyone has taught and a former president of the Graduate Center, such a hero and the Graduate Center at the university was willing to do this and what we are going to do is walk into class on the first day and say i am Cathy Davidson. I just moved here from another university and i was brought here to start this program and i am the president emeritus of the university we will be back in 45 minutes to design a class that will change your life. One of the students was in that class we came back 45 minutes later and its like go away. What happens now . They go away and we came back five minutes later and we are kind of sitting there and what he had them do is put post notes with a schedule because nobody should have their schedule on the fly so they set up their schedule and designed an incredible class. I think that the process of learning how you take hardly any anyone whod known each other and with a class of mapping the future of Higher Education on everything from Computer Sciences to speech and ideology to criminal justice. So it was a wide range of students. What they figured out is how to Work Together as a group and divided up into teams of four and come up with important topics to do and what we did in that class when you were a graduate student you are also bo teaching out and one of the undergraduate campuses. They came up with experiments in learning and the graduate class every week and then they tried them out with their undergraduate and got feedback about what these methods were so the students at 14 campuses and they all talked to each other about what was working or not working and it was an incredible experience and i dont think you forget that. I dont think that you forget in a situation where you have to darn powerful people in the room and they gave up the power and gave it to you and let you create a class and created probably one of the best classes ive ever been in. As a devils advocate of everything she said is so, its a lifechanging experience, but in the time in which expertise is being challenged on everything from Climate Change to date news and the media and so forth at one point you talk about the faculty learning from students and being a pub amateur. Are you at all concerned about the power of the podium or the kind of level of expertise that is implicit in the pedagogy that you described leads to a kind of relativism that disavows the expertise and says it certainly didnt happen in the class you were describing that one argument i gets made about the student centered learning is that it turns experts and amateurs and because a positive value and is a fairly froth position. I wont say that every professor i interviewed that have some form of active learning deepseated problem, but certainly everyone i talked to in the course of writing the book and my own experience of turning my class upside down the last ten years is that students when they are charged with that responsibility of making the classes work more vigorous and demanding, more determined to get it right then a normal situation where you have the answers they also know a lot about content and how poor we are at retaining content. I will not say the name of the university but one of the top five wealthiest and most prestigious prep schools in the country three years ago did kind of a horrible thing