Oscar Wilde on Learning Outcomes Assessment

摘要

“Education is an admirable thing,” said Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist, the 1891dialogue that presents the most extensive exposition of his philosophy of art, “but it is wellto remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught”(Intentions 124). Teachers of language and literature in today’s academy scarcely needWilde’s reminder of how difficult and fruitless their task can be in an age when a collegedegree is increasingly viewed as a right, not a privilege. As Ian Dennis observes in “StudentResentment and Professorial Desire in Higher Education,” today’s professors frequentlycomplain that their students are at best indifferent, and at worst hostile to the educationalexperiences we create in order to share with them what Matthew Arnold called “the bestwhich has been thought and said in the world” (Culture and Anarchy viii). Seasoned collegeteachers have long known what Wilde hints at, that university education is a matter of soulcraft, not training, with subtle effects that may not show themselves for decades, if at all. Inrecent years, however, academia has grown impatient with slow and indeterminateintellectual growth. The spread of the learning outcomes assessment movement hasresulted in academic departments being required to enumerate precise educationalobjectives, lists of exactly what our students will know and be able to do at the end of a 15-week course on, say, British Romanticism or the Russian realist novel.