Georgetown University announced a new infusion of funding -- $4 million -- for its impressive project to reimagine the future of higher education.
The project, Designing the Future(s) of the University, engages "the university community in an exploration of issues facing academia and . . . [experiments] with new ways of delivering Georgetown's signature education."
The Georgetown announcement elaborates:
The initiative explores ways Georgetown can carry out the Jesuit tradition of cura personalis, or care of the whole person, and promotes the learning and development concept of “formation,” which aims to shape students to be distinctive, well-balanced individuals.
The university will measure such qualities of student formation as well-being, resilience and empathy inside and outside of the classroom. Georgetown also has begun designing several new degree-level and course-level initiatives, including the Global Futures Curriculum Studio, which looks at ways to expand and challenge a student’s worldview.
This is an intriguing initiative, and I hope the inquiries will shed light on the ways we can reimagine high school education as well. What we do at the secondary level cannot be separated from what students will need to know or do in college; yet often this is the case.
At the same time, the Georgetown project is also an invitation for high schools -- e.g., Jesuit and Catholic high schools -- to to start or to continue their own conservations about the next decades of Catholic and Jesuit education.
