Education Blog Archaeology: Alex Geurds on bildung in our bachelor
In this series the Vice-Dean and portfolio holder of education in the board of the Faculty of Archaeology will reflect on the state of education. Posts can range from shedding light on current national shifts in the university landscape to arguments as to why it’s important to be timely with designing your classes. Some blogs will be aspirational, others will be more informative, or indeed also inviting. The opinions found here are personal but will also not be disconnected from Faculty Board policymaking.
What about Bildung in our undergraduate degree?
For years now, redesigning a university degree means keeping a close watch on the demands to train students for the fast-evolving job market. Archaeology is no different. In university hallways this is referred to with the 25-letter word arbeidsmarktvoorbereiding. It has all the marks of being a pragmatic necessity: To be able to demonstrate a clear link between a cluster of university classes and getting into paid work seems to be a strategic shoo-in. So, end of blog.
Or is it?
Given that this is Leiden’s 450-year anniversary, and having the archaeological advantage of hindsight, let’s see where we are coming from. The emphasis on employability makes sense but this is only quite recently become a variable. In fact, before commercial archaeology became a factor in the Netherlands during the 1990s, graduate transition into the labour market was hardly something the Faculty was keen to emphasize. After all, with studying archaeology you would fit right in with, say, the Kleine Letteren (sic), when it came to swiftly landing a job. This is no longer the case obviously. Most graduates find discipline-related work quite quickly. As a result, transferable skills are woven into what we teach and we emphasize the embeddedness of archaeological work in the contemporary in offering a degree combining heritage and archaeology.
So, how is this different from vocational training programmes such as the Dutch ‘HBO’? Well, we like to say that a difference is the emphasis on teaching critical discernment, combined with a greater emphasis on written work. Where vocational programmes, such as Saxion, are nationally leading at applied archaeological practice, we might have the edge with helping students decide where and how that practice should take place. It’s certainly not a black-and-white difference though (Cohen 2020).
Before the 1990s, and indeed before much of the entire presence of archaeology as a discipline in Leiden (never mind its existence as a Faculty), university training meant something very different. Yes, something much more elitist as well, with mostly very similar looking single-gendered humans benefitting from these hallways. Central to teaching for the first 300 years or so –when our Bio Science Campus was still a bovine campus– was the assignment to [drum roll] help form citizens.
During the middle part of the 19th century, universities developed into something akin to the bodies of higher education they still are today. We have Wilhelm von Humboldt to thank for that. Not coincidentally, the 19th century was also when natural sciences emerged, bringing with them the modern concept of ‘research’. And, by the way, PhD degrees. For those interested in such histories, I recommend looking up works by Stefan Collini (2012, 2017).
Perhaps this sounds arcane now, but this ‘citizen formation’ goes back to the roots of what one might call Western education. The Prussian concept of Bildung, or perhaps the now better-known term ‘liberal arts’ is central to this goal. The arts to liberate the mind and create, quite literally, free thinkers. Two points on this, taking the case from across the Atlantic: 1) US liberal arts programmes have by now endured decades of being culled or simply eliminated (the ones remaining are leafy spaces for the privileged); 2) There’s an argument to consider such Bildung more centrally in what classes we offer.
Bildung encompasses the complete development of students into independent reflective and societally engaged individuals. I see the fuel to become such individuals every day among students. But, as Femke Reidsma’s research shows, fuel is rarely effective on its own; sparks and oxygen are needed as well. Teaching is the forum to shape critical thinking and moral responsibility, with the right mix of skill in dialoguing and dissenting. And this matters if we agree on seeing healthy citizenship as the foundation of democratic communities. In this vein, Gert Biesta (2017) explains that education should achieve three essential goals which include qualification (say, learning a discipline), socialization (say, working together as a group) and subjectification (say, becoming part of society). If carefully balanced, this situates a university education as central in helping students develop into independent thinkers who actively engage with and transform the social spaces they form part of.
This is not just a Romantic ideal from long ago times. In 2020, the Rathenau Institute, a Dutch think tank that reflects on the impact of higher education, published Balans van de Wetenschap to suggest universities handle societal problems through direct ethical examination. Perhaps we should think about this more and not only interpret such documents as a call for more transferrable skills but also as an incentive to learn to think deeply and critically.
Bringing this back to the van Steenis, this may seem like a very challenging agenda for a three-year BA that is, in essence, monodisciplinary, and where our learning goals are ample already. But would it not be feasible to open some space for this student fuel, even if it comes at the cost of something else? I would wager that commercial archaeology employers are looking for adaptable employees who demonstrate a balance of a societal compass and critical evaluation skills. Is it too much of an ambition to say that the current period of increased uncertainty and societal division requires our programmes to demonstrate their purpose as places where knowledge benefits individual growth and, therefore, societal health?
References
- Cohen, Floris (2020). De ideale universiteit. Amsterdam: Prometheus.
- Collini, Stefan (2012). What are universities for? London: Penguin.
- Collini, Stefan (2017). Speaking of universities. London: Verso.
Exchange ideas with Alex Geurds
Would you like to exchange ideas with Alex Geurds? Please send him an email or walk by his office (A2.07).