Abstract
“Learning comes before completion.”1 That is Sanford “Sandy” Shugart’s simple, but profound, reminder to everyone connected with the completion agenda. President of Valencia College in Florida, Shugart is one of the country’s most highly respected leaders in higher education. While his entire article, Rethinking the Completion Agenda, is worth reading by anyone interested in genuinely improving community college student success, that last principle of eight elevates his voice of reason above much completion clatter. Shugart went on to correctly appraise that “the country has got the wrong working theory about completion,”2 and his perspective must be repeated until everyone who touches American higher education understands the substantial danger in emphasizing completion over learning.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1983), 7.
Arthur M. Cohen and Florence B. Brawer, The American Community College, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 256.
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1966).
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 126.
Timothy Shriver as quoted in Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: D&M Publishers, Inc., 2011), 8.
Hilary Rodham Clinton, It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 266.
Theodore Roosevelt, Roosevelt’s Writings: Selections from the Writings of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Maurice Garland Fulton (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920), 224.
Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl. “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It,” in Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College, ed. Richard Kahlenberg (New York: The Century Foundation, Inc., 2010), 79.
Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: D&M Publishers, Inc., 2011), xi.
Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education. How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2010), 26.
Page McBrier, Beatrice’s Goat (New York: Aladdin, 2001).
Copyright information
© 2014 Juliet Lilledahl Scherer and Mirra Leigh Anson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Scherer, J.L., Anson, M.L. (2014). Restoring America’s Culture of Learning. In: Community Colleges and the Access Effect. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331007_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331007_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-33601-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33100-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Education CollectionEducation (R0)