Beyond Reason and Tolerance

This book identifies the major challenge facing higher education as preparing students for life-long learning and society’s 21^st century needs for civic minded individuals who have the intellectual and personal capabilities to constructively engage political, ethnic, and religious differences, work effectively, and live together with many different kinds of people in a more global society. A developmental science basis is adopted to inform the transformations in undergraduate educational practices that are necessary to empower students to act globally and constructively engage difference....

This book identifies the major challenge facing higher education as preparing students for life-long learning and society’s 21^st century needs for civic minded individuals who have the intellectual and personal capabilities to constructively engage political, ethnic, and religious differences, work effectively, and live together with many different kinds of people in a more global society. A developmental science basis is adopted to inform the transformations in undergraduate educational practices that are necessary to empower students to act globally and constructively engage difference. Current scholarship is synthesized regarding the nature and development of three core capacities deemed essential: A personal epistemology that reflects a sophisticated understanding of knowledge, beliefs, and ways of thinking; empathy and the capacity to understand the mental states of others; and an integrated identity that includes values, commitments, and a sense of agency for civic and social responsibility. It is argued that to foster the development of these capabilities, colleges and universities must recommit to providing a formative liberal education and adopt a developmental model of undergraduate education as a process of intellectual and personal growth, involving empathy as well as reasoning, values as well as knowledge, and identity as well as competencies. The focus is on emerging adulthood as an especially dynamic time of reorganization and development of the brain that both influences, and is influenced by, the undergraduate experience, and advances in our understanding of human development and learning are synthesized with regard to the direct implications for undergraduate education practices.