These comments are provisional – that is, I will stand by
them ‘provided’ that no better ideas come along to change my views. I appreciate the statements already
submitted, which are in my mind as I think about these matters. I also will
need to flesh out the implications of these principles in a concrete curricular
structure.
I suggest the goal of education is to
help students find truth – truth in themselves, truth of
other people, and truth in the cosmos – that is, of the totality of their
world. This is an
unfashionable way to talk, such that many of the baser sort in academia would
have already, after that last sentence, have formed a prejudice that will
distort their thinking independent of anything I might say in support of this
claim. I hope my current readers are not among their number!
I affirm this goal because of my antipathy to individualistic, self-centered
educational visions which see learning primarily in terms of sharpening
individual minds, or helping students give birth to their own best selves, as
if those students are not already embedded in a cosmos to which they are tied
by bonds of dependence, mutuality, and obligation. Against the individualistic
mantra of “be all you can be,” I would pose a counter thought, that ‘knowledge is
acknowledgement,’ or
as German pietism put it, “bedenken ist bedanken.” This approach to education affirms that a world
exists prior to the student, and that the student’s task
is to find a place, a home in the world. To begin in this way suggests that human beings not
atomic selves, isolated in minds so complete that teaching is simply “unpacking”
a powerful, fully-equipped
computer. Instead of simply subordinating themselves to students, professors
should subordinate themselves also to truth – that is, to the way
things are constituted in the world, so that their teaching becomes a
connecting of student openness, curiosity, and passion to the reality in which that student is already
immersed, and to which their adult life will be related in thousands of ways. [One
of our colleagues] spoke of head and heart, and gave primacy to the head; I
give primacy to the heart, that is, to the bonds of sympathy (“feeling
together”) between people.
Thus I place corporate, communal life above individual. Mine is an
ecological approach to education, avowing with John Muir that “everything
in the cosmos is hitched to everything else.” For liberal learning, this means that our professional
obligation as teachers is to help students see those connections –
between economics and poverty, between chemistry and their own bodies, between
advertising and upper middle class values, between mathematics and painting.
This is also to claim that our students will have obligations to the world,
and though only careful thought will disclose what those obligations are,
academic institutions have the responsibility to reveal the painful truth to
students that they cannot be educated and also be islands to themselves, free
to be paid handsomely for maintaining the American economic machine, and free
to spend that wealth mainly on themselves. This is so because of the way the
world is put together, which reflects the ethical bonds that all human
societies recognize. [A colleague] has helpfully pointed to Emerson’s
“Self-Reliance” as a guide to our thinking, and while I am much more critical
of Emerson than he, the Sage of Concord does write that “a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property,
ashamed of what he has, out of new respect for his being.” If this is true, how much does
Furman need change, so that we do not attract students who expect us to prepare
them for a comfortable life! “Self-reliance” is responsibility for one’s
thoughts and actions, not a permit for admission to an upper-class life free of
limits or duty. We do
not teach ethics because it sharpens the mind, or because it exposes the
weaknesses of other people’s (“conventional”) morality, but because students need to act
responsibly, and we need to help them learn how to do that.
Believing as I do in the connectedness of students to people and to world, I
think a sound education must include study of the past, of the variety of
human cultures and values, of the physical world and humanity’s
connection to it. The
degree to which the institution should direct that study along particular lines
is debatable – I fall somewhere between the completely open Amherst approach,
and the degree of constraint
that our present GERs impose. But that a good education should include these
various dimensions seems clear to me.
Thus far, I have preferred to say we are to help students find
truth, or the way things really are, beyond all cant, be it social, sacred, or
academic. I affirm we can use these words meaningfully, but I have not
predetermined where this truth lies. I have also consciously used a word other
than “think,” or “reason,” since I want to push the learning
experience beyond the boundaries of philosophic dialogue, to include the myriad of ways human beings
come to understand things. In carrying out experiments, in painting, in the
give and take of classroom argument, in watching film, in listening to lectures
or debates, in giving speeches, in writing notes and assignments, in doing
research in the library, in running laps or singing an aria, in reading,
students put together a world of meaning that is hopefully more satisfying than
the one with which they arrived. I think a good college should teach this
rich sense of rationality, and if it does, then I would agree that “critical
rationality” is one way to describe the truth-finding faculty we mean to
develop.
Another of my bed-rock convictions is that human beings are normally
extravagantly self-centered, that their self-absorption is so powerful and
ubiquitous that it infects everything they do. For this reason, helping them to
see what is outside them, what is often indifferent to them, can be difficult.
This is why reason must be “self-critical,” and this is the truth in Emerson’s
attack on convention. But
a virtual lifetime in academia has convinced me that academicians are no more
immune to illusion, to convention, to rote thinking, than non-academics – it
simply takes a different form, and is expressed in a richer language and a more elaborate grammar. One
of the conventions of the Ivory Tower is that non-academic society is limited
by its conventions, by the beliefs, loyalties, customs, habits of mind and
thought passed down through the generations, but my ideal educational
environment would be open to the frequent conventionality of its own thought.
This is widely agreed, but rarely practiced.
Because the reality we are trying to connect students with is not structured
departmentally, a good education would privilege interdisciplinary learning,
seeing departments as necessary, but of limited importance. Let me suggest
provocatively that majors should have to prove that they could best be taught
by one department – lacking such proof, majors would be interdisciplinary (Religion,
for example, being taught by professors of literature, anthropology,
philosophy, and politics, as well as religion). Specialization is a necessary
technique of training, but at an undergraduate liberal arts college, it should
not occupy pride of place as the highest level of learning. Interdisciplinary
teaching would also enhance, in a natural, unforced way, the unity of purpose
that a university should espouse.
Finally, the current world to which we are connected is a much larger one than
the world of our institutional ancestors, and I think we must help students to
see that their particular place is part of a larger world. We must help
students come to understand this larger world, its languages, patterns of
living, its habits of organization and practice, its tradition of thought. Such
a global perspective is not an add-on to, not a replacement for
traditional education, but a re-conceptualization of “western”
and “non-western” to better express the new reality that we are beginning to apprehend (as Robin
suggested). Students may begin as “patriots,” as lovers of the
familiar, but they should also come to be “cosmopolitans,” that is, lovers of
the unfamiliar, recognizing that though a world is given to us, what we make of it need not be a given.
Posted by love at
September 17, 2004 04:16 PM
Discuss
this proposal in the forum, or leave a comment below!