He who would do good
to another must do it
in Minute Particulars.
General Good is the plea
of the scoundrel,
hypocrite, and flatterer;
For Art and Science
cannot exist
but in minutely organised Particulars.
[William Blake]
For decades now, a common lament has been the increasing
specialization of knowledge and learning and the subsequent erosion of liberal
sensibility in the academy. The forces at work behind this trend are legion and
responsible for the questions held by many—among them, potential liberal arts
students and their parents—concerning the contemporary relevance of a liberal
arts education. For reasons explained below, I submit that liberal education
is, in fact, more relevant now than ever, and I suggest that understanding this relevance is key to
conceptualizing a liberal arts curriculum for the new century.
Although fueled and shaped by any
number of seemingly ineluctable historical, political, and economic forces,
academic specialization has also been enabled and impelled by technology. That
technology is instrumental for specialization is obvious; less obvious is
technology’s epistemological role:
At no period in human culture have men understood the psychic
mechanisms involved in invention and technology. Today it is the instant speed
of electric information that, for the first time, permits easy recognition of
the patterns and the formal contours of change and development. The entire
world, past and present, now reveals itself to us like a growing plant in an
enormously accelerated movie. Electric speed is synonymous with light and with
the understanding of causes. [Marshall McLuhan, media theorist]
McLuhan here suggests that the effect of technology is not limited to the
exponential proliferation of information but extends to the kind of knowledge
that is made possible by both the speed and extent of available information.
Instant access to organized stores of information on a superhuman scale enables
perception of previously inaccessible patterns and relationships, to which
McLuhan here refers as causality, but which I suggest might more broadly be
conceived as insight.
As has been noted elsewhere in these reflections and proposals,
facts these days are cheap. What is dear, and dearer with every passing information-saturated
moment, is the capacity to generate insight from facts and information and to
bring insight to bear upon them in turn. I contend that information and
communication technologies now confront our students with an epistemological
environment that requires, not so much new cognitive skills, as a new
ordering and emphasis of these skills. In a world in which, not just
factual information, but the semantic and algorithmic parsing of this
information is and will increasingly be instantly and ubiquitously available,
the ability to contextualize and synthesize information in response to complex
and emergent issues and questions is crucial. Poetics, or the ability to make
meaning from seemingly disparate elements, is fast becoming as important as analytics
and may, in the future, become even more important. Creative thinking deserves
as much concentrated attention and nurturance as the liberal arts have long
devoted to critical thinking.
Our students must become, not simply receptacles, but artisans of
meaning.
The liberal arts, with their long tradition of “well-roundedness,”
are singularly well-suited to help students meet the challenges of the
information economy, but we must first reconceive the notion of
“well-roundedness,” not simply as exposure to content across the disciplines, but as the cultivated
capacity to integrate knowledge in ways that generate meaning and insight for
complex problems and questions. We must teach specifically toward this
capacity.
Blake locates evil in the general, in received and abstractly
applied notions of value and truth. On the contrary, he claims, the good is
always a matter of “Particulars” that are “minutely organized.” Consistency suggests that, for
Blake, general rubrics of organization simply reinscribe the generalities he
would have us eschew: what is required is the ability to organize to the
moment, to the question at hand, to the voices and needs that splinter all that
we think we know and give rise to new knowledge, new insights.
Posted by love at
September 20, 2004 11:28 AM
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