Saturday, October 6, 2007

A Liberal Education

(http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/ml/summer_school/images/small_oxford.jpg)


A liberal education teaches a fundamental knowledge. Between the objects we are taught to comprehend and the mind attempting to do so exists a dialectical process. More than a prescribed and blanketing body of facts, our education must be particular to the individual, for it is preferable to “err on the side of each person’s particularity” (Coles in Bump 332). Though there be thousands of people in a liberal institution, a method of teaching may be employed that inspires individually. Knowing what to think is “still necessary” but “no longer sufficient” (Pink 330). A liberal education is “training in how to learn” (Brickley 326) [italics mine].

Vocational training is the learning of an object. A vocation is a “what” and thusly entails the learning of what to think. Training toward this end is not limited solely to learning whats, but it often stops shortly thereafter. Knowledge of how to perform a job – practical what knowledge – is integral to life in this day and age. But a human cripples himself if he confines knowledge to the work place. We should seek “freedom from narrowness of mind” (Newman 319). A liberal education provides a broad base from which to grow. How to think is the ground from which what to think arises. By learning knowledge’s method, we, as individuals, gain the ability to build a unique view of the world. 


Portrait of Alfred Lord Tennsyon: http://www.nndb.com/people/859/000024787/tennyson_vignette.jpg 


If the knowledge of what to learn feels narrow, the knowledge of how to learn feels broad, all encompassing; it feels deep. “Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, and the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns” (Tennyson, 302). Philosophy, the study of that “one increasing purpose,” “the science of ultimate causes which in one point of view is identical with theology” (Liberal Arts 318F), is a mainstay of a liberal education. Philosophy is an active inquiry into the workings of knowledge, into the most elementary of our beliefs. It is a study of the architecture of our knowledge’s foundation. The study of that “one increasing purpose” – of meaning – broadens our ability to learn. A liberal education should be wide, but it should draw the connections between each of its studies, thus enabling “a larger design” (Giametti 323) to be perceived. Connections facilitate meaning.



With the emphasis on the individual in American culture, it is absolutely vital that we, as maturing Americans (we are all at least Americans in the sense that we co-create America’s culture), obtain an education that encourages the discovery of our own individuality. If we are to keep strong (or rejuvenate) our culture, then we must first know ourselves. Leaders of the Texas Revolution declared that “it shall be a duty of congress… to provide by law, a general system of education” (Texas Constitution: “For the Promotion of Literature 304). For this general system of education to mobilize individuals in our society, it must keep up with the pace of unending change. Technologies multiply, advance, expand rapidly. Individuals must know their culture in order that they may differentiate themselves; we perceive the rapid evolution around us and find our role as we roll through change.


(http://prblog.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/secondlife_1.jpg)

Through all three of these images, through Oxford, Lord Tennyson, and Second Life runs that "one increasing spirit."
This year, in E 603, we have been asked to embrace technology as part of our liberal education. Computers and the internet facilitate the exchange of complex information, media that triggers multifarious receptor-functions in the brain. In Second Life we are creating virtual representations of our role models – people who exemplify our own aspirations. By then acting and speaking, by thinking as this person would, we come to take on their “role.” The object is “to throw [our] soul[s] into the body of another man” (The Sympathetic Imagination) so that we embody the characteristics we admire in our exemplar. “By actually entering into the object” (The Sympathetic Imagination) of our admiration, we alter ourselves. We sculpt ourselves into the model of our ambition.



A liberal education – the essence of Plan II and the aim of an idealized college – enables individuals to create themselves. A liberal education informs of the past while keeping pace with the future. A liberal education is broad and it pronounces “the organic connection existing between all studies” (Liberal Arts 318H). I believe a liberal education shows us how to discover something real. As Giametti declared in his address to freshman at Yale, “Remember that what is real, and really enduring, starts in acts of the disciplined imagination, acts of insight and definition that create and discover a larger design” (Giametti 323).