Liberal Education: What's the Purpose?

To those of you inducted into Alpha Chi, congratulations! This honor means you are committed to excellence in higher education. But what is a higher education anyway? This is a good time to reflect on what your education is about. When you grasp the purpose of an activity, you engage in it better. Understanding the purpose of higher education provides guidance and motivation in your academic life. A higher education is a liberal education. And a liberal education has important implications for the shape of college. So let's talk about a liberal education, which these days is under attack.

Particularly by the time of the Enlightenment, there was a growing recognition of and agreement on the following points: that we grow up in and gain an identity through a culture, that the culture is in some sense a human product, that we ought to live free lives, and that reason can provide a way to assess and reshape culture and our identity. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that the motto of the Enlightenment was, Dare to know! He meant, dare to know for yourself. Dare to use your own powers of mind to reach truth. Dare to be free from blind adherence to the culture that forged your identity while you were young. Dare to be free from blind adherence to knowledge and authority. In other words, dare to escape from cultural slavery.

No one thought that such a task is easy or that people will figure out how to accomplish it on their own in the thick of life. No task that transforms our commitments, our identity, our life, is ever easy. Over a long history humans have judged that mastery of the needed knowledge and understanding is difficult to reach on one's own without guidance. An education that simply taught how to read and add and develop allegiance to religious and political authorities would not suffice. A different education, a higher education, was needed to help people become culturally free under reason. To provide it, humanity realized the need to develop a formal educational approach, a liberating education, liberal education.

Universities, from their genesis 1000 years ago, have been about liberal education. Career training was mostly left to apprenticeship on the job. Liberal education WAS education. Only on this basis did Gotthold Lessing in the Enlightenment and many others since then call for the education of the human race, for they realized that everyone needs to be culturally free under reason and that everyone therefore needs the transforming power of liberal education.

Fast forward to the present. We seem to have lost a shared conception of what is needed to become a wise person, a good person, a person who functions well as a person. Lacking a conception of what living well amounts to, we lack the end for which liberal education is the needed means. We do still have a shared conception of what is needed to produce a good worker. A growing number of people challenge or even reject the purpose of liberal education, and many of them contend that career training should replace it.

Certainly, people should be able to be economically productive members of a society. But we are not homo economicus. We are homo sapiens, sapiens meaning "wisdom". We are beings of wisdom, not automatically wise, but rather the kind of being who ought to be wise and for whom lack of wisdom is a basic defect. The ancient Greeks spoke of our having a telos, a natural inner imperative, to be a rational animal, an animal that is more than an animal, a being that ought to define and live a life under rational knowledge. The basic knowledge at issue here is knowledge about what kind of being we are and the implications of that for how we ought to structure a life. But also important is the knowledge of who we are as individuals, and also there is the accumulated knowledge in the culture about many subjects. Liberal education is all about this knowledge.

What is the shape of a liberal education? It emphasizes language and other symbol systems such as math, for through them we express, create, understand, and evaluate thought. This is why reading, writing, speaking, as well as math, music, and the arts may claim to develop basic human powers. Thought is most powerful when we think by writing. Liberal education requires reading and writing across the curriculum, for one needs to think deeply in all disciplines. Also, one learns how to read and write in great part by reading and by writing--and by doing it more. Thus we ask you to read and write quite a bit.

The curriculum of a liberal education introduces students to the spectrum of knowledge. All students need to confront a range of thought: scientific, humanistic, artistic. All students need to reach a defensible understanding of self and world. Thus, you take courses in a wide range of disciplines. Not any cafeteria-style choice of courses will help, though, just as not all combinations of food will help your health or even taste good. Some ideas are more important than others for fashioning a basic knowledge of self and world. Everyone should encounter certain ideas. The most important and universally needed knowledge is that which helps us understand ourselves and shape up a life worthy of our humanity and individuality. Here the humanities have a special role to play, for the humanities are the primary resources we have for grasping, understanding and shaping the self from within. So, the humanities are at the heart of a liberal education.

Broad exposure to areas of thought is good but risks breadth at the expense of depth. One should also reach a level of critical mastery in some discipline. We all acknowledge that the better one's critical mastery of an area of thought, the better one's thinking and judgments in that area are likely to be. When sick, we go to a doctor, who has a critical mastery of medicine, not to a mechanic. The mechanic's judgment about our health, even if correct, carries no authority; but simply because a doctor reaches a diagnosis, that judgment is likely to be correct. Thus, you choose a major and engage in extended study in that area.

Just as breadth without depth is not good, too much depth is a problem. A major ought not to pull students too quickly into an area of study and ought not to dominate a student's course hours. For then, students cannot take as wide a range of courses as needed, cannot explore interests, and cannot even change their minds about majors. In liberal education, no area of thought is that important. No area of thought should be a bubble unto itself. Liberal education requires that we think of a college as an integrated whole. Each discipline contributes to, and is needed for, the whole. Not only should a major allow a student academic room, it is important for the major that students learn to think across disciplinary boundaries. Great thinkers confirm that our thought in one discipline is often enlightened by ideas from other disciplines. At one time all students took capstone courses in which they engaged in cross-disciplinary inquiry. Some courses here offer you that opportunity; we should offer more of those courses.

Perhaps the conception of liberal education that I have sketched seems obvious and uncontroversial to you. You should know that some people reject liberal education as unnecessary, or wasteful, or a luxury. Some scoff at it by noting that many students forget much of what they learn after a certain number of years. That much forgetting is a bit disturbing. But, in one important sense, how much of the specific bits that you remember or forget is beside the point. Can you remember all the specific times and lessons in your childhood when your parents taught you how to grow up? No? Does that mean that you learned nothing or that your parents were not effective? You learned from them something about moral character, principles and values and habits that you need in order to flesh out and structure your life well. Similarly, a liberal education primarily develops your intellectual character, the intellectual principles and values and habits of mind that you need in order to structure your mind well. You do not forget the character you formed, assuming you allowed your character to be transformed by your education in the first place.

And now you can understand the foolishness of another attack on liberal education: the one that points out that people do not use it in their jobs. Given what we have said, one uses such an education all the time, for it becomes part of you. But even more importantly, whether or not you use specific bits of learned material in your job is also beside the point. Liberal education is not about what you will need for a job but rather about what you will need to live a life. It's not about what you do, it's about what you are and will be. The irony of ironies is that a liberal education is also the best career preparation one can get. Major business leaders tell us that schools should not turn out students with specialized job training, because a liberal education is more useful. But too many people (parents, students, faculty, administrators, politicians) will not listen. Some folks just do not get it.

People have fought for and died on behalf of a liberal education. Some of our fundamental commitments are predicated on a liberal education. The American Founding Fathers understood well that the maintenance and well-being of the Republic requires a liberally educated citizenry. They would never have proposed a democracy if they had not envisioned a liberally educated citizenry.

Liberal education is one of the great developments in human history. It should be preserved and strengthened, not allowed to wither away. You members of Alpha Chi have shown high achievement in education. That speaks well of you not only as thinkers but as people who understand what is needed for right living. We pray that you continue to have the strength, commitment, and understanding needed to live a life guided by liberal education. For those people with the opportunity to live an educated life, there is no worthwhile alternative. Thank you.