Thoughts for the Class of 2010
Written by: Dr. Marshall Gregory
You have probably heard the terms "liberal education" and "the
liberal arts" bandied about, but you may not have a concrete notion
of what these terms mean, except, perhaps, that the liberal arts
are a required set of courses not directly connected to
your major, and you may have wondered irritably why you should pay
good money to take a big chunk of courses not pointed like an arrow
at the bull's eye of a future job, preferably a job with high
status and a big salary. This brief document explains to you why
the value of a liberal arts education can, like a wise financial
investment, not only stretch across a lifetime, but increase in
value the longer you own it.
Despite the fact that the liberal arts are often defined as a
set of courses, the truth is that the liberal arts are not a lot of
things you learn about. Instead, the liberal arts are a
lot of things that you learn to do: things that you learn
to do directly on your own behalf, not because doing them serves
someone else's agenda. An "art," after all, is not a parcel or a
burden. It's an activity. In the second place, you need to realize
that these activities-the liberal arts-are the arts of living a
life that you increasingly learn to shape by purpose and design-the
way you would write a poem or construct a proof or design an
experiment-rather than living a chaotic life dominated by random
impulse or living a sterile life dictated by social programming.
The arts that a liberal education teaches you to perform are the
very arts you have been working to master since you were born:
- Rationality: the art of practical reasoning, such as
figuring out what's likely to happen tomorrow based on what
happened today, learning how to read such phenomena as
cause-and-effect, coincidence, agency, and learning how to use
logic or critical thinking to analyze everyday problems. The more
you study reasoning, the more you realize the vast span that it
covers from, say, figuring out how to use a simple tool like a
hammer all the way up to doing the calculus or recursive functions
or scientific hypothesizing.
- Imagining: the art of holding an image in your head,
holding it there indefinitely, constructing a mental picture of
something that does not exist in order to criticize or
change something that does exist (where do you think the ideas for
better mousetraps or better governments come from?), and sometimes
stringing a lot of images together to tell a story, a joke, a lie,
or to make a private day dream the topic of social
conversation.
- Introspection: the art of thinking about your own
thinking. Perhaps this is the only one of the liberal arts that is
thoroughly unique to human beings, but whether it is or not, the
ability to submit our own thinking to persistent inspection is
central to human identity in general.
- Language: the art of using language is a profoundly
indicative marker of human nature, and is surely the basis of
humans' ability for abstract thought, metaphor, cooperative
activity, and individualized self-expression.
- Moral and Ethical Deliberation: the art of judging our
own and other people's conduct in moral and ethical terms. Only
human beings make such judgments, apparently, but all
human beings do it, and they do it unceasingly. Deciding who is
right or wrong in a disagreement or deciding which actions bring
honor or shame, praise or blame, and so on is a human pursuit of
ceaseless interest to everyone. From culture to culture the
standards of judgment may differ widely, but not the
exercise of standards, whatever they may be.
- Sociability: the art of living with other people in
ways that either promote human flourishing or that impoverish and
undermine human flourishing. Since we have no choice but to live
with other human beings-there is no such thing as a naturally
solitary human being-we can never shake off this topic. Sociability
is woven into the fabric of human existence. Other people may often
pain us or tire us or bore us, but they are always important to
us-what we think of them, what they think of us-whether we like it
or not.
- Aesthetic responsiveness: the art of responding to
certain forms, sounds, appearances, shapes, colors, uses of
language, textures, designs, and so on because we consider them
beautiful, and responding in different ways to these same stimuli
when we consider them ugly. Like moral and ethical deliberation,
aesthetic responsiveness seems to be an activity that only human
beings do, but it is an activity that all human beings do,
and is the reason you like listening to music, looking at pictures,
wearing jewelry, picking clothes that you think are attractive,
going to museums, and so on.
- Physicality: the art of mastering your body. Your
education on this front began with learning how to feed yourself,
how to walk, and how to go to the toilet without assistance. You're
still working on your body as you learn how to exercise, stay
healthy, eat right, sleep enough, (or, on all of these fronts,
not).
The point is that these are the arts of human excellence. You
are born with a great capacity for the potential development of
each of these human arts, but all of us begin life with little
functionality. Functionality comes slowly. Mastery comes seldom.
The corridor to both is practice.
However, it is natural for most people to overestimate the
degree of their mastery of the arts of human excellence. In your
own case, for example, you have now gained familiarity with all of
those forms of functionality that challenged you as a child. You
have not only been tying your shoes for about twelve years, but you
can now dance and pass a lab science course and do math problems
and read easy poems and drive cars and have sex in your dorm rooms.
All of these forms of functionality invite you to participate in
the universal human tendency to overestimate your mastery of the
arts of human excellence, but you probably have the deep intuition,
as the old adage puts it, that "you still have a lot to learn." We
can all make progress toward mastery, however, even though
none of us will ever become full masters of excellence, and making
progress is what getting an education is all about.
The methodology of a liberal arts education is to take you
through a series of courses, each of which gives you particular
forms of practice that are the foundation for progress in all the
arts of human excellence. Text-based courses such as literature and
history and languages, naturally, give you the kind of practice
that helps you strengthen such arts of language as your sensitivity
to metaphor, rhetoric, idioms, different levels of style,
conventions of usage, and the sound and feel of language used for
artistic purposes rather than informational purposes. Lab courses,
math courses, and science courses give you the kinds of practice
that help you strengthen certain arts of reason, such as
computation, calculation, hypothesizing, collecting and evaluating
material evidence, and so on. Courses in art history and music
appreciation give you practice at strengthening your aesthetic
responsiveness to ever more complex and, at first, unfamiliar forms
of artistic expression. And so on. All the way through the liberal
arts curriculum you will be assigned forms of practice the real
purpose of which has less to do with your remembering the content
of the discipline forever than with your getting the kind of
exercise that will develop your fundamental capacities for human
excellence.
Every class is about some discipline or other, and this fact is
neither trivial nor false, but it is also neither trivial nor false
to say that, most of all, every class is about you. It is
about how much progress your study of each discipline forces you to
make simply because some good teachers is making you sweat blood in
the chemistry lab, or making you sweat blood over the poem,
formula, hypothesis, fact, or interpretation. The sweating blood is
not about anyone's ambition to turn you into a chemist or a
literary specialist or a psychologist or an art historian. It's
about your learning how, regardless of the discipline, to get
it right. And to get it right-to get right
the fact, the formula, the hypothesis, the proof, the poem, or
whatever-forces you both to employ and deploy all
of your arts of human excellence. If you think back on all of your
years of previous education, you will instantly perceive that you
have forgotten most of the content you learned. This is not because
you have a learning disability; it's because education is about
a lot more than what you remember or forget. It's
about how you learn to think, feel, and judge.
Another thing you need to realize is that you are the target of
insidious designs on your autonomy, and that you are probably
looking in the wrong direction to see the trouble coming. While you
are peering anxiously into the future as if the "What Job?"
question is the only important question driving your education, the
trouble coming at you from both sides is composed of false and
confusing messages incessantly being shouted at you by the American
marketing machine. The great act, the great deed, that a liberal
arts education helps you perform is the act of constructing an
entire human life that is socially responsible, intellectually
perspicuous, personally enriched, and morally defensible. However,
all Americans' lives are saturated in messages constructed by
corporate marketers, and the last thing marketers want is for any
of us to be authentic and autonomous because, the more autonomous
we are, the less they can control how we spend our money.
The scary thing is that corporate marketers are among the most
accomplished and successful teachers you will ever encounter. In
matters of teaching, many of your college teachers feel like
bumbling Neville Longbottoms when they compare themselves to the
Lord Voldemorts of corporation marketing, for corporation marketers
know the magic spells and enchantments that make their lessons
about the heaven of toys and fashion go all the way down. Corporate
marketers have actually mastered the magic of restructuring human
desire. The words and images that they use on television and movie
screens teach all of us not only what products to buy but what
kinds of lives to desire.
Another thing you need to realize is that life is always more
than a job or a career or a profession. Quite independently of jobs
and careers, everyone falls in love, gets love denied or love
requited, gets sick and gets well (or not), relates to other people
in a wide variety of roles, needs rest, walks on two legs, fails,
succeeds, endures accidents, enjoys good luck, suffers from bad
luck, feels happy, feels sad, grows old, and dies. Educational talk
that forever forces you to focus on the question of what you are
going to do with your education is profoundly misleading
because it is way too shallow to be truly useful. The deeper
question is not what you are going to do but who you are
going to become. Every day the choices you make are
turning you into some particular version of your potentialities,
and your four years in college will be a particularly formative
period of self-formation. All those people who have shallowly led
you to think that you can form a self merely by preparing for a
profession have done you a serious disservice. No matter what
career you choose, the single job that every human being has to
work at is the job of deciding what kind of person he or she will
become. You cannot dodge this issue. Not deciding who you are
going to become is, in fact, deciding to let internal impulse or
outside pressures form your soul. A liberal arts education is your
best resource for learning how to think in holistic terms about who
you are and about who you wish to become.
A final thing you need to realize is that the arts of human
excellence are your only resources for doing anything at all.
Because academic disciplines and jobs in the world vary so much,
people often think that these differences mean that everyone needs
vastly different kinds of education to prepare for professional
life. This is a mistake. Whether you turn out to be a physicist or
a stock broker or a computer engineer or a high school history
teacher, the only resources you will ever have for performing
any of these tasks are your resources of reason, language,
sociability, imagination, introspection, moral and ethical
deliberation, aesthetic awareness, and physicality. These resources
can and will be tweaked by specific job requirements-chemists have
to know things that stock brokers don't-but, still, the success
with which chemists and stock brokers do their work, and the
success with which you will master job requirements of any kind,
depends on how well you have strengthened your fundamental
resources, the arts of human excellence. For 2500 years society's
main strategy for strengthening those arts has been a liberal arts
education.
So what's the value of a liberal arts education at Butler? The
value of a liberal arts education is no more and no less than the
value of your own life and the extent to which that value can be
added to, strengthened, and enhanced by your persistent efforts to
develop all of the arts that make for human excellence. All of you
possess these arts but none of you possesses them completely.
Working to develop the arts of human excellence is a lifetime
project of discovery, enlightenment, and joy. If you learn how to
start working on this project in a serious way here at Butler
University because we know how to lead you through a liberal arts
education, you will enter post-college life having learned how to
learn, how to think, and how to feel and judge with subtlety,
propriety, finesse, and power. You will have learned how to
liberate yourself from sheer impulse, prejudice, bigotry, and any
shallow belief in quick-and-easy answers. You will have learned how
to use evidence and make arguments. You will have learned how to
communicate clearly and effectively. You will have learned how to
argue about issues of justice, fairness, and equity without relying
on the clichés of partisans or the platitudes of popular culture.
You will have learned how to see beauty in corners of life where
you never before suspected that beauty might be hiding. In short,
you will have learned how to become a joy to yourself and a solace
to others. The liberal arts education you acquire now will be a
mainstay of your life forever.
Marshall Gregory
Ice Professor of English, Liberal Education, and Pedagogy