WHAT ?? !! - THE “NEW” LIBERAL EDUCATION

Fear not O Muse! truly new ways and days receive, surround you.

-????????? Walt Whitman, Song of the Exposition

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Today in 21st century ?we live in a culture divided between two conceptions of a liberal education. The older one, is the idea of an education that is liberalis, “fitted for freedom,” in the sense that it is aimed at freeborn gentlemen of the propertied classes. This education initiated the elite into the time-honored traditions of their own society; it sought continuity and fidelity, and discouraged critical reflection. The “new” idea, favored by some interprets the word liberalis differently. An education is truly “fitted for freedom” only if it is such as to produce free citizens, citizens who are free not because of wealth or birth, but because they can call their minds their own. Male and female, slave-born and freeborn, rich and poor, they have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument. They have ownership of their own thought and speech, and this imparts to them a dignity that is far beyond the outer dignity of class and rank.

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These people, I would suggest, will not be uncritical moral relativists—for ownership of one’s own mind usually yields the understanding that some things are good and some bad, some defensible and others indefensible. Nor will they scoff at the traditions that the older “liberal” education prizes: for they know that in tradition lies much that has stood the test of time, that should command people’s respect. They will start from convention and tradition when they ask what they should choose, viewing it as essential food for the mind. On the other hand, they do not confuse food with the strength in the mind that the food is supposed to produce. They know they need to use tradition to invigorate their own thought—but this benefit involves a willingness to criticize it when criticism is due. They do not prize custom just because of its longevity, nor do they equate what has been around a long time with what must be or with what is “natural.” They therefore want to learn a good deal about other ways and people—both in order to establish respectful communication about matters of importance and in order to continue rethinking their own views about what is best. In this way, they hope to advance from the cultural narrowness into which we all are born toward true world citizenship.

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Our country has embarked on an unparalleled experiment, inspired by these ideals of self-command and cultivated humanity. Unlike all other nations, we ask a higher education to contribute a general preparation for citizenship, not just a specialized preparation for a career. To a greater degree than all other nations, after independence we have tried to extend the benefits of this education to all citizens, whatever their class, race, sex, ethnicity, or religion. We hope to draw citizens toward one another by complex mutual understanding and individual self-scrutiny, building a democratic culture that is truly deliberative and reflective, rather than simply the collision of unexamined preferences. And we hope in this way to justify and perpetuate our nation’s claim to be a valuable member of a world community of nations that must increasingly learn how to understand, respect, and communicate, if our common human problems are to be constructively addressed.

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I read in History in my graduation from Lucknow University – ‘as in ?Rome, so too in our nation, this ideal of an education for freedom has its detractors. In Rome, the cultivated elite frequently resisted the Stoics’ (Stoicism was one of the dominant philosophical systems of the Hellenistic period. The Stoics believed that our wealth, status, power, possession and stature are neither good or bad, and they have no social importance with respect to our relationships with one another. We are equals. They held that external differences, such as rank and wealth, are of no importance in social relationships) ideas about the insignificance of rank and hierarchy, their insistence on acknowledging the equal humanity and educational potential of male and female, slave and free.’ In our own society, traditionalists frequently resist the idea that we should cultivate our perceptions of the human through a confrontation with cultures and groups that we have traditionally regarded as unequal ( as in our caste based society). Defenders of the older idea of a gentleman’s education urge that our colleges and universities focus on acculturation to what is great and fine in our own tradition, rather than on universalistic goals after independence. In so far as this education reaches out to new citizens, it will do so because they agree to accept time-honored gentlemanly standards. They should not expect that their own experiences and traditions will form part of the curriculum. They may enter the academy only on sufferance and in disguise. They may remain only so long as they do not allow their nongentlemanly voices to be heard, or inject their nontraditional experiences into the dignified business of liberal learning.

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This way of thinking, though common enough, is foreign to what is finest in our democratic educational traditions, which have been built on ideas of equality and mutual respect. The prevalent education system does not show us directly how to criticize such an opponent, since his time is so unlike our own. From this basic idea of the cultivation of humanity, however, we can derive our own answer. We do not fully respect the humanity of our fellow citizens—or cultivate our own—if we do not wish to learn about them, to understand their history, to appreciate the differences between their lives and ours. We must therefore construct a liberal education that is not only traditional or Socratic ( for my western readers), emphasizing critical thought and respectful argument, but also pluralistic, imparting an understanding of the histories and contributions of groups with whom we interact, both within our nation and in the increasingly international sphere of business and politics. If we cannot teach our students everything they will need to know to be good citizens, we may at least teach them what they do not know and how they may inquire. We can acquaint them with some rudiments about the major western as well as non-Western cultures and minority groups within our own. We can show them how to inquire into the history and variety of gender and sexuality. ABOVE ALL, WE CAN TEACH THEM HOW TO ARGUE, RIGOROUSLY AND CRITICALLY, SO THAT THEY CAN CALL THEIR MINDS THEIR OWN.

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It is relatively easy to construct a gentleman’s education for a homogeneous elite. It is far more difficult to prepare people of highly diverse backgrounds for complex world citizenship. Curricula aiming at these ideals fit no general mold. Where they are well constructed, they are constructed resourcefully on the basis of local knowledge, knowledge of the institution’s student body, its material resources, and its faculty - ?for example, it is often best advanced by a required course or courses in philosophy; in some institutions, however, a more flexible system of infusing traditional ?values into courses of many types may achieve good results. An understanding of race and ethnicity is frequently best promoted by an integrated interdisciplinary course required of all students, such as some I can cite from western countries though in their own context - the SUNY-Buffalo course on American pluralism, or the Scripps course on Enlightenment thought and its critics. But at some institutions, for example Brown and Grinnell, students find enough course offerings in a variety of different departments to attain a comparable degree of understanding without a single common course. The diversity of institutions and students puts enormous pressure on faculty to think creatively and to invest their time in curricular development.

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Such projects do not always succeed. One of my friends at the University of Nevada at Reno told me, that their resources are so limited that the basically well-reasoned program in human diversity can achieve little more than an amorphous elective requirement comprised of existing courses. Many institutions face such pressures. At the University of California at Riverside, otherwise promising proposals in sexuality studies and women’s studies are marred by tensions between postmodernist faculty in literature and faculty adhering to more traditional canons of rational argument, who feel, plausibly enough, that the postmodernist attack on truth threatens the very possibility of ethical and political criticism. At Riverside I am told, we see tensions between an approach to ethnic studies that sees it as an important area of understanding for all students and an approach based on identity politics. Both of these tensions arise on many campuses, threatening world citizenship. Finally, some such projects are derailed by opposition from an administration unwilling to permit faculty to incorporate controversial new material into their teaching. One salient example of this kind of failure is the assault on feminist scholarship at Brigham Young University, but at many institutions these new studies are more passively discouraged by insufficient financial support. Far more often, however, we see an astonishing variety of creative proposals that promise a rich future for our democracy if only they will continue developing and find the support they deserve. The most successful proposals include some ambitious multicourse programs, such as the Cultural Encounters Program at St. Lawrence, where a creative and tenacious faculty group has transformed many aspects of the curriculum; the Afro-American Studies program at Harvard, where Skip Gates, Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, William Julius Wilson, and others are bringing distinguished scholarship and humane ideals to a field that has too long been treated as a poor relation; and the program in Sexuality and Society at Brown, where a multi-disciplinary faculty drawn from the humanities, the social sciences, and the biological and medical sciences are working to present students with an integrated understanding of this important area of personal and political life. Successes also include required basic courses, such as the American pluralism course at SUNY-Buffalo, or the Scripps course on the legacy of the Enlightenment, or required philosophy courses at Notre Dame, Bentley, Harvard, and Pittsburgh, or Spelman’s course on the African diaspora. They include countless individual elective courses at the departmental level: Steve Salkever and Michael Nylan’s course in comparative political philosophy at Bryn Mawr; Ronnie Littlejohn’s course on comparative moral philosophy at Belmont; Susan Okin’s course on women in political thought at Stanford; Marilyn Friedman’s class on feminist political thought at Washington University; Amartya Sen’s course on hunger and famines at Harvard; Eve Stoddard’s course on the female body at St. Lawrence. Finally, campuses also foster world citizenship through noncurricular projects such as conferences and visiting lectures. Brown University’s conference on Homosexuality and Human Rights in the Major Religious Traditions was an outstanding example of such a project, promoting civil dialogue across political lines on a deeply divisive issue.

The future of these projects is, however, highly uncertain. They face some peril in our time, above all the risk of being undermined by a growing interest in vocational, rather than liberal, education. IT NOW SEEMS TO MANY ADMINISTRATORS (AND PARENTS AND STUDENTS) TOO COSTLY TO INDULGE IN THE APPARENTLY USELESS BUSINESS OF LEARNING FOR THE ENRICHMENT OF LIFE. Many institutions that call themselves liberal arts colleges have turned increasingly to vocational studies, curtailing humanities requirements and cutting back on humanities faculty—in effect giving up on the idea of extending the benefits of a liberal education to their varied students. In a time of economic anxiety, such proposals often win support. But they sell our democracy short, preventing it from becoming as inclusive and as reflective as it ought to be. People who have never learned to use reason and imagination to enter a broader world of cultures, groups, and ideas are impoverished personally and politically, however successful their vocational preparation.

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This peril to democracy is compounded by the assault on curricular diversity that has been repeatedly launched by defenders of the gentleman’s model of liberal education. In principle, the gentleman’s model and the world-citizen model agree on the importance of a shared humanistic education for the culture of life. Against the challenge of vocationalism, they ought to be allies rather than opponents. But this has not always been the case. By portraying today’s humanities departments as faddish, insubstantial, and controlled by a radical elite, cultural conservatives—while calling for a return to a more traditional liberal arts curriculum—in practice feed the popular disdain for the humanities that has led to curtailment of departments and programs and to the rise of narrow preprofessional studies. When critics such as Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and George Will caricature the activities of today’s humanities departments by focusing only on what can be made to look extreme or absurd, they probably do not promote their goal of increasing university support for traditional humanistic education. In practice, the parent who reads such attacks is far more likely to develop a disdain for the humanities and to press for cuts in that entire area, often in favor of narrow vocational education. If people view the teaching that is actually going on in the humanities as incompetent and even politically dangerous, it is all too easy to feel justified in cutting off funds and turning increasingly to the safer terrain of accounting, computer science, and business education.

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It is urgent, then, to say that the disdainful picture is inaccurate. The energy, goodwill, and resourcefulness of our humanities faculty should command our profound respect, whether or not we agree with every proposal that is made. (It would be impossible to agree with all proposals, since there is endless variety, disputation, and debate.) These faculty are educating citizens of widely varying types—in many case students who would not have been in college at all one or two generations ago. Wisely, instructors at both elite and more inclusive schools are not seeking to make these nontraditional (and traditional) students into little ?gentlemen; nor are they seeking to turn them into clones of the radicals of the 1960s. Instead, they are seeking to elicit from them the best in citizenship and understanding that they can achieve, starting from where they are. At University Of Virginia, my friend Namrata Tangre ( A Indian ) ?teaches a philosophy course for people who never thought Socratic argument would be a part of their lives; by the end of the course their attitude to political debate has been transformed. At another University in Europe, faculty working in the area of gender studies start from an awareness of the cultural background of students and their likely stereotypes, in order to work toward a more inclusive understanding of women and their lives.

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BECAUSE THE WORLD IN WHICH WE LIVE IS COMPLEX, THIS ENTERPRISE REQUIRES LEARNING ABOUT RACIAL, ETHNIC, AND RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCE. IT REQUIRES LEARNING ABOUT THE HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE OF WOMEN. IT REQUIRES GAINING A REFLECTIVE UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN SEXUALITY. AND IT REQUIRES LEARNING HOW TO SITUATE ONE’S OWN TRADITION WITHIN A HIGHLY PLURAL AND INTERDEPENDENT WORLD. THESE THINGS ARE DIFFICULT TO DO, AND THEY ARE NOT ALWAYS DONE WELL. BUT OFTEN THEY ARE DONE EXTREMELY WELL—BY MEN AND WOMEN OF HIGHLY VARIED RELIGIOUS, ETHNIC, AND PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUNDS, MANY OF WHOM ARE STRUGGLING TO KEEP THEIR DEPARTMENTS GOING, OR MOVING FROM UNTENURED ADJUNCT JOB TO ADJUNCT JOB, IN A TIME OF ECONOMIC CONSTRAINT AND CONTRACTION OF ACADEMIC PROGRAMS. IT IS TO THEIR HOPE AND INGENUITY THAT WE OWE OUR FUTURE AS A DEMOCRACY.

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Another friend in University of Rome ?Meryl ?Debbie, an old professor of philosophy, talks about the struggle to keep philosophy going in an institution increasingly dominated by vocational goals and increasingly indifferent to the idea that philosophy forms part of a basic liberal education. Faculty in there have an extremely heavy teaching load, and Meryl, teaching in both philosophy and women’s studies, has even more duties than many. Despite these impediments she has achieved widespread respect for her writing about legal and moral issues in the area of prostitution and women’s equality and, more recently, about the role of a religious or ethnic identity in giving meaning to one’s life. A petite woman in her forties, her energy and humor are contagious.

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The University of Rome students, says Meryl, are bound for a wide range of professions—engineering, business, computer science, high school and elementary school teaching. (Not many go for medicine or law, fields that are known to find a philosophy major highly desirable.) Most of them fear philosophy, convinced, without any prior experience, that it is too hard for them. Although the university has a “critical thinking” requirement, other humanities departments offer courses that satisfy it, usually without much emphasis on logical analysis or argument. Meryl and her colleagues have not been able to persuade the administration that philosophy’s attention to logic and rigor has a distinctive contribution to make. This, Meryl feels, is a loss for the students, both as people and, ultimately, as citizens. They do not learn to argue about issues of the day with rigor, curiosity, and mutual respect. Courses in business and engineering pay lip service to the importance of ethical issues, including some attention to ethics in their regular courses; but they are not the focus of such courses and do not get covered fully; meanwhile, the existence of some ethical discussion in those courses reinforces the students’ sense that they do not need philosophy.

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What do Meryl and her colleagues do to keep philosophy going? Meryl ?says she doesn’t have much hope of attracting many future engineers or even high school teachers to her courses. But she is not giving up; and now she speaks with passionate enthusiasm. In thinking how to keep the field going, she has decided to focus on the future elementary school teachers. They seem less rigidly preprofessional, more ready to get interested in what a liberal education might offer. Meryl ?has therefore designed a course for them, “Philosophy through Children’s Literature,” which explores ways in which they can use works of L. Frank Baum and other classic children’s authors to awaken wonder and questioning—about space and time, about the mind, about what a human being is, about what friendship is. Meryl ?smiles at the thought that she has discovered a route to her goal, even when all the obvious routes were blocked.

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In a paper Namrata Tangre ?talks about University of Virginia, her students, and cross-cultural understanding. Namrata was born in Calcutta; although she has lived in USA more than twenty years, she still wears a sari and speaks with a heavy Bengali accent. For years she has taught as an adjunct at UOV at, without a tenure-track position. Namrata has an ability our nation badly needs: the ability to generate excitement about rational debate in students who never cared about it before. She keeps awakening this eagerness in students took hes second course on Indian thought. How can this cultivation of humanity continue? Few people who teach at privileged institutions would be able to hold out against the discouragement Namrata contends with. How does she go on as she does, without a decent salary, without benefits, without any job security? Namrata shrugs, as if that is a slightly strange question. I guess it is the joy of it, she says. It is because I like them. Each class, all new and different people. I just like them. That is also my answer to my business teaching of 23 years in India ........ students motivate me ....... I guess the joy of it – and not the depression, dejection and frustration emanating from the dirty politics of the managers of education in ?this good country traditionally and now called BHARAT ......... !! ....... It is the joy of it ..... MY STUDENTS ........ batches after batches – Each class all new and different people - have seen me going and my tenacity of purpose to cleanse the system of its malaise .......... a real LIBERAL EDUCATION ..... !!

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Namrata – and many other good hearted academics though rare now - such teachers have embarked on a project that urgently demands our support, since we all live in the nation that will be governed, for better or for worse, by people who have, or who do not have, the complex understanding they seek to impart. It would be catastrophic to become a nation of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others. And yet, unless we support these endeavors, it is in such a nation that we may well live. It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted, but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship.

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Soon we shall breathe our last. At the end of this writeup I would say ?- Meanwhile, as we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate our humanity in our universities and work to develop curricula that will meet the challenge contained in these words. Let us support these sincere teachers and academicians.

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sudhanshu