|
|
 |
Craig Watson, Monmouth College
August 27, 2002
You have heard that I will be speaking to you about the “Values
of a Liberal Arts College” and I promise to do so. But you can also
see that I have re-titled this talk, “Strangers in a Strange Land.”
Let me begin by explaining the new title I’ve chosen.
Stranger in a Strange Land is the name of a science fiction
novel by Robert Heinlein I read in high school. I remember that the stranger
in the book was a Martian with strange powers who ultimately established
a cult following and a religious movement. More than that I don’t
remember. But the phrase “stranger in a strange land” has
stayed with me, maybe because on many occasions I have felt myself to
be one.
For instance, I remember a day deep in the last century when I was a
freshman at a liberal arts college something like Monmouth. Our freshman
orientation group leader described a name game we were to play that was
supposed to help us get to know each other. We were to choose imaginary
names for each other based upon our appearances and behaviors. I thought
it was a stupid game and said so, which led my fellow freshmen to agree
that I should be called “Anton the brooding Russian.” They
all laughed at their cleverness.
And sometime later at the draft induction physical exam in Chicago, I
remember feeling like a stranger in a strange land, standing naked in
a long line of other naked young men, all coughing on command as the Army
doctors worked their way down the rows.
In different cities and small towns in the US and in other countries,
I have more than once felt very much like a stranger in a strange land.
But never more so than as a newcomer to Monmouth, watching for the first
time-- as you may watch a few weeks from now-- the Prime Beef Festival
Parade proudly present the Prime Beef Queen and her court, followed by
ten or twenty $300,000 John Deere combines rolling down the middle of
Broadway.
And now, of course, speaking to almost 400 of you from the lay assistant’s
pulpit in a church of all places, I can whisper to myself again, Watson,
you are indeed a stranger in a strange land. And so I am.
But so are all of you.
Look around. Many people here this morning are from somewhere else.
They don’t know your name and you don’t know theirs. Until
a few days ago, most of you didn’t know the name of the stranger
you share a small room with now. You are a first-year student at your
first Monmouth College convocation on the first full day of classes.
Being a stranger in a strange land can be a burden to you or to anyone,
a burden of longing and loneliness and confusion. Perhaps you are feeling
a bit disoriented, a bit temporary about yourselves, despite good efforts
to welcome and orient you to Monmouth College. On the other hand, your
strangeness signals a moment of opportunity, what the ancient Greeks called
kairos, a time of crisis that is also a time pregnant with potential
for good changes.
When you’re a stranger and faces step out of the rain, you may
find yourself asking with a special sense of urgency strange good questions
like: Who are these others around me? Who am I, after all? What do they
know? What do I know? What can anybody know for sure? What do I want to
be? Where have I been? Where am I going? Whom will I care for along the
way? Who will care about me? What would I be willing to die for? And so,
perhaps what am I willing to devote my life to?
These questions others have asked before and will ask again long after
you have graduated. Like them, you may find in your time at Monmouth answers
that will deepen your self understanding and your connections to the world
around you, answers that, to borrow a phrase from our general education
program title, will offer you “beauty and meaning” in your
lives. So strangeness may be unwanted but it may be necessary for growth
and enrichment, the way “stress” in our lives is something
we think of as something to avoid, knowing, though, that stress is also
evidence of our vitality and activity, of being truly alive. The questions
I just listed and some other very good ones lie at the heart of the heart
of a tradition of learning called liberal arts. And you will see these
questions underwrite much of what we do in Freshman Seminar, the course
that is the gateway and cornerstone of the liberal arts curriculum at
Monmouth College.
I want to do two things now. First I want to offer you-- not a map to
this strange land of liberal arts education but rather--a key to the maps
you may make, a key that may help you negotiate strangeness and strangers
on the way to becoming more comfortable, more connected with people here,
and more connected with some of the important aims and ideas of liberal
arts education.
And then secondly, I want to try to give you a better idea about what
the phrase “liberal arts education” has meant and could mean
to you now and long after you graduate.
For me an excellent key to maps of this strange land called Monmouth
College goes by the name of a human activity that is basic to all education:
storytelling.
Storytelling, of course, has a long history in your educations already.
We are storytelling animals. We experience reality as narrative. And storytelling
is one of the primary ways we human beings turn little strangers called
babies into grown up family and community members. You may take for granted
the stories you heard as children: stories your grandparents and parents
and teachers and friends have told you about their lives. And there are
other stories you have heard and hardly think about now: fairy tales and
nursery rhymes, fables, young adult novels, action accounts of discovery
and exploration. You may not have thought much about the place storytelling
will have in your liberal arts educations at Monmouth College, but you
are wrong if you think you have put stories behind you. Storytelling,
story listening, story analysis should play a very important part in your
education at Monmouth, inside and outside the classroom.
I guessed you were strangers in a strange land and I guessed that the
burden of strangeness may weigh heavily upon you for a few days and weeks,
at least. One way of making strangers into familiars and friends is to
tell them about yourself. In telling stories about yourselves, you are
doing a simple thing and complicated things. You are trying to make yourself
understood, but you may also be partially creating or re-creating your
own sense of identity, your own self-conception, in the image of the person
you want to be, or at least in the image of that person you want others
to see as you. When you think of it, your time of crisis as a stranger
becomes a time of opportunity to narrate and to remake your life . . .
and to become a better, a more studied listener and commentator when others
around you tell their stories. Likewise, the stories you go home to tell
about your experience here (to yourself and to parents or siblings somewhere
else) become ways of civilizing this wilderness, making habitable
a strange land. “Don’t be a stranger,” the saying goes.
Okay. Tell me a story about yourself. Tell stories about your experience
from which you and others may learn.
Not incidentally stories are at the heart of the matter in Freshman Seminar.
You were asked this summer to read a short story “The Machine Stops”
by E.M. Forster, and you were invited to begin reading a novel BRAVE NEW
WORLD.
You will learn shortly, if you don’t know already, that different
kinds of stories ask you to respond in particular and different ways.
Recognizing how you should respond, how you must learn to listen and evaluate
stories is a very important part of your education here at this liberal
arts college. We read a novel, for instance, differently than we read
a roommate’s recounting of a death in her family. We read with different
expectations and different critical skills a history text and a lab report.
Yet all of these are stories of one kind or another, and the knowledge
they provide you has to be integrated into the narrative of your “so-
called life.” One way of approaching this journey you are about
to take into strange land of the liberal arts is to see it as a series
of experiences and encounters and courses in which you learn how to read
and read well different kinds of stories.
So what now do I mean by a liberal arts education? What purposes does
it serve? How might it become valuable to you?
A dictionary definition of liberal arts says the following: “A
course of study that leads to general intellectual enlargement and refinement,
as opposed to narrowly conceived training for a technical or professional
occupation.” This suggests that a liberal arts education promises
greater scope and breadth of study, but also implies that purposes and
of a liberal arts education may be different than those of places where
specialization in one field or professional training programs are emphasized
before all else.
A liberal arts philosophy and curriculum we associate first with the
medieval universities of Europe (Cambridge, Oxford, Paris). Students of
the 13th century in those places studied the “trivium”
whose subjects were grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the “quadrivium,”
which emphasized arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy. Those who studied
these subjects most often entered the clergy and used their educations
as a means both for serving God and for serving themselves within the
immense bureaucracy of the Catholic Church. The mission of a liberal arts
education in the Middle Ages then was to enlarge and refine intellects
to serve the Holy Church.
And there is an evident connection between the mission of the medieval
university’s liberal arts curriculum and that imagined by the early
founders of liberal arts colleges in the United States in the 18th and
19th centuries, though often Protestants and not Catholics founded liberal
arts colleges in our part of the country. In the case of Monmouth College,
they were Presbyterian founders.
It is no accident, for instance, that Presbyterian ministers were the
first Presidents of this college; or that daily and then later weekly
religious chapel services or were part of the required curriculum of all
students at Monmouth, as late as the 1960s. “Convocation”
means a calling together and is no doubt related to the concept of vocation:
a calling-- originally a calling by God to service in his name. In Monmouth
College’s first hundred years, the higher aim of a liberal arts
education had much to do with educating and refining the minds and moral
imaginations of conscientious individuals who could then lead better Christian
lives, often as emissaries of the Gospel in this country and overseas.
But related to the high value placed on an explicitly Christian ethical
and moral liberal arts education was and is a more secular ideal of American
citizenship as the appropriate and meaningful outcome of a liberal arts
education. We have heard that democracy depends upon informed and reasonable
citizens. In order to thrive, citizens have to be able to deploy fully
their ability to reason, to be logical and critical thinkers. After all,
good citizens have to translate abstractions like freedom, justice, and
equality into good policies and practices. Political thinkers of the 18th
century-- in this country people like Jefferson and Paine and Franklin--
talked about this idea of citizenship, and an ideal of service to others
they called “virtu.” The service ideal they sought to realize
has something to do with that Christian sense of “vocation,”
but it recalls also an ancient classical ideal of Greek and Roman citizenship
they admired. A liberal arts education might serve the nation state by
educating citizens broadly to participate wisely in their own self-governance,
and by training leaders whose intellectual development was both broad
and refined.
To mention the name of Thomas Jefferson, however, reminds me of a third
historically based description of what a liberal arts education could
or should do by way of providing intellectual enlargement and refinement.
And here emphasis shifts to the word “arts” in the phrase
liberal arts. The value of such an education, one might argue, is that
it encourages and cultivates appreciation of beauty and that such appreciation
offers not only deep human satisfaction but also deepened understanding
of the meaning of being human in the world.
- The beauty and meaning in design of great buildings like Chartres
Cathedral, the Taj Mahal, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Robie
house.”
- The beauty and meaning in the complex style of Henry James’s
late novels, the power and lyricism of Toni Morrison’s Beloved….
- In music, the breathtaking colors of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth
Symphony, the beauty of a morning raga on the sarod of Ali Akbar Khan…
- In painting, the marriage of sea and sky in J.M.W. Turner’s
masterpieces, and Paul Cezanne’s fruit spilled out on a table.
- But also the beauty and meaning evident in the transformation of
a rough patch of briar and scrub become through design and cultivation
an extraordinary herb garden that is a delight to look at and smell
and taste.
- The beauty and meaning of an exquisitely prepared seven course French
meal, whose sauces are the pride of national memory, whose subtle wines
grace each course.
- The elegance and economy of design in the Concorde supersonic jet
or an orbiting space station.
- Grace in the apparently effortless movements of the dancer and the
superb athlete.
And so on. According to this idea of the liberal arts, higher education
means educating the eye, the ear, the palette, refining the senses, cultivating
taste, honing the power of intellectual and aesthetic discrimination and
thereby celebrating civilization and human achievement. Where there was
nothing before, something came into human being that inspires awe. That
makes us joyful.
So far then I have spoken of the values of a liberal arts education (the
religiously informed moral and ethical education; the education of enlightened
citizenry; the cultivation of taste and appreciation of beauty and meaning
in works of art) as historical purposes of a liberal arts education,
but you can see in the way I describe these three values (or missions)
of the liberal arts that they promote powerful and important values of
a liberal arts education today. They compete, however, or at least coexist,
cohabit, with some other values and missions of a liberal arts education.
That same Thomas Jefferson I referred to a moment ago once wrote a letter
to a young man named Peter Carr, advising him about books he should read
in order to be liberally educated. His letter reminds me that once upon
a time, long ago, I sat across from my academic advisor at that liberal
arts college something like Monmouth. I had survived the Anton the brooding
Russian incident, but I was now in a deep funk about what I should major
in. I wanted to be a doctor but I liked English and Religious Studies
too. I was in my advisor’s office (he was a History Professor) to
get advice on what course of study I should take. I wanted a perfect map
for my future. I remember that he listened to me drone and whine for quite
a while, then raised his hand, leaned back, put his feet on the desk between
us and said, “Watson, lighten up. You have four years to make up
a reading list for the rest of your life. That’s what this is all
about.” I was shocked to learn that his idea of a liberal arts education
was apparently this: the college would showcase the best bibliographies
in the world, and students should spend four years constructing their
own life-long, Oprah’s recommended reading list. At the time I thought
he was crazy. Now I’m not so sure. . . .
But wait a minute. I can see you shifting uncomfortably in your seats.
A religious calling? Enlightened citizenship? Beauty and meaning in works
of art? A reading list for life? What do any of these have to do with
getting a good job or earning a living. How many of you here think that
coming to a college like Monmouth, receiving a B.A. degree after four
years of loans and debt, might have something to do with, yes, making
money?
Most of you, I see.
Fair enough. Let’s stay with this job-for-money theme for a moment,
because I have some news that should interest you. It’s about the
world around us and how quickly it is changing. Most predictions suggest
that most of you will have two or three entirely different careers and
as many as five to seven distinctly different jobs in your working lives.
The particular job you think you want now may not be there or be recognizably
the same by the time you think you are prepared or trained for it. Whatever
career you pursue, you will be expected to become life-long learners,
perpetual students for the rest of your occupational lives. If you want
to be successful in your working and earning lives, you will have to learn
to ride not just the gravy train, but the waves of change. You will have
to be able to learn how to learn new things quickly and effectively.
Let me give you an example to make this point concrete. My sister and
her husband are both doctors. My sister Heather was a music major who
went to medical school, where she met Jerry. They married, finished their
residencies, did a service year of doctoring on the island of St. Lucia,
then came home to enter a family practice in Connecticut, where they now
live. They do the things you would expect medical doctors to do: they
diagnose illnesses, make hospital rounds, read medical journals, return
to school each year for additional training, and attend conferences sponsored
by hospitals, HMS organizations, and pharmaceutical companies. My sister
also attends national conferences on women’s health care issues
and holistic medicine. But talking recently with Jerry, I was impressed
by how much their working lives as doctors involve jobs other than treating
patients. For one thing they manage a business: four doctors built and
own the clinic where they work that employs twenty full-time people: nurses,
accountants and clerks, maintenance staff. They have to hire and fire
people, dispense bonuses, schedule work, replace equipment, wade through
government regulations and tax forms, provide insurance and workman’s
compensation, deal with drug companies, lawyers, malpractice claims. These
were things they had never imagined doing when they went to medical school.
Furthermore, Jerry and my sister both sit on a medical ethics board at
the local hospital, where philosophers, theologians, community and business
leaders sit down with doctors to create health care policy and to preside
over cases of questionable practice. My sister Heather has become a lecturer
on women’s health care issues and geriatric care, so she both writes
and speaks publicly to large groups of people. She now manages hospice
care for eastern Connecticut, so she is an administrator and business
person too, holding meetings, determining budgets, lobbying politicians
on health care issues, doing public relations to make people more aware
about the need for special care of those who are dying. Needless to say,
they both have had to self-educate in the many uses of computer and internet
communications. Well this is just one example of the ways in which the
world of work increasingly requires us to be flexible, multi-dimensional
perpetual learners and performers. It’s a complicated world you
will work in. Much will be expected of you that you haven’t planned
to do.
Let’s get to some interesting, good news, then. There is much to
suggest that a liberal arts education could prepare you very well for
the world of work you will face. Take a look at graph q on your handout,
for instance, and let me explain what it could mean.
This graph plots the earnings over time of two groups of people who
have achieved undergraduate degrees either in a liberal arts curriculum
or in pre-professional specialist training programs. You can see that
at the entry level into the work force those in specialist training programs
initially make more money on average than those who graduate in the liberal
arts. But at around seven years after graduation, the graph suggests that,
again on average, the liberal arts graduates’ incomes accelerate
past their counterparts’.
If this graph (which by the way represents trends first noticed in the
1970s and 80s) still accurately reflects comparative income levels) we
might ask why would liberal arts graduates begin to earn, on average,
more than their counterparts whose undergraduate years have been spent
in more specialized training. One explanation suggests that liberal arts
graduates are more often moving into managerial positions in companies
with which they first received on the job training at the entry level.
A related explanation suggests that they are improving their positions
in an organization by qualifying for and taking other better paying jobs
as they are created or become vacant. But how do they do that? What about
the nature of a liberal arts education may give them the flexibility to
make those moves?
It would seem that these liberal arts educated people have learned to
translate themselves into new situations, to learn new things quickly,
to think critically and synthetically, and organize knowledge systematically.
Communication skills so evident in the structure of our General Education
program and many of our majors, for instance, surely have something to
do with the ability to acquire and use new knowledge. Bu there may be
more to it than that. Perhaps somehow a liberal arts education can enhance
a graduate’s ability to step back from specific situations in order
to estimate the larger, conceptual picture. See the forest, not just the
trees. Build bridges with what is known into unknown territories. Maybe
that’s the bottom line on this success story. Liberal arts graduates
have learned how to learn and that has helped them succeed.
I take seriously this explanation and I take seriously those who say
that the purpose of a liberal arts education is to teach students how
to become successful learners for life. But still it isn’t very
easy to say what that means exactly. Let me tell you two stories that
may help.
I’m back in college, the one I talked about earlier. I haven’t
taken my adviser’s advice. I haven’t lightened up. I’m
killing myself in a Human Physiology class, memorizing like mad all the
parts and systems of the body and brain, their functions . . . every part
of the inner ear, all the organs and glands and their complicated interactive
influences. Going into the final, I’m doing fairly well in the course
but I could do better. I have studied for three days and now, with other
bleary eyed M.D. wannabees I come in ready for the test. I think. The
first part of the examination is what I expected: multiple choice, short
definition, and diagram identification. But when I turn the page, lo and
behold I am looking at an essay question worth half of the examination
grade. I read the question and I freak. The question goes something like
this: “You are asked to design a human-like physical being capable
of surviving and thriving under conditions thought to exist on the surface
of the planet of Mars.” The question goes on to describe near boiling
temperatures during the day, antarctic nights, little oxygen, almost no
water, etc. Of course the question is fantastic. Some kind of joke. But
no one in the lecture hall is laughing. I look around to find what looks
like a hospital emergency room, flashing with code blues. Everyone is
freaked.
And after all, the exam is totally unfair. I know the names and layers
of human skin. I know about tendons and muscle and cartilage and bone.
I have studied all the right stuff. I have hundreds, even thousands of
facts to call upon. Design a humanoid for Mars. Outrageous! But I have
to answer the question.
I start to think. Alright, Watson, stand back here. You have studied
the physiology and function of parts of the human body. You know that
the human body must nourish itself, heat itself, cool itself, regulate
its functions. You know how it passes poisons, combusts food and oxygen,
coordinates its chemical life. Of course, everything you know works on
earth, and the human body would die on Mars. How would a body survive
the heat and then the cold, endure the incredible range of temperatures
in that hostile environment? What if . . .?
What if you could change this about the human body? What if you could
add an organ here and pop a gland there . . . ? What if skin could look
and act more like a stilsuit on a freman from the planet Arrakis in Frank
Herbert’s Dune. How would that skin work? What would be the design
flaws in stilsuit skin? How could a body compensate for impermeability
of this different skin? By now I’m not feeling so strange. Like
Dr. Frankenstein, I start to design a new Adam and a new Eve, for Mars.
Looking back, I think it was a great test question. It was a liberal
arts and science education. It taught me about the human body as an complete
organism, a biological system of great complexity with several specific
requirements, a system often threatened by its environment. I don’t
now remember the parts of the inner ear; though when I go to an eyes,
ears, nose and throat specialist, I most surely want her or him to know
all those parts by heart. I never went to medical school, but I have general
knowledge about how the systems of the body work that has been invaluable
to me over time. The exam forced me to think, to extrapolate from things
I knew, to deduce particular conclusions from general principles, to generalize
from particular instances and examples, to modify old models for new purposes.
The essay exam question, you may have gathered I am arguing, is like the
real world ahead of all of us, full of surprises, requiring each of us
to make good use of basic knowledge, good use of critical thinking skills,
good use of concepts in order to learn new things and solve hitherto unimagined
problems.
Let me make this point with a second story about a Harvard student named
Metzger, who once took a test in a class that he had never taken. Here’s
how the famous story goes. Metzger was a math major with an interest in
music, who one day followed a friend into a lecture class the friend was
taking in the social sciences, probably anthropology. Metzger was so engrossed
in the conversation with this friend that he didn’t hear the instructor
close the door to the classroom. It was a day for a midterm exam. The
bluebooks were passed out, the exam questions, and Metzger decided he
would take the test. For fun. So he did. Again, there was an objective
part and an essay part. He completed both and signed his finished exam
sloppily “G. Smith,” turned it in and went on his way, thinking
nothing about more about his adventure. Well it so happened that someone
named Smith had been absent that day for the exam. So by mistake, Metzger’s
test was graded. The next week grades were posted for the exam, and while
G. Smith-Metzger had received a low mark on the objective part, he had
managed an A- on the essay portion. . . without ever having taken the
class. Metzger started bragging, and when the story reached the student
newspaper, two things happened: there arose a tremendous outcry at Harvard
that educational standards were slipping dangerously. Some called for
dismissal of the anthropology instructor who gave Metzger the A-. The
second thing that happened was that Metzger was called in to explain his
actions before a disciplinary committee. And one of the judges at his
hearing was a dean of Harvard at the time, a man named William Perry.
Perry listened to Metzger explain how he took the test, what went through
his mind as he wrote the essay part of the exam. Then this Dean of Harvard
himself sat down and wrote a famous essay called “Examsmanship and
the Liberal Arts.” He didn’t condone Metzger’s chicanery,
but he argued that what Metzger had done on the exam was to successfully
bullshit his way through the question, and that furthermore, bullshitting
of the kind that Metzger was good at was exactly what a liberal arts education
at Harvard was designed to produce.
You see Metzger had analyzed the exam question. He had made certain calculations
about what a course in anthropology might be about (from other things
he knew). He used logic (deduction and induction), language analysis,
and his general knowledge to make educated guesses about the contents
of a book he had never read. He was supposed to comment on the methods
the author of the book had used in approaching the study of a particular
human community. And he reasoned his way into an answer which, while it
lacked specific examples, grasped the big ideas, the basic concepts, and
estimated fairly accurately how the author had gone about studying that
group of people. Metzger bullshitted a good essay because he understood
how human beings organize knowledge generally, and he understood what
ought to be true about anthropology, what ought to be the subject of the
book he was to comment on, what ought to be the strengths and weaknesses
of an anthropological approach.
A quick analogy here. You have seen artist’s conceptions of our
pre-human forbears in Science magazine or National Geographic
or in Biology textbooks: pictures of Neanderthal ancestors huddled around
a fire or walking across the veldt. We are told that these representations
are drawn from the record of fossilized bones. But bones aren’t
flesh. How can these artists represent faces and bodies from a fragment
of a femur bone, from two teeth and a lower jaw bone buried for hundreds
of thousands, even millions of years. Because in general they know how
bones support flesh, they know from widths and angles and positions of
bones, what flesh they could carry. They know generally from the study
of primates and the study of the physics of living on earth, what it takes
to face gravity down, what it must have taken to chew raw meat or grind
raw grains. And from what they know they make wonderfully educated guesses.
That’s what Metzger did. That’s what liberal arts graduates
should be able to do. To apply what they know in order to discover and
conjecture, surmise and invent. To reason their way to more or less right
answers.
Of course, Perry pointed out, the students at Harvard angriest about
Metzger’s essay grade of A- were the ones who had read the book,
knew lots of facts from the book, but who received poor marks on their
essay because they hadn’t understood what anthropology was really
about. The kind of people like me who could memorize 23 parts of the inner
ear but who freaked at the assignment to design a humanoid Martian.
Maybe a liberal arts education can teach you how to learn, how to relate
the facts and the concepts, how to get from here to there across bridges
of thinking you construct from methods and models and systems of thought
that others have used successfully before. Practically speaking, for your
success in the work world, that could be the best news you have heard
in a long time.
Monmouth College’s president in the late 1990s was a woman named
Sue Huseman. For a couple of years she gave the convocation I am doing
now. Sue Huseman presented a view of the purposes of a liberal arts education
that I think emphasizes the word “liberal,” if we understand
that a liberal arts education should have a liberating influence on the
lives of undergraduates, that it should free them through self knowledge.
I call this view of the value of a liberal arts education “fishbowling”
for reasons that may be become apparent in a minute.
According to Huseman, the goals of liberal learning are: to achieve knowledge
of self and others; to thereby understand and appreciate both our shared
human condition, and our diverse natures; finally to commit to improve
the human condition. In all these she placed great emphasis on the importance
of studying languages. For Huseman language is the means whereby the college
community, like any community creates and confirms knowledge. For her
the college is an interpretive community like many other interpretive
communities in the world wherein people decide together what to call the
truth, what to call justice, what to call good or evil. For Huseman truth,
justice, good and evil are defined by diverse communities of people.
She suggested, however, that most of us growing up are unconscious or
unaware of the forces that shape our identities and opinions, our points
of view, and our values. For Huseman college is a place where we should
become conscious of just those shaping influences on our lives. Through
a liberal arts education we should become self-conscious, insofar as when
we begin to ask “Who am I?” we are also asking “Where
did I get that idea?” and “How did I come to that opinion?”
and “Why do I believe that?”
In the first diagram r on your handout the influences that go to shape
a particular individual’s understanding of self and the world, and
of others are still invisible to that individual. We might think of that
individual as someone whose reflection does not yet include critical self-awareness.
For that individual one’s own beliefs, values, opinions—one’s
own identity—may be associated with what is real, good, normal,
and unquestionable. But in the second diagram r, as the student becomes
more aware and self-aware, that student begins to see how home life and
family, how race, ethnicity, gender, class, nationality, region, religion,
etc.—a whole host of influences--contribute to one’s understandings
and misunderstandings about self and others.
In becoming self-conscious we begin to see how cultural myths and beliefs
have shaped our views . A liberal arts education, then, can offer students
educational experiences designed to foster that kind of self-inquiry,
because such self-reflection suggests the possibility that any of us can
become, at least to a certain extent, free agents. By free agents I mean
this: that such self-consciousness and self awareness may free you to
choose critically to accept or reject those influences that have made
you what you are. And perhaps this new understanding of yourself will
reveal to you your prejudices and misunderstandings about others. You
can free yourself from your dependence upon influences that have shaped
your viewpoints, or you can select purposively from among them and say,
I believe this (even though I know this is not what others may legitimately
believe.)
The second diagram Huseman used involves a fishbowl. She explained it
thusly: we are so caught up in our own culture, so absorbed by our own
communities that we assume that everyone lives and experiences reality
the way we do. Like the fish in diagram s here, we look out through curved
glass of the fishbowl and our perspective is distorted. From where we
swim, outsiders are weird strangers and we are normal good folks. We have
to risk a leap out of our own accustomed fishbowl to gain new perspectives.
You might say we have to become strangers in strange lands in order to
learn more about others and still more about ourselves. Looking back at
the fishbowl we left behind in diagram t, we may see it freshly, differently,
with greater insight. We can see perhaps that ours is just one fishbowl
among many. If we find ourselves in somebody else’s fishbowl, we
can begin to learn new languages of that interpretive community, not just
languages like Hindi or Swahili or French or Spanish, but the languages
of business, languages of science, the languages of literature, the languages
of city people, languages of country people, languages of the rich and
the poor, languages of gender, languages of ethnicity; languages for formal
occasions, languages for informal occasions, non-verbal languages, etc.
. We may become educated by becoming multi-lingual and by realizing that
the varieties of language expression point out the varieties of experience
and belief among many interpretive communities in the world.
Diagram u then imagines that many things you do at MC: class work, athletics,
leadership and fellowship opportunities, socializing, doing off campus
programs and internships teach you to be multi-lingual and to multiply
perspectives you can use to better understand and then to improve the
human condition. Having different words, different languages at your command,
you may approach shared problems of this world (hunger, war, identity
hatreds, environmental degradation) with intelligence, sensitivity and,
yes, compassion.
I like all of these descriptions of a liberal arts education. I like
to think about a reasoning soul and the discipline of a moral education.
I think we need good citizens who are well informed. If human beings are
capable of great ugliness, they are also capable of incredible, creative
acts of beauty. It has made my life wonderful to appreciate a few of those
acts. A reading list for life seems to me an excellent idea. Being able
to learn how to learn new things should pay off. And fishbowling unquestionably
describes processes of growth and change and understanding necessary if
we are to survive in this world. I particularly like in the last diagram
the idea that a liberal arts education may teach us to speak in different
languages, to understand and appreciate different ways of knowing and
different ways of being in the world.
But then there is stargazing too. I want to leave you with one more value
of a liberal arts education, one that you may only realize much later
in your lives. And so I would ask you to place yourself now on the shore
of a great, dark lake some years hence, no city lights for hundreds of
miles. No moon, no clouds. And as you stand there looking up at the sky,
a graduate of Monmouth College, the stars are incredible, smoldering and
flickering brightly. You think of the influence of the earth’s atmosphere
on incoming light. You remember that light, like the lake may travel in
waves. You think about the immensity of space, the distances between stars,
the speed with which everything is running away from the big bang that
started it all. You return for a moment to an Old Testament course you
took where you discussed the Genesis Creation story in light of the Big
Bang theory. You know a few constellations, and their names recall Greek
myths you studied, wonderful stories about gods and goddesses and heroes
and heroines and jealousy and betrayal, about going to war and coming
home to Ithaca. You muse for a minute upon the social and psychological
truths of those myths. And then there’s star light, star bright,
and twinkle twinkle little star, but you also remember Keats’s sonnet
that begins “Bright star, wish I were as steadfast as thou art”
and from Hamlet “The fault, Horatio, is not in the stars, but in
ourselves that we are underlings.” Then you recall from Music Appreciation
Holst’s “The Planets” and from an art history class
Van Gogh’s “starry night” spins into view. The star
of David rises in imagination, but also you see on the dark waters the
recumbent god Visnu out of whose navel all creation unfolds. Copernicus
and Galileo and their revolution in human perception call out in remembrance
of your Physics class. And on and on it goes. . . . Multiple perspectives
abound, requiring of you tolerance for and playful acceptance of ambiguity.
And as you quiet your mind, you are awed not only by the spectacle before
you but by the human history behind you. You are buoyed and humbled by
the record of human beings who felt themselves and feel themselves often
to be strangers, wherever on earth they look up at the stars at an intersection
of the known and unknown, but who like yourself are addressing the universe
with spirit and intelligence. I see value in the education that gets you
to those thoughts, on that dark lake. Welcome to a liberal arts education.
Stangers in a Strange Land
A. When You’re Strange
1. Kairos: crisis is opportunity
2. Storytelling is a key to the maps of strange lands
B. Values of a Liberal Arts College (“mission statements”)
1. An education for service to God (vocation in the medieval university
and the 19th century liberal arts college).
2. The Church of Reason and the Enlightenment citizen
3. Beauty and Meaning in Human Achievements
4. A reading list for life
5. Learning how to learn: critical thinking and integrative studies
a. The world of work ahead.
b. The track record of liberal arts graduates (diag. q.)
c. Making a Martian out of thin air.
6. “Fishbowling”: self inquiry and service to others (diagrams
r, s, t, u)
|
|
