On Liberal Education

I am surprised by how much difficulty people have in defining the goals of a liberal education. Typically, they resort to clichéd expressions like broadening horizons and critical thinking. The goal and method are actually quite simple. It is a two step process.

First, one particular assumption must be disproven. This assumption is so fundamental and widespread that I will call it The Big Assumption. I believe that it has been held by every person who has ever lived on the planet. Moreover, I am convinced that the Big Assumption has profound consequences for politics, economics, psychology, and sociology. This assumption is: The experiences that constitute my individual life are representative of the entire human condition.

This cannot be the case for a variety of reasons. Our experiences are shaped by the time and place of our birth, our parents, our spouse, our education, our friends, our gender, our race, our religion, etc. To put it in statistical terms, our experiences are not a random sample of the experiences of all human beings who have ever lived. Nevertheless, the Big Assumption has been and continues to be held, knowingly or unknowingly, by almost everybody on the planet.

The method for disproving this assumption is straight-forward. The student is exposed to ideas, feelings, beliefs, and experiences via literature, philosophy, art, and history, which are so foreign to their own life that they are forced to question the Big Assumption. This is where the broadening horizons and critical thinking clichés are applicable. Yet, this is only the first step in a liberal education. The failure to realize that this step is only the beginning is the reason I believe that liberal education is under attack. The student is in a vulnerable stage at this point. The fundamental assumption that has provided order and meaning to their life has been disproven.

There are three possible outcomes at the end of the first stage of liberal education.

First, the student changes from the Big Assumption to what I have begun to call the Studies Assumption. They realize that their experiences are not representative of the human condition as a whole, so they narrow the scope of the assumption to their gender, class, race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. These students often major in Gender Studies, etc depending on how they have narrowed the Big Assumption. Typically, these departments utilize the Marxist frameworks to justify their Studies Assumption. Yet, The Studies Assumption is just as false as the Big Assumption, and this is why I believe that these departments have such a difficult time finding a core belief system.

Another possibility is a complete rejection of the Big Assumption. This leads down two separate paths, which represent the second and third possible outcomes. The second outcome is relativism and cynicism. My Big Assumption has been rejected and now I realize I can make no other assumption about anything, ever. This usually happens to the cowardly and intellectually lazy students.

The third outcome is when the failure of the Big Assumption leads to the never-ending search for the universal in the human condition. Oddly enough, the second step in a liberal education is exactly the same as the first. The student examines ideas, feelings, beliefs, and experiences via literature, philosophy, art, and history, which are so foreign to their own life that they can find what is universally present in the human condition. This is the ultimate goal of a liberal education. I believe the difficulty in recognizing this goal is that both the first and second step are superficially the same activities.

A core curriculum must be designed to achieve this final goal. During freshman year, the students should be exposed to as many ideas as possible to undermine their Big Assumption. Only using the classic texts, written by dead white men, is problematic here because a student who is not white and male can assume that a more narrow Studies assumption still applies. When the students were exclusively white males this was not a problem, but fortunately this is no longer the case. Therefore, some multicultural diversity is important during this phase so that the student cannot assume that their experience is representative of a sub-group of humanity. During sophomore year, the focus should be on comparing texts to discover the universal aspects of the human condition.