Education
It probably won’t come as a surprise to most that I am the product of a liberal education at a liberal arts school. But, as you know, that doesn’t mean I was “indoctrinated” into a “liberal” political philosophy. I came by that all on my own.
So if liberal doesn’t mean that kind of “liberal” when talking about education, then what does it mean? A “liberal arts” education doesn’t stand for one political philosophy or another. It’s an education that challenges students with all sorts of philosophies and ideas, and demands that they explore all of them, looking for the good and the bad, and reach conclusions about them. It is designed to get students to question their own fundamental beliefs as well as the ones they are studying.
The “outcome” of a liberal arts education is a thoughtful person, able to identify the roots of ideas and use a range of knowledge to evaluate new concepts. Liberal arts education does not aim for a particular political “stand”, but rather for a process of thought.
Denison
I went to a liberal arts college, Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Denison required me to study beyond my “major,” American Political Studies. I took courses in English and psychology, mathematics and fine arts, and Spanish (oh boy); as well as history, geography, anthropology and sociology. Oh, and there were several courses about government and politics.
I was challenged on a variety of levels – and pushed to think not just about different ideas, but about different ways at looking at the same subject. It wasn’t just “knowledge”, it was a process of thinking about that knowledge that I developed.
Teachers
A good example of challenging students was my two favorite history professors. Professor Dennis was a traditional “conservative” (he later worked in the Reagan administration). But sitting around a table discussing the philosophies of the Founding Fathers in developing the Constitution, he wasn’t particularly interested in pushing his ideology. Instead, he forced his students to challenge their own preconceived ideas, regardless of their own political stands.
Professor Kirby was an unabashed “liberal” in the political sense. He served as a key advisor to me as I navigated my “individualized major” of history, political science and education. And he also guided my through an understanding of the development of modern politics – taking on a “poli-sci” student for a directed history study in 20th century Democratic politics. Like Dennis, he wasn’t as interested in shaping me to a certain political philosophy. He too challenged me to develop a “process” of thinking about how history shapes our current thought.
And those two professors were also good friends, willing to work together as much because of their philosophical differences than in spite of them. They were like good “coaches”, preparing their students in a process of thinking.
A “liberal” education doesn’t “hide” ideas from students. It lays those ideas “on the table” for discussion, dissection, and evaluation. Ideas like Critical Race Theory would have been the exact kind of challenge that Drs. Dennis and Kirby would have put to their students. Ideas then, and now, are not to be feared.
Stifling Thought
There are two “movements” today that threaten educational development. The first is the argument that education should be solely vocational – to “get a job”. If all an education does is prepare a student for a particular job category, it fails. It fails to teach a student how to think and process new ideas, and it fails to recognize perhaps the most important fact of our current lives: change. Jobs of the 20th century are disappearing, whether it was the manufacturing job on an assembly line, or the skilled trade jobs. Try to find an appliance repair-person today, or a shoe repair shop.
In today’s world, the job you have today may well not be the job you have a year from now. Training for a single career doesn’t fit our changing world. Training for change, for flexibility of thought and process, is a more useful course for the future.
The second movement is to “prevent” ideas. Critical Race Theory, the idea that racism is embedded in our institutions and laws and not just in “personalities”, is one of those ideas that should be examined. Instead, several states are literally writing laws to ban teaching about the idea. Banning ideas is neither a “liberal education” nor an American tradition. If our nation cannot stand the scrutiny of ideas like critical race theory, regardless of whether they are right or wrong or somewhere in between, then the problem isn’t the idea.
It’s us.
