This blog entry is the first in what will be a series of
remarks from professors and educators. Chuck is a renowned professor of
religious studies. His department has frequently been ranked in the top 5 in
the US, so you are hearing from someone who is not only kind to take time to
reach out, but who is also a person very well-known in his field.
I hope to give readers the chance to read a broad
sample of the infinite visions of what education can be for those students who
have the desire to take positive and active steps. No one gets an education passively.
For some people around the world, the concept of liberal arts is a strange one.
This is especially true of parents who wonder about the wisdom of spending huge
sums on money on what might appear to be a major that is not “marketable”. But
all my years in the field have taught me that jobs and graduate school
acceptances are rarely about majors. They are about learning how to learn and
developing skill sets. To learn to think, to write, to question, to solve, and
to experiment can and does happen in any major. It is a rare student who should
choose a university based on major. Instead, it should be based on a holistic approach
to education, both in and out of the classroom.
What is it we aim to teach in
college? We talk about a “well-rounded”
education. What does that mean? Why, for example, are there distribution
requirements? Why don’t we simply do
what European universities do, and let undergraduates specialize in very
focused ways from the get-go? There are
many reasons why the American liberal education tradition has developed the way
it has. Much of it has to do with sheer
chance. But there’s something valuable
about a college education that demands breadth as well as depth—something worth
defending, and promoting. And, despite
what you may have heard, such an education is quite possible in today’s
universities. In fact in some ways it is
more possible, to more students, than ever.
There is an easy way to say what
liberal education teaches, and that is to say it teaches “critical thinking.” But “critical thinking” is a tricky notion. On one hand, it’s terrifically
important. We need—the world
needs—people who can see the strengths and weaknesses of various points of
view, and build on the strengths and address the weaknesses; we’ll always need
that. Creativity, the spark of genius,
needs shaping, no matter what the field, from creating a new physics formula to
painting a house to writing a memo to composing an opera. Critical thinking is most basically that
shaping: careful attention to an argument, a skeptical testing of its various
steps, an attentive assessment of the evidence it musters for its conclusion,
and so on—in short, the capacity to see acutely what is right and what is wrong
about the object under study.
But the best studies of “critical
thinking” suggest that, insofar as there is something that goes by that name,
it can be developed only in those people who know a fair amount about something. Why is that?
Because one of the truths intrinsic to the practice of critical thinking
is that, for one to do this, one must be able to compare a strong argument to a
weak one, to assess what evidence looks like, and what sorts of challenges to
an argument (and to the evidence mustered therein) are available; and all these
issues are matters that cannot be mastered unless one already knows what one is
comparing the argument to, what other evidence might be out there, and
what a legitimate challenge to an argument looks like—that is, they are all
matters that cannot be mastered unless one has more than a passing acquaintance
with the topic under study, and perhaps the approach employed to study it. This acquaintance with some field is called
“domain knowledge,” and it is essential to developing any sort of “critical
thinking” whatsoever.
Critical thinking isn’t totally
wrong as a description; it is just incomplete.
In fact I would say you need to learn a certain set of virtues, a set of
almost-reflexive habits and attitudes and behaviors and dispositions that shape
the way you perceive and behave in the world.
But those virtues cannot be taught directly; they can only be taught
indirectly, by attending to one lesson while teaching another. Here’s what I mean.
The above weaknesses of any attempt
directly to aim at the teaching of “critical thinking” show you why depth in
some field can matter. After all, it is
easy to become a glib dilettante. But to
learn something seriously, you will need to learn a lot. Not just a lot, in fact; you will need to
learn in a certain way: to be humbled by the seriousness with which a certain
approach to thought engages the world; you must be stripped of pretensions of
knowing already what is going on. Thus,
becoming acquainted with a field teaches you humility before what you do not
yet know in that field; but perhaps it also teaches an eagerness, a hunger, for
seeking out that “more” that you do not yet know: a love for learning, as it
were.
But depth—a humility before your
subject and a love for learning more about it—is not the only goal. The danger of depth, pursued alone, is that
it can create fanatics of one approach, zealots of a single method: English
majors who see only texts, crying out for interpretation; history majors who
imagine that if everyone knew history, our problems would be resolved;
mathematics majors who know, just know, that everything is ultimately reducible
to an equation; chemists who see around them nothing but reactions and
combinations. The very respect we aim to
cultivate in one’s understanding of a field, or an approach to seeing the
world, can easily become, on its flip side, disdain for other ways of
understanding.
(On our own, by the way, most of us
professors wouldn’t be of any use in facing this problem. Most of us are monomaniacs, true believers,
so committed to the value of our field that it is hard for us to see that our
approach has edges, that we may need to learn from others at least as much as
we have things to teach them. But
fortunately, undergraduate students are not supposed to be taught as if their
education were merely the first step towards them becoming professors (though
that is a lesson far too many of my colleagues do not remember, or have never
learned). They are being trained not to
be college teachers, but to be informed citizens in the world. A certain monomania may be a professional
deformation for academics; but inhabitants of the world must know better.)
So we demand breadth alongside
depth; we ask not just that you learn a lot about a little, but that you learn
a little about a lot. We demand that you
expand how you see the world, just a smidgen, just a teensy bit—just enough,
that is, to make cracks appear in the hardened carapace of any one field’s megalomaniacal
self-confidence about its vision of the world.
Those cracks let the light shine in.
They remind you that humans have not yet devised a frame big enough, and
solid enough, to take in the whole world, in all its dimensions. The fields we invite you to study do reveal
in deep and profound ways aspects of reality that are valid and important to
apprehend. But none of them, on their
own, are enough. So you learn to seek
out other views, other perspectives, to participate in the give and take that
makes the community of educated women and men possible, to welcome insight
wherever it may be found.
Take my field, for example:
religious studies. What do we teach, and
why might it be valuable? Well, religion—that’s
a big topic, isn’t it? My field has
claimed for itself the study of those practices, beliefs, and traditions of
human attempts to understand our place and our destiny in the cosmos, in all
the manifold ways that those attempts have manifest themselves throughout human
history, basically we propose to study the human as a creature who is engaged
in meaning. In a way, this is a summary
of all the liberal arts. (There’s that
monomania coming in. I can’t help
it.) We study literature, philosophy and
religious thought, texts, material history, culture, and more. But we do so always with an eye on a moving,
but tightly focused (or so we like to think), target: how all these dimensions
of human existence coordinate to provide us with a meaningful framework, in the
broadest possible sense, for our various endeavors, as individuals and as
communities. To do this we think you
need to appreciate the value of different approaches to the various phenomena
of “religion”, and so we demand that students who study with us learn how to
engage seriously intricate philosophical and theological texts; but we also
assume you need to know more than this, so we demand that students also learn
something of the complexities of textual interpretation, historical inquiry,
and cultural and ethnological investigation, among other things. Furthermore, since it has seemed important to
us that one be acquainted with only one religious tradition, we demand some
serious efforts at understanding at least two traditions.
Why is this useful? Well, for many reasons. But in the most hard-nosed, pragmatic way,
consider this: for much of the past decade, the United States Marine Corps had
an operating base built around the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon, in
Iraq; and much of the time there, they were engaged in trying to stop a civil
war between Shi’ia Iraqis and Sunni Iraqis.
Just in that sentence, I see at least three different religious themes:
first, Babylon was a major religious center of ancient Mesopotamia (did you
know cities seem to have first developed not as trade sites, but as built-up
areas around religious shrines?); it is named in the Hebrew Bible as the site
of the Tower of Babel; and the ugly fratricide between Shi’ia and Sunni has its
roots in a very old religious dispute about the proper line of succession from
Muhammad to his followers.
I could say more, give more
examples: for instance, the fact that the US financial crisis of 2008 was first
and foremost a fiduciary crisis, a crisis of faith, of confidence
in the financial system and various actors therein; scholars can study even the
most “profane” of human systems in light of religious themes, and can apply
their insights to uncovering themes or dimensions of the situations that would
otherwise go underappreciated, or perhaps would be missed altogether.
Plus, there’s that whole “meaning of
life” thing: for, as I say to my students from time to time, the questions we
study in our classes, and the answers we assess to the questions we ask, are
some of the most fundamental questions that grip every human who has
ever lived this planet: what are we? Where are we from? What are we doing? Where are we going? Sometimes we delude ourselves that the
humanities, or the liberal arts more broadly, are not “practical.” But think about it: you’re at a job forty,
sixty, seventy, maybe—heaven forbid—eighty hours a week, but no matter—because
you’re a human 24/7, and you’ll remain so as long as you’re around here; so
these questions are arguably far more “practical,” in a far more profound
sense, than almost any other topic you can imagine.
So I think liberal education helps
you in many, many ways—both by teaching you some stuff, but then also,
by enabling you, through learning that stuff, to cultivate in yourself some
virtues that may be “portable” across academic fields, and one hopes across the
whole scope of your life.
But there’s one last thing: liberal
education teaches you nothing, or very little. What it does do, however, is offer you an
opportunity to learn. And this is
a very important fact about liberal education: it rewards most those who assume
that an education is not given to them, but that they must take it. As teachers, professors try very hard; but
none of us are deluded that we by and large are responsible for the learning
our students do. By and large, all we
can do is offer, invite, open the door, point: but “the vision,” as the ancient
philosopher Plotinus once said, “is the work of the one who has decided to
see.” All the liberal arts can do, that
is, is direct you towards learning; but you have to be the one to walk that
path.
Professor of Religious Studies
Director, Virginia Center for the Study of Religion
Co-Principal, Brown College
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