Orators and Philosophers
Reading Notes--Adam Kissel
Reading Notes and Excerpts
16-17, 37, 53: liberal arts in Athens = what serves a free citizen with leisure to study. The orators recognize that this education is required for the citizens to form a successful deliberative democracy. But liberal arts also can provide an elite with the education necessary to lead the rest. More strongly, the elite can use the liberal arts as a "secret language" of special symbols that the untutored do not (or can not) have access to, in one sense transcending the symbol-system of the mass of society at large.
67, Aquinas' "five-step program of intellectual formation leading to theology: (1) trivium, (2) quadrivium, (3) natural philosophy, (4) moral philosophy, and (5) metaphysics."
110, a school's having an external board of trustees tends to emphasize the oratorical tradition, i.e., the external board places "governance in the hands of leaders of society rather than schoolmen," so that there is pressure to make the school primarily teach and express the values of the society. 182, a faculty member of LSU argued, "philosophy was declining relative to commercial subjects because 'educational business men' rather than 'educators' were running the show." [sce: Peter Carmichael 1942]
151, Yale says in 1828, [Kimball's words] "nothing else except the classics can provide (1) the appropriate development of 'taste and fancy' for the liberal citizen and (2) the proper exercise of mental faculties." Jeremiah Day says [BK] "that learning in a certain subject trains faculties of the mind to learn in other areas is conveyed by Day's oft-quoted view that liberal education ought to contribute to 'the discipline and furniture of the mind: expanding its powers and storing it with knowledge." This is the oratorical side: the artes liberales ideal with the accommodation toward free powers. 152, Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid: "inherent structures of the mind must provide certain essential truths with which everyone agrees." Farther along the accommodation, some defend the classics "for their enhancement of 'Freedom and Equality'" themselves.
166, Eliot at Harvard, however, claims "that (1) practically any study could discipline the mind and (2) individuals ought to be free to choose the subjects most congenial to their own psyches for this discipline." 169, Dewey follows the same path and is "oriented against affirming the certitude of any absolute standards and values and toward appreciation of the individuality of each human being and reliance on a free experimental approach to every new situation encountered in life." This is the philosophical side: the liberal-free ideal with the accommodation toward utility (more or less). 166, But critics of Eliot's view ("System of Freedom") and of Dewey's view continue to assert "the special virtues of the classics and ... limits, standards, and values."
172 f., Huxley stresses scientific method while Arnold stresses the classics, but both of them (though they attack the excesses of each other's positions) incorporate both into their idea of the best liberal education.
194 f.: "In other words, general education implied, on one axis, that individual students would be prepared for life in general according to their particular needs and desires. Influential here was the emphasis upon the individual that characterized progressivism and the liberal-free ideal. ... However, such institutions commonly found a difficulty in maintaining this emphasis relative to the second axis of general education: that all people in general would receive the same education. Observers with this sort of 'common denominator' orientation ... talked about 'general education' for 'intelligent participation in the experiences of life shared by all persons'; and [one man at] the University of Chicago contrasted 'general,' meaning egalitarian, with the 'liberal' tradition, which he associated with high social standing. ... The third axis relied on an understanding of 'general' more congenial to the artes liberales ideal. This might be termed the 'highest common denominator,' or the common education to which everyone in general should aspire--culture générale as opposed to culture généralisée in the words of H. I. Marrou--and this view recalled the expectation of 'universal knowledge' in a liberally educated English gentleman of the mid-nineteenth century. These three axes of 'general education' [are] individualism, egalitarianism, [and] culture."
222: in defense of Hutchins: "To those who say that they do not know what studies to prescribe for liberal education, the accommodation holds aloft a venerable tradition, and to those who say that this amounts to dogmatic prescription, the accommodation cites as its purpose the training in a method of critical inquiry that is the antithesis of dogmatism."
238 f.: "Another exercise of discipline required by the oratorical view is the submission of autonomous scholars to the consensus of their colleagues. Here, too, a philosophical kind of discipline already exists, for the canons of specialized research require the submission of research findings to the members of the specialty for criticism. But the submission demanded by the oratorical liberal education involves the surrendering of one's personal view for the sake of consensus within the community of academicians. Recent attempts to formulate core curricula have shown that this kind of discipline, or surrender, is not happening. These curricula, however much they may be draped with rationales of breadth and depth, are largely products of balancing the political interests of entrenched departments and programs. The reason that such curricular are bundles of the disciplines' courses rather than the courses of disciplined reading and expression that the oratorical ideal recommends is that the latter would require the professional scholar to submit to the curriculum, rather than vice versa, and thus to relinquish the [total] freedom and autonomy of the philosophical ideal--a freedom and autonomy so painstakingly earned a century ago and now so lavishly enjoyed. The contemporary problem, then, of liberal education lies in the paradox that the strengths of its ideal are also the source of its greatest liabilities [in addition to the one just described above; e.g., "searching for truth without giving commensurate attention to the importance of public expression inevitably leads the individual to isolation and self-indulgence and the republic to amoralism and chaos"]."
The whole Afterword (260 ff.) is terrific.
265 f.: "the discussion about the values, citizenship, and community of the faculty usually pertains to a fourth major point in the reports [about ug ed]: the call for general education, that is, a coherent and unifying purpose and structure for a curriculum that will serve all students throughout their lives. This fourth topic--coherence and unity of a general education--is causally linked by the reports to the cohesiveness and community spirit of the faculty or lack thereof. ... Jerry Gaff [in 1983] concluded, 'I am convinced that the problem with general education is basically a problem with the faculty.' Two years later the Select Committee of the Association of American Colleges emphasized 'the responsibility of the faculty as a whole to the curriculum as a whole.'"
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some things BK leaves out:
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People to follow up with:
Eva Brann, St. John's; Nathan Glazer, HU; Paul Kristeller, Columbia; Chauncey Loomis, Dartmouth; Walter McCann, Athens College, Greece; George MacRae, HDS; Stephen Nichols, Jr., Dartmouth; Sheldon Rothblatt, UCBerk; Frederick Rudolph, Williams; anonymous, U of C; JLA and David Riesman, HU; Bernard M. Loomer.
Sources to follow up on:
Isocrates, Antidosis
Liberal Education
Seminar Reports, Pgm of General Education in the Humanities, Columbia U.
Samuel Capen, Dilemma of the college of arts and sciences, Educational Review 61, 1921, 277
John Wise, Nature of the Liberal Arts, 1947
Charles Wegener, Lib Ed and the Modern U (the University of Chicago 1978)
Brann, Paradoxes of education in a republic (the University of Chicago 1979)
McKeon, "The Methods of Rhetoric and Judgment," in Luitpold Wallach, The classical tradition: ... 1966, 365ff
McKeon, "The transformation of the LA in the Renaissance," in Bernard Levy, Developments in the Early Ren., 1972, 161ff.
Augustine on leisure: de ordine 2.16.44
Mary Mayer, The philosophy of teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1929, esp. ch. 6
Erasmus, via William H. Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus concerning the aim and method of education, 1904.
Handlin & Handlin, The american college and american culture: socialization as a function of higher education, 1970
Dewey, "The problem of the LA College," American Scholar 13, 1944a, 391.
Harper, the prospects of the small college (the University of Chicago 1900)
Jurgen Herbst, "Liberal Ed and the graduate schools," HEQ 2, 1962, 244ff.
Ethics Teaching in Higher Education, ed. Daniel Callahan and Sissela Bok, 1980, esp. Sloan, pp. 2 ff.
Abraham Citron, "Experimentalism and the Classicism of President Hutchins," Teachers College Record 44, 1943, 544-553; also Lewis on Meiklejohn, 563-71.
Kimball, "Matthew Arnold, Thomas Huxley, and Lib Ed ..." Teachers college record 86 (spg. 1985), 475-87.
Michael R. Harris, Five Counterrevolutionists ... (1970).
Alexander Meiklejohn, the Liberal College (1920)
Meiklejohn, "A Reply to John Dewey," Fortune 31 (1945) 207-19.
David Sidorsky, "Varieties of Liberalism and Lib Ed," SR 5, 1977, 222.
Amy Kass, "Radical Conservatives for Lib Ed" (Ph.D. diss, JHU, 1973).
[Kimball p. 179n has some sources on Hutchins]
Adler, how to read a book, 1940.
Hutchins, JHE 4 (1933), 2.
Arthur Wirth, Ed in the technological society, 1972
Mark Van Doren, Lib Ed, 1943
"The Post-War Responsibilities of Lib Ed ..." Association of American Colleges Bulletin 29, 1943, 275-99.
Jerry Gaff, Gen Ed Today, 1983
JLA, "The Purpose of a Lib Arts Ed," Journal of the Liberal Ministry 9, Spg. 1969, 3-8.
Leo Strauss, "Liberal Ed and Mass Democracy," in Higher Ed and Modern Democracy, ed. Robert Goldwin, 1967.
Ernest L. Boyer, College: The UG Experience in America, 1987
Ernest Boyer, "The Quest for Common Learning," in Common Learning: A Carnegie Colloquium on Gen Ed, 1981.
Integrity in the College Curriculum (Wash. D.C., Association of American Colleges, 1985)