Idealism and Liberal Education

The Teaching of Values in a Liberal Education

The Teaching of Values in a Liberal Education Higher education inevitably presents the most troubling and perplexing questions concerning the teaching of values. In approaching those questions , one cannot escape the aptness ofJudge Learned Hand's definition of the spirit ofliberty: "the spirit which is not too sure that it is right." He was fond of recalling Cromwell's statement, "I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken." In recent years, the performance of colleges in confronting questions of values has been called into public question. This development should hardly be surprising. From the time that Jefferson emphasized the indissoluble link between education and democracy, American society has placed its greatest hopes-and fixed its greatest anxieties-on educational institutions. In recent decades, public concern about the values Americans shareor do not share-has increased. The common core of values that once seemed to unify our society and to insure trust among the generations has eroded. As those values have lost their moral claim on our conduct, as institutions such as the family, the neighborhood school, and the church have failed to maintain their unifying social capacities, and as the younger generations have challenged the ethical standards on which their parents and elders have built their lives, society has turned its apprehensive attention to higher education. Colleges are criticized by some (often by those whom we call "liberals ") for not sufficiently teaching the values of social responsibility, while they are criticized by others (often by those whom we call "conservatives") for not sufficiently teaching the values of individual responsibility. Both sets of criticism, from the Left and from the Right, argue that colleges have, in Yeats's phrase, "lost all conviction." Still others argue that colleges ought not to teach values at all-that the enterprise of higher education ought to be value-free. These divergent points of view suggest that those of us who care about higher education must state our case with renewed conviction, as well as with clarity. In too many respects, the tone of much of the recent criticism of higher education seems to me a contemporary version of"paradise lost"55 56 Idealism and Liberal Education a version of social commentary that has had great staying power among cultural and intellectual pessimists from Henry Adams to F. R. Leavis. Many of the current critics of higher education are reminiscent, in their lament for the shining glory of a bygone world, of Edwin Arlington Robinson's character Miniver Cheevy, "child of scorn," who "wept that he was ever born." Robinson wrote: Miniver sighed for what was not, And dreamed, and rested from his labors; He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot, And Priam's neighbors. Two of the most prominent recent critics of higher education have been William J. Bennett and Allan Bloom. The former secretary ofeducation 's views on the cultural deficiencies of liberal education, set forth in many public forums, and Professor Bloom's 1987 book, The Closing ofthe American Mind, have found responsive chords in American society. Although I disagree with much of what Bennett and Bloom believe, I readily state my admiration for their commitment to academic excellence and their conviction that education must, among other things, be about book learning, hard questions, and answers worthy of consideration. But I have substantial reservations about their apparent willingness to rest liberal education so exclusively on the study of so-called great books, even though the works that are typically involved in such selections have, indeed, an undeniable power-moral, intellectual, and emotional-to set both mind and soul afire. My reservations derive from a misgiving that the compiling oflists of "great books" risks our defining the intellectual and moral universe as closed and finite. It risks suggesting that liberal education is like a church with an authoritatively declared canon. It is, of course, neither. Liberal education is a process of inquiry, not a fixed body of knowledge, and its goal is the achievement of those intellectual and moral capacities that will enable students to lead lives that are thoughtful, reflective, inquisitive, and satisfying. The aspiration of liberal education is to help students appreciate that the work of life is to grapple with the ambiguity of the moral universe and to ask searching questions addressed at defining the dilemma of being human, especially those questions that will unsettle their most routinely held beliefs. The aspiration of liberal education is to help students develop the intellectual, emotional, and moral resources...