Idealism and Liberal Education

The Stillness and the Courage

The Stillness and the Courage What is the value ofa liberal education? That question brings to mind Benjamin Franklin's famous remark when he was asked, as the Constitutional Convention came to a close, what was the use of the new document. "What is the use," he responded, "of a newborn child?" The value of a liberal education, like that of a newborn child, depends, of course, on how it is nurtured. Its value depends on how it is made to shape, refine, and deepen our sense ofselfand others. If we let liberal education make a difference in our lives, it will. This lesson was reinforced for me when I learned that I had cancer. I suddenly came face-to-face-as so many others have as well-with fundamental questions of value and meaning. The shock of that medical diagnosis brought home to me the meaning of F. Scott Fitzgerald's observation that "in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning." In my lonely hours of introspection, I came to concede for the first time the certainty of my own mortality and to understand the vulnerability of my being. I came to appreciate more fully that the time allotted to each of us is limited and precious and that how we use it matters. I knew these things before, ofcourse-intellectually, even emotionally-but never with all my being. I have been struck by two realizations-first, that life is a learning process for which there is no wholly adequate preparation; second, that although liberal education is not perfect, it is the best preparation there is for life and its exigencies. With it we are better able to make sense of the events that either break over us, like a wave, or quietly envelop us before we know it, like a drifting fog. During the difficult and dismaying days of chemotherapy, liberal education helped me in that most human ofdesires-the yearning to make order and sense out of my experience. I have come to understand, for example, that literary modes-romantic, tragic, comic, satiric-are not mere academic constructs to which plays or novels may conform. Rather, those narrative categories exist because, as the Greeks and others have 51 52 Idealism and Liberal Education understood for millennia, life tends to play itself out in ways that seem romantic, tragic, comic, or satiric-or perhaps all four. Does liberal education answer all our questions and solve all our problems? Of course not. But, then, it does not pretend to. Show me a fictional character who thinks he or she has everything figured out, and I will show you an author's rendition of a fool. Hearing a physician say the dread word cancer has an uncanny capacity to concentrate the mind. That is what liberal education does, too. God willing, both this disease and my liberal education will, each in its own way, prove to me a blessing. What, then, is the use of a liberal education? When the ground seems to shake and shift beneath us, liberal education provides perspective, enabling us to see life steadily and to see it whole. It has taken an illness to remind me, in my middle age, of that lesson. But that is just another way of saying that life, like liberal education, continues to speak to us-if we have the stillness and the courage to listen. That reminder is worth more than gold. ...