Idealism and Liberal Education

The Capacity of Imagination

The Capacity of Imagination One of Charles Dickens's most engaging novels, Hard Times, describes a soul-blighting philosophy ofeducation that still, more than a century later, attracts far too many adherents. As the novel opens, the businessman Thomas Gradgrind is haranguing the local schoolmaster on the need for a pedagogical revolution to prepare students for the new age that was then at hand. "Now, what I want is Facts," he insists. "Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts." In Gradgrind's narrow curricular design, there is little room for ideas, for intellectual excitement, for spontaneity, or for imagination. He asserts: "You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.... Stick to Facts, sir!" It would be a mistake to read Hard Times as being merely an historical gloss on the Industrial Revolution or to see Gradgrind as no more than an absurd caricature of dullness and petty-mindedness. Hard Times is in truth a fictional treatise on moral education, a tract for the unsettled period of technological change in which it was written. However, in our own period of technological change, Dickens's indictment of a narrowly utilitarian philosophy ofeducation has lost none ofits relevance. College students are confronted today with complex and confusing possibilities about the meaning of the "good life," with perplexing anxieties about achieving their fullest potential and choosing a satisfying career, and with the meretricious huckstering of affluence, avarice, and materialism. William James warned that such social circumstances all too readily give rise to "the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS." These circumstances are creating pressure on colleges and students, all across the nation, to concentrate on what Gradgrind, in Hard Times, calls for: a narrow, practical curriculum based on the acquisition of "Facts" alone-a curriculum that would shrivel the imagination and blunt the humane values of a liberal education. Ofcourse students should learn facts, but not the kind to which Gradgrind affixed a capital F. The learning of facts, to the extent that scholars can agree on what they are, is no more than a beginning. If facts are to 145 146 Idealism and Liberal Education supply meaning-and, even, wisdom-students must employ their own critical capacities to question facts skeptically, to consider facts imaginatively , to place facts in those larger contexts that will most fully illuminate their real significance. The task of drawing meaning from facts is precisely what the great writers, philosophers, historians, and scientists have performed for centuries , and that is why the study of their lives and works is so rewarding. I especially admire Flannery O'Connor. Her life was heroic and her work is a triumphant example of the capacity of imagination to transform the inert stuff offacts into startling truths about the private and social lives of human beings. Flannery O'Connor was a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, a teacher of hard moral lessons. Her books do not yet appear on those "great books" lists that are fashionable in some quarters, but they inform the mind and stir the imagination in the most troubling and most satisfying of ways. She is a good reason why we should also celebrate the opening up of academic reading lists and syllabi to works by the most talented members of what Simone de Beauvoir ruefully called "the second sex." Flannery O'Connor's life was short (she died at the age ofthirty-nine) and, to most observers, uneventful. But, as Keats said of Shakespeare, she led a life of allegory-a life that reflected a determined and successful effort to triumph, by her intellectual gifts and energies, over the toughest of human odds. Born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925, she was reared in a devoutly Catholic household within the overwhelmingly Protestant culture of the Deep South. At age twenty she was graduated from Georgia State College for Women, where she had majored in sociology. When she entered the Writers' Workshop at the University ofIowa, she started her life's work as a writer. On her arrival at Iowa, her manner was so shy and her Georgia accent so impenetrable that Paul Engle, the workshop's director, could comprehend little that she uttered. Fearing that an unqualified student had been referred to his program, he asked her to write down what she had said to him. She scribbled, on a small piece of paper, "My name is Flannery O'Connor...