Molding a Man Through 'Liberal' Education

When Rumplestiltskin graduated from high school he was very wise in the ways of the world, and he knew what he wanted. Since Harvard was supposed to be a center of worldly wisdom, he came to Cambridge bent upon improving his mind.

It took him four short years to discover that Harvard, wise as it was, had no idea what his mind was like, and so was utterly incapable of improving it. It took him a lifetime to discover that he was equally ignorant of himself, and was equally incapable of directing destiny.

Out of this vast mass of ignorance about people arose the arrogance which led Rumplestiltskin to all his sorrow. For both he and the University entertained theories about who he was and what he might become. And so they both imagined him as somebody he was not, and then tried to reconstruct him in the new image.

The object of all these efforts was the acquisition of a liberal education--an undefined product which has replaced God as a name for what we want but have not got. The pamphlet said that he was being trained to apply general knowledge in particular situations, and President Pusey told him that he was being trained to read books and defend the community of learning against the attacks of antiintellectuals. Unfortunately, nobody told him how or why these things could or should be done. Perhaps that was why, four years later, Rumplestiltskin graduated as puzzled and lost as when he had arrived, still trying to improve his mind in order to define and live the good life. Perhaps too that was why, a few years later, he decided that he was permanently lost, and jumped out of a hotel window in Biarritz in order to define himself.

When asked about Rumplestiltskin, the Dean said, "He graduated before the new General Education Program, and thus was never exposed to Harvard's broadening influence."

The Superintendent's Story

Another summary came from his House superintendent, a friend, "He was a queer guy. He got all mixed up with all these homosexuals and atheists. He got himself all screwed up thinking too much. I mean he never had a date because he was always too worried about something. Sometimes I'd give him advice or tell him he ought to go to church, but he never listened. I guess they taught him to be independent. He couldn't listen. I guess he always had the idea that he had something to say that was too important to listen. He kept saying he was gonna think things through, but the more he thought, the worse it got."

But the superintendent's comment is less helpful than the Dean's. The Dean's notion that a college could make a man more than he is born was perhaps foolish, but it is a part of an endless effort. First there were parents, then there was God, and now there are educators, all trying to refashion men.

Perhaps the Dean was trying to say that there is a pattern of life which is contagious, a way of thinking and feeling which will occasionally rub off if there is sufficient enforced exposure, and that in some mysterious way people will be the better for acquiring this habit. At least this seems to be the theory behind both the maze of often contradictory demands made upon Harvard undergraduates, and the claims made by administrators.

The nature of that pattern, ambiguous though it is, is perhaps best seen by looking at what Harvard demands of its students, for Harvard's only working definition to "a liberal education" is found in the requirements which are imposed upon its students.

Harvard's first demand upon Rumplestiltskin was excellence in whatever he did. He was supposed to do everything well, and always to try to do it better.

But the Harvard version of excellence was a bit peculiar. It was competitive. Nothing was excellent if it could be excelled. The measure of excellence was never Rumplestiltskin, but rather a metaphysical absolute variously identified as "Veritas", (in academic work), "professional competence" (in extracurricular activities), and "intelligence" (in social situations).

Perhaps one of his difficulties was that he soon discovered that he was not among the very few among any generation who are granted the ability to become "the very best", and that he was, therefore, never quite an courant with today's vision of truth.

It was only natural that he should meet this failure with the technique Harvard taught him--rationalization. It was the work of a few minutes to convince himself that so long as excellence remained unattainable, it was also ultimately undesirable.

Peculiar Sort of Excellence

But such rationalizations soon found more substantial support, for Rumplestiltskin began to notice that Harvard's version of excellence was not exactly the same as that affirmed by many others. Indeed, he found, Harvard prized only a very peculiar sort of excellence.

This excellence was certainly not moral. Nobody was concerned about the goodness of undergraduates. Indeed, the University required only that they keep out of trouble with the police, and that they obey a certain minimum of administrative regulations most of which had to do with two national preoccupations: money and sex. Bills must be payed immediately and girls must never be used overtime in rooms.

Beyond this minimum, the University not only required no virtues, it did not even discuss them. Virtue was a minor topic in the philosophy department, seldom discussed since the rise of "modern" analytic methods.

But if the University's attitude towards moral excellence was purely punitive, its attitude towards physical virtue was the reverse. Rumplestiltskin found that while the University encouraged athletics for all, it encouraged the athletic endeavors of the naturally proficient with especial fervor. The most excellent athletes were given rewards of cash and kudos, and put into the entertainment business on weekends. And yet, strangely, the University did not seem to believe that excellence was the only standard, for it also required the physically incompetent to perform alarming feats during their first year of residence. It seemed to be a case of "everybody's being physical, but some people being more physical than others."

But it was in the realm of the intellect that the University made its greatest demands for excellence, and it was in his examination of the intellect that Rumplestiltskin discovered his best excuses for denying the importance of excellence.

1/16 of a Calculator

The first measure of intellectual excellence was given even before he arrived in Cambridge, a series of tests in which people asked him to manipulate verbal and mathematical symbols very rapidly, asked him to give "correct" answers to ambiguous questions, and tested his capacity for making or discovering analogies. Rumplestiltskin, it appeared, could do all of these things about 1/16 as fast as the University's electronic calculator, and so he was immediately admitted to the University as a distinguished student.

It was several months later when he discovered that there were other phases of intellectual excellence. One of the most important was the capacity to talk facilely about subjects of no importance to him. He learned that he could use words for anything and everything, as a substitute for excellence or a demonstration of it.

Especially, he learned that words of many syllables were a demonstration of the great virtue, intelligence, and that they could fill the silences at cocktail parties and examinations, which was apparently absolutely essential under the University ethic.

He learned to talk about creativity as the dynamic element in the human situation, and to treat all ideas as forms of other ideas, just as he had learned to treat all behavior as a substitute for some other kind of repressed behavior. And when he had related the configuration of events to the total pattern of incidental perceptions he found that a meaningful relationship existed between the transient and the intransient elements of the situation, which was worth an 'A' and therefore equated with intellectual excellence.

Overwhelmed with his own success he often fooled even himself into thinking that he was becoming something more than human, and began to believe that a liberal education was worth more than he had originally thought. He was only slightly disturbed upon those occasions on which he noticed that these symbolic manipulations were of absolutely no relevance to any of his most imminent dreams, and seldom if ever seemed to stir him from his invariably supine intellectual position.

He also noticed that intellectual excellence on the undergraduate level was in no way equated with his puritanical notions about the need for work. Apparently anticipating the fact that the proto-academics would soon be required to suffocate in book dust sixteen hours a day, the University granted a four year respite in which intellectual sophistication plus a few hours of work per week would pass for genius.

In terms of actual requirements, he observed, the University was even more lenient. While the implicit expectation of high grades could make many students intensely anxious about their inattention to their studies, the actual requirements could be met with almost no effort by anybody actually admitted to the University.

But requirements did not, of course, end with excellence, because excellence alone does not define the University's concept of "a liberal education." Indeed, some maintain that excellence has very little to do with liberal education, and is but an inescapable phase of America. These voices added that since excellence was less emphasized by Harvard's anomic culture than by most universities, a Harvard education was perforce more "liberal."

The exact meaning of liberality was extremely hard to define. Primarily it seemed to have to do with freedom, and at Harvard this freedom was more related to unlimited choice than to the absence of compulsive objectives.

Academic requirements seemed to fall into two categories: Some were aimed at his knowing a little about a lot; others were related to knowing a lot about a little. These were summed up in the phrases "distribution" and "concentration."

Trinitarian Approach

Distribution was represented by General Education. A student was supposed to understand the trinitarian approach to the mind, grasping the attitudes of the Natural Science, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities. In all three cases, this educational effort followed the "learning by doing" theory, since even introductory courses in General Education had very little to say about the underlying premises and attitudes of their field as contrasted with others, but simply "did" in their own area.

This narrowness was perhaps inevitable, since every instructors necessarily revelled in the superiority and necessity of his particular approach to life, and felt that his own premises were intuitively obvious consequences of the world order. There were very few men who could see themselves in perspective, and set off the individuality of their disciplines and attitudes against all the alternatives.

The scientists could hardly under- stand what was unique about science, because they were on the inside looking out, and saw the humanities and the social sciences as ineffective forms of empirical naturalism. Meanwhile the Humanities attempted to subsume the sciences instead of admitting them as an alternative, and this with only the vaguest understading of what the sciences were really up to.

The synthesis was therefore left largely to the individual uncommitted student, who could occasionally avoid taking a parochial approach because he was not emotionally involved in any form of academic life.

Irrelevancy

But while the lack of commitment to a discipline could upon occasion lead to objectivity about the divergent approaches, it more often led to the irrelevancy of the material studied. The student who looked at a discipline from the outside seldom found it possible to use this approach for dealing with anything which really mattered to him He found himself regarding the academic life as a meaningless game, a juggling of materials into circular and therefore meaningless patterns. And so Rumplestiltskin was forced either to ignore what he was learning or else to stride pensively up and down his Elsinore posing endless alternatives until either madness or disaster followed his incapacity to exclude possibilities in favor of action.

But Harvard did not encourage this sort of thing. General Education was essentially not very different from other courses. Learning by doing meant that you confronted the problems which faced a discipline and looked at the discipline's techniques for solving them. The primary question was always the positive one, "What can this discipline do?" rather than the negative one, "What can it not do?" and perhaps this accounted for the sometimes incredible arrogance of educators.

Over and over Rumplestiltskin was induced to believe that his intellect could somehow do the impossible. Every discipline followed the assumption of University educators; that men could be made into what they were not by trying hard enough. The scientists were perhaps more honest about their quest than others, since they continually narrowed the questions they asked in order to make the answers they could get sufficient unto the occasion, until finally they were no longer asking questions about which anybody cared, and so managed to avoid explicit claims which they could not fulfill.

But requirements did not end with General Education. There were others, sometimes more incredible than amusing, with which the University and the departments attempted to define a liberal education and suggest what sort of person Rumplestiltskin ought to become.

The most important of these academic requirements were those established by the departments. These usually mirrored the University policy of knowing something about the whole department and a lot about some particular specialty of that department. The consequence was envisioned in mathematical terms, with knowledge building up from the most general understanding of all fields to the most meticulous understanding of some specialty, a glorious conic section.

Not Building Blocks

The only problem was that for Rumplestiltskin knowledge was not neatly constructed of building blocks which could simply be seized and shoved into place, and the moments at which his intellectual pursuits came to significance were not arranged according to any systematic program.

Indeed, he found that the primary problem at Harvard was that knowledge was treated as something which could be bought and sold, given and received, and that the University thought that by requiring the right courses it could give him the perspective which he lacked upon arrival. The trouble was that he could only listen to what was being said to him on very rare occasions, and predicting these moments was utterly impossible. The courses and the books which suddenly registered and left the deepest imprint on him seemed to be unrelated to the greatness of the subject-matter, author, or lecturer, and to depend almost entirely upon their relevance to his own inscrutable mental movement.

Rumplestiltskin was an English major, and perhaps his experience in that department is illuminating in the effort to explain the difficulties of defining a liberal education in terms of requirements.

The English Department envisioned literature as chemists envision the elements--with the help of a periodic Table. By dividing literature into six historical periods, the department allowed itself to handle the canon of "great" writers categorically, utilizing the tools of history and social science as an approach to art.

Why?

Just why the department then felt compelled to expose students to a specimen from each period is extremely difficult to say. Since they could hardly expect to expose him to all of the literature written in English in a mere four years, it was clear enough to him that they were aiming at directed selection. But why it was not likely that he should discover more in selections chosen by himself on the grounds of personal preference, this was hard to say.

And yet it could not be denied that having dabbled in every age he was better prepared to discuss English Literature with his friends and to discourse learnedly about the Western tradition. The only difficulty here was that once freed from the Harvard influence he never discussed anything of the sort, and the things which had meaning to him alone were buried in this mass of external tradition.

More important than these requirements, however, were the demands of individual courses. Courses seemed to be obsessed with putting knowledge into people's heads so that these people would then have "the necessary intellectual tools" for executing some undefined mental acrobatics.

Indeed, the objective too often seemed to be the acquisition of "good taste." President Pusey had spoken of the dangers of anti-intellectualism, but he had never spoken very succinctly about the value of the intellect. He had suggested that the development of a University Library was essential to creating the community which Cambridge ought to be, and that the development of an individual library was a sign of being educated. And without really denying these values, Rumplestiltskin was a little puzzled by what these things implied about living, since he could hardly see that they implied anything.

Very often, he noticed, this simply implied that he should have read and "understood" the right books, and understanding consisted exclusively of what he could articulate, which was usually what he least cared about.

The department also had certain peculiar theories about its own requirements. The people best capable of coping with the academic world were given the most attention, while those most completely nonplussed by the department were consigned to limbo as non-honors students.

And yet the same ambiguity cut the other way, for the students best able to cope with the regular requirements were also allowed to dispense with them and get course reductions, tutorial for credit, and other special dispensations, while those who found courses extremely difficult to adapt to were not allowed to dispense with them, but continued to plug away at the media to which they were unsuited.

University's Confidence

This situation Rumplestiltskin could only explain as an evidence of the University's amazing confidence in its own vision of what a man should become. Surely the University must be little less than fanatical if it would continue to demand that students follow a program and seek an attitude which it was patently impossible to give them. And surely they must think this ideal highly desirable if they felt it was desirable to convince the vast majority of students that they were less than they ought to be because they could not attain this ideal.

And yet the University seemed to have no such explicit assurance. Nobody was willing to say that requirements worked for the benefit of those subjected to them, and yet nobody was willing to abolish them. Everybody agreed in theory that all students had unique needs and that no system could possibly do these individuals justice. And yet with monotonous regularity the abolition of one unsatisfactory system was succeeded by the installation of another, which in turn was abolished when it too failed to achieve the undefined end, "the liberal education."

By the time he had graduated, Rumplestiltskin had learned only one thing about the University's effort to educate him: that neither he nor the University knew enough about him to proscribe a system for making him over into a new "educated" image. Indeed, he found, the most important thing that had happened to him at Harvard had nothing to do with the information he had acquired, or the courses he had taken, but rather simply that he had become four years older in good company.

Meaningless Education

It was not until several years later that he realized that good company could mean more than intelligence, sophistication and conviviality. It was when he began to look for this new radical kind of goodness, to look for virtue instead of virtuosity, that he first found how little his systematic education had actually meant in his search for a way of life.

Once discovered, this fact was quite painless, for the discovery came with a built-in awareness that the good life could not be taught, but only learned. The only complaint he could lodge against the University's peculiar efforts at filling his head according to formulae was that they claimed too much for the process.

But even here it was hard to find fault, for the notion that higher education would make men over into a new image was the unasked for bequest of a society incapable of accepting its own limitations and yet equally incapable of removing them in home, church, or school