Defining a General Education

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

In a recent editorial, you declare that "the generally educated man should be doing nothing less than preparing to organize his perceptions [sic]. He should learn what it is like to put on the scientist's thinking cap, or the behavioral scientist's, or the historian's, or the humanist's." This Thinking Cap Theory, while well presented, strikes me as seriously deficient in its assumptions.

General education in a liberal arts college should be a part of liberal education. As such, it should seek to develop the inherent powers and self-mastery of the student. It should organize knowledge not simply to sharpen minds but, ultimately, to make free men.

This goal of human fulfillment leads to a theory of general education which emphasizes the themes of Western civilization. Such an approach assumes that we have an intellectual tradition transcending academic disciplines, which is relevant to enduring human problems.

Implicitly, your editorial believes that the relevance of this tradition has been a casualty of the explosion of knowledge. It finds that we have all become specialists and declares that the best each specialist can do is learn how other specialists think.

Contrary to the inarticulate premise of your editorial, the common problems of men are still with us. They are worthy of the "shared" and "philosophical" experience advocated in Harvard's 1945 Redbook, and still attempted at such colleges as Columbia and St. John's. Your editorial mentions the Redbook's idea, but seems to consider it not even worthy of evaluation.

The plan you propose instead may make slightly more enlightened specialists. But the mere development of a keen mind and the more mastery of technical vocabularies will fail to meet the purpose of general education. For without some more fundamental and human goal, such skills will not make better men.  Robert Herewitz 1