Dean of the Faculty
Speeches & Articles
"What's Interesting" Linfield College Convocation
September 2005
[ page 3 of 4 ] << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next >>
But if everything is interesting, what exactly is it about a liberal arts education that’s interesting? Indeed, what are the defining features of a liberal arts education?
Now, my own view is that the goal of a liberal arts education is to teach students how to think. Once again, that’s a kind of tired cliché; but once again, I think I can give it some substance, since by teaching students how to think, I mean something quite specific. A liberal arts education teaches students how to think by developing in each of them a disciplined mind; and the way to develop a disciplined mind is to teach students the disciplines.
As I see it, a discipline – an academic discipline – is fundamentally a structure of concepts, together with a specific range of theoretical approaches that are derived from that structure of concepts. The various disciplines are different from one another largely because they rely on or are composed of different concepts and theories. Thus, for example, the discipline of chemistry relies on or is composed of a vast, enormous array of concepts – electrons and molecules and valences and isotopes and things like that – that are more or less unique to chemistry. Without those things or things like them, chemistry wouldn’t be chemistry. In some sense, chemistry just is that universe of concepts. But literary analysts don’t use those concepts at all when analyzing literary texts; economists don’t use them when analyzing the behavior of economic actors. By the same token, literary analysis is composed of an equally vast, equally complex, equally rich and powerful set of concepts – narrative structure, metaphor, synechdoche, semiology, dactyls and iambs and trochees and spondees – the list is really endless. Chemists as chemists don’t use any of those ideas. No spondees in your chemistry textbook. What we have here is a set of utterly unrelated conceptual structures. Notice, moreover, that sometimes these structures are used to analyze the very same objects. A literary analyst will analyze the literary properties of a work of fiction – say The Magic Mountain, or Ulysses, or the latest romance novel. But a chemist could analyze the very same novel, that is, he or she could analyze the physical, chemical properties of the paper, the ink, the glue with which the pages are bound, and so on. Obviously this would be a radically different kind of analysis. But that’s the point.
We look around – you and I, constantly, ever single second of our waking lives – and we confront a world. We try to make sense of what we see and experience. But the only way to do that is to impose on the world a conceptual apparatus of some kind – a structure of ideas, a set of categories with rules, that allows to take the infinite array of data that is constantly bombarding our brains and to organize it. Our concepts are organizing tools, tools that we use to impose some coherence and orderliness on what we observe and experience. Each concept or category is a kind of cubbyhole; and our understanding of the concept tells us that this particular object belongs in the cubbyhole and that one doesn’t. The conceptual apparatus allows us, in other words, to make distinctions; and making distinctions is really what it means to think.
Learning the disciplines – learning about those various conceptual structures that have been most influential, that have been most successful, that have demonstrated their power to make sense of things – this is what it means to develop a disciplined mind. Without this kind of discipline, our thinking is apt to be disorderly, chaotic. Our thoughts are apt to fly this way and that, with no rhyme or reason. We call that being confused; and to be confused is to be powerless, to be at the mercy of the world.
