{"id":1312,"date":"2012-01-14T16:00:21","date_gmt":"2012-01-15T00:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/?p=1312"},"modified":"2019-02-24T10:45:54","modified_gmt":"2019-02-24T18:45:54","slug":"same-coin-two-sides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/archives\/1312","title":{"rendered":"Same Coin, Two Sides: Resurrecting the Liberal Arts Ideal"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0;float:none;height:30px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/archives\/1312\" send=\"false\" layout=\"standard\" width=\"450\" show_faces=\"false\" font=\"arial\" action=\"recommend\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div><p><em><span style=\"font-family: georgia,bookman old style,palatino linotype,book antiqua,palatino,trebuchet ms,helvetica,garamond,sans-serif,arial,verdana,avante garde,century gothic,comic sans ms,times,times new roman,serif;\">There are truths on this side of the Pyranees, which are falsehoods on the other.\u00a0 <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: georgia,bookman old style,palatino linotype,book antiqua,palatino,trebuchet ms,helvetica,garamond,sans-serif,arial,verdana,avante garde,century gothic,comic sans ms,times,times new roman,serif;\">~Blaise Pascal<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p>Have you noticed that the same behaviour can be described in diametrically opposed ways, depending on different people&#8217;s perspectives? For example, if you were taught, \u201cIf you have nothing good to say, then don\u2019t say anything at all\u201d, couldn\u2019t you also be accused of being \u201cpassive aggressive\u201d? Or maybe you\u2019re an introvert <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/01\/15\/opinion\/sunday\/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?_r=2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">who thinks best when thinking alone<\/a>, and often finds the banter of your colleagues trivial; you\u2019ll probably find people accusing you of poor social skills. A man who is careful with his money becomes a miserly cheapskate,\u00a0 a confident woman becomes a bitch, and an optimistic person becomes a pollyanna. And so on.<\/p>\n<p>I find the same thing in education.<\/p>\n<p>According to leaders of the progressive camp like <a href=\"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/archives\/215\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Ken Robinson<\/a>, modern public schools are \u201cfactories\u201d where young people are dehumanized and forced into categories that betray each young person\u2019s unique character. According to <a href=\"http:\/\/sethgodin.typepad.com\/seths_blog\/2011\/09\/back-to-the-wrong-school.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Seth Godin<\/a>, \u201cLarge-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.\u201d A central villain is the lack of choice; each student is compelled to learn what other people are learning, regardless of whether he or she finds it interesting or relevant. And teachers reinforce factory discipline by lecturing from the front, demanding that students listen and regurgitate.<\/p>\n<p>But when I see that same school system, my perception is very different. I don&#8217;t see the straw man above. The upside of this vilified institution is the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virtualsalt.com\/libarted.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">liberal arts<\/a> ideal. The idealists of the past who built the system of the present viewed the liberal arts as the ideal. (I haven&#8217;t found many who consciously wanted a factory.) In my opinion, our current system is at its best when it emulates this ideal. Unfortunately, this ideal has receded from popular consciousness as the progressives&#8217; negative &#8220;factory&#8221; critique has gained popularity.<\/p>\n<p>In the liberal arts ideal, public schools exist to introduce young people to a variety of disciplines and ideas that they\u2019ve probably never encountered or considered. \u201cExploratories\u201d is a virtue \u2013 students experience a variety of courses in academics, business, trades, performing arts and physical education. Yes, students may not like basketball, woodworking or reading Shakespeare, and they may employ that classic of resistance, \u201cit\u2019s boring\u201d, but school might be the only place they ever get to expand their \u201czone of relevancy\u201d. Unlike the progressive demand to teach what&#8217;s &#8220;relevant&#8221;, the liberal arts ideal asks, \u201cIf they\u2019ve never tried it, how do they know they won\u2019t like it?\u201d I remember hating Technology 8 at the beginning of the year, but by the end I found woodworking and drafting to be wonderfully creative activities. My preconceptions would never have allowed me to find these passions without being \u201ccompelled\u201d. In the early years of my Bachelor of Arts degree, I discovered a passion for political philosophy; my preferred choices, history and English, became my minors. And I was grateful that I had to take algebra right to Grade 12; otherwise, my university economics courses would have been much more difficult. (When I was a teenager, I was sure that math was irrelevant. I was wrong.) So, I am grateful for the need to take a wider range of courses beyond my initial preferences.<\/p>\n<p>A liberal arts education also believes that a broad exposure to a variety of disciplines provides a general education. This general education, in turn, forms the basis of creative and critical thought. As Professor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virtualsalt.com\/libarted.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Robert Harris<\/a> has said, \u201cKnowledge of many subject areas provides a cross fertilization of ideas, a fullness of mind that produces new ideas and better understanding.\u201d Content isn\u2019t \u201cfactoids\u201d or \u201cinformation\u201d, as the progressives like to (mis)characterize it; content is the very essence of what we use to think comparatively, critically and creatively. [Thus, if we have to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2008\/07\/is-google-making-us-stupid\/6868\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">look it up in Google<\/a>, the thought has probably passed us by.] The distinction between skill and content, as I\u2019ve argued before (<a href=\"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/archives\/945\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/archives\/1020\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>), is simply unsustainable.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, the liberal arts ideal views the teacher as an active leader at the center of the class discussion. It&#8217;s probably close to the &#8220;sage from the stage&#8221; approach that the progressives so dislike.\u00a0 Ideally, the teacher engages in a Socratic dialogue with his\/her students. Through continual questioning and discussion, students learn to explain and understand their beliefs and knowledge, and potentially change their mind in the face of other points of view. It\u2019s not a comfortable practice, to be honest. Nobody likes to hear ideas that contradict their own. But it does make young people engage in conversations that they might otherwise not participate in.<\/p>\n<p>Do public schools (and my own teaching practice) always reach this liberal arts ideal? Of course not! But it seems to me that this ideal \u2013 an ideal that goes back to antiquity \u2013 would be a better model for school improvement than what the progressives have been promoting since the days of Rousseau. Since we don\u2019t know what we might be doing in 20 years (a meme that all progressives seem to accept), isn\u2019t a broad, liberal arts education better than allowing adolescents to personalize their education based on a narrow range of experience?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are truths on this side of the Pyranees, which are falsehoods on the other.\u00a0 ~Blaise Pascal &#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;- Have you noticed that the same behaviour can be described in diametrically opposed ways, depending on different people&#8217;s perspectives? For example, if you were taught, \u201cIf you have nothing good to say, then don\u2019t say anything at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,13,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-experiences","category-in-a-philosophical-mood","category-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1312"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2453,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions\/2453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lexiconic.net\/wheatfromthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}