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Why do we need schooling? Especially, why do we need a liberal arts education?

It’s easy to see why a plumber needs to learn about plumbing, or an electrician about wiring.  A chef really should learn ingredients, sauces, knife work.  An auto mechanic had better understand transmissions and radiators.

But why does anyone need to know English literature, or American history, or elementary physics, or French?

What is the purpose of a liberal arts education?  Aristotle wrote about the study of rhetoric as being similar to the study of the martial arts (he meant boxing and wrestling, not jiu-jitsu and kung fu).  A person needs to be able to defend himself.  Even if you’re not going to argue publicly in a political or legal arena, you need to know the techniques that might be used there–so you can defend if you’re attacked, so you can judge the competition of others.

An educated person might need to know enough chemistry to understand product safety and how ingredients interact, or enough history to see when political are new and what their roots are.  For self-defense, if nothing else, a broad education with a basic grounding in most academic disciplines might be necessary.

And some people make the argument that we live in a democracy–so we, all of us, need to be able to make the decisions and set the policies that govern all of us.  And to do that, we need to be educated citizens–with a broad enough knowledge to evaluate those policies.

I would also argue (particularly when it comes to the study of art and literature–I am, after all, an English teacher) that studying literature lets us think about unanswered questions–and unanswerable questions.  It gives us the opportunity to think deeply and widely and to engage with complexity.  To see alternate points of view.  To “walk in someone else’s shoes.”

I was at a symposium last week, and almost all the conversation was about what college can do to make people better employees.  “How,” businesspeople were asked, “can we our students better-prepared to help your companies?”

But are you looking for something more, from education? Is it about self-defense, or being ready to govern, or being ready for a job, or more than any of those?

Allow me to romantic for a moment–I think that education is about being the hero of your own life–it’s about finding the questions…and I mean the quests…that will define you and your world.  And education, to me, means something that can go on forever–even after schooling ends, even near the end of your life, you can be, if you undertake a wide-ranging education, like Tennyson’s Ulysses.  Sitting old, and ready to retire, you can still be the heroic king, ready to set off to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!

ULYSSES

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
that loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known—cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honored of them all—
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end.
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, my own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the scepter and the isle—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I started this blog post by asking my mom how she thinks I’ve changed since the internet came around. I could talk about the things that I think have changed – the internet has given me access to fandom, I’ve learned a ton of stuff from the ‘net that I might not otherwise know (not all of them good things – we haven’t really addressed the negative aspects of totally open access online, but my parents never could figure out how to instill parental controls faster than I could figure out ways around them…) but I honestly can’t remember a time before I was huddled in front of the family desktop, listening to the BEEEP BEEP WHIIIIIIIR of the dial-up loading. Oh, AOL.

I do remember a time before cell phones, however, but it’s actually hysterical to think about it. I was still dependent on my parents for transportation anyway, so planning ahead was the way of life, instead of my “we’ll figure it out later, call me,” attitude of today. I don’t know how much of the change was just technological access vs. growing up, but it’s a definite attitude shift that happened alongside my gaining a cell phone. So, I suppose that’s a change to take notice of.

IPods are also something that changed me a lot. Before my iPod, I barely listened to music at all, and I was only tentatively buying some CD’s for my CD player. These days, music is an integral part of my life, and my iPod is a huge source of entertainment for me. Youtube always allows me to preview songs before I spend money on them. So, that’s a change that I can trace to technological shift, but again, it happened while I was growing up, and I might have found more music anyway.

Back to my mother didn’t really notice any of that. Her perspective was that technology has made me far less social. She mentioned that I used to spend hours on the family computer, then my own computer, and now on my laptop. Holed up in my room. By myself. And she has a point, I guess. I can be “social” now, without ever leaving the comfort of my room, so why bother? Most of my face-to-face social life happens on Saturdays, when I can’t use the internet at all.

Before the internet was easily available in my house, leisure time was spent either playing actively or reading. I had the best Barbie collection of all my friends, and I played basketball and baseball depending on the season. I also regularly took out a double handful of books from the library every Friday to devour over the course of a week. Again, many of these things might have changed because I am older. But I can tell that the internet has cut directly into my reading time, and probably into my social time as well. How many times has my cell phone rung and I don’t want to pick up because I have 23 tabs open, three videos running, and a paper hovering somewhere in the background and being social just takes more effort? How many times have I chosen not to go out because hauling myself into the city is just more annoying than watching the latest episode of Glee on Hulu?

Of course, I’m more in touch with more distant friends, with my clever usage of facebook, email and skype. But overall, no matter how much I bemoan the fact that these websites are cheap replacements for real interaction, I still end up using them to stay in touch with more local friends. Technology seems to build a lot of barriers between people in some ways, even while it provides outlets for meeting new people through forums and classes. So my mother had a point – from her perspective, I do favor the internet over family interaction whenever I’m home. I argue that I’m doing homework, which I am, but I’m doing it alone, in my room, instead of at the dining room table like I did in the days of notebooks and paper homework.

For this reflection, I decided to take on a very visual approach. Initially, I wanted to write an imaginative story, but I also wanted to try something new. I decided that instead of a story, I would show everyone how I think. I use a program called FreeMind which helps me visually outline my thoughts. By making concept maps, I can see relationships that keep everything hierarchically organized. After I finished an outline on a comparison of visual learning to other learning styles, I felt that it wasn’t enough for a reflection and so I made a small comic. Though I appreciate visual learning, I am not a great artist. I hope my stick figures are acceptable.

As of course you know, you need to post a reflection for each unit in the course. Reflections (which are basically blog posts) are a place where you can expand at some length on a theme or idea from the unit–with a little more formality and depth than you might use in the forums, but a little less formality and depth than you will use in your papers. Reflections are part of the open side of the course–so you may have an audience which is wider than just me and your classmates. And you may receive comments from people who are interested in what you have to say, even though they’re not (officially) part of this course.

So how do you post a reflection? It’s fairly simple.  Click “Post Your Reflections” in the navigation menu above.  If you’re not logged in, you’ll need to log in.  If you are logged in, that link will take you straight to your Dashboard.  In the Dashboard, you’ll see a menu item for “Posts” and a choice to “Add New.”  That’s what you’re doing: adding a new post (reflection).  Give your post a title, and type it right into the box there.  You’ll see editing buttons, if you need or want to format your text (there’s even a spell-check in a dozen or so different languages).  There’s an “add media” button if you want to include some images or other media.  All fairly standard.

In order to keep things somewhat organized, please choose a category (from the menu on the right) for your post.  The category should be the unit where that reflection belongs.  For example, your first reflection, in the first unit, should have the category “Where Have You Been?”  Don’t choose “Reflections” as your category.  We want these reflections to go directly to the right sub-page for each unit.

Reflections, by default, are public.   But there’s a choice there, and it’s your choice.  If you want to make your reflection private, just use the “Visibility” setting under “Publish” on the right.  If you choose “Password protected” you can set a password, and then you can give that password to your classmates (post it in the forum, where outsiders can’t see it, with some thoughts about why you want that post to be just for us).  Or you can give the password only to me, or only to a group of classmates.  You can even mark the post “Private,” which makes it so nobody except you can see it (but do remember that I, as the professor, can still see private posts–this isn’t the same as your own personal blog or journal!)

And of course, you can go back and edit Reflections even after they’re posted.  And if the category or visibility needs to be changed, you can do that, too!

You can upload your assignments here.

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