On the Liberal Arts
by Dr. William Turner
Welcome, freshmen, to Wabash College. The school you have chosen to attend is very different from many that your friends from high school are attending. Wabash is much smaller than most colleges and universities, and it maintains a relatively low student-faculty ratio. It is also a college for men, one of only a handful remaining in the United States. These are all important facts in understanding Wabash College and the education you will receive here. However, I think the most important characteristic of your new academic home—albeit not independent of other traits of the college—is the fact Wabash is a liberal arts college.
Many people go to college to study a specific field. They go for a professional or technical education—to become a physician, a lawyer, an engineer, a scientist, a historian, a journalist, a teacher, a businessperson, etc. They want to learn a profession, to acquire a certain set of knowledge, to become proficient in some technical area, to become specialists in their chosen field of study. They go to college as a means to an end. They go to train for a job.
There is nothing wrong with this. In fact it is a good and important thing. This type of professional or technical education produces people with very specialized knowledge, and this specialized knowledge is vital in making our world as it exists today. Without it and the division of labor associated with it, most if not all of the things we take for granted every day—and thus the world as we know it—would not exist. Fifty years ago, an essay titled “I, Pencil. My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read” gave an autobiographical account of how a simple wooden pencil is created, including listing the many components and people with different expertises necessary for its creation. This essay showed how the process for creating something as ubiquitous as a wooden pencil is so complicated that no single person could do it alone. Even if someone could build a pencil alone, the division of labor and specialization allow more of an item to be produced in a given time than could be done by the same number of people working separately, as Adam Smith famously explained in his description of pin manufacturing in his treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Combined with interchangeable parts and engineering tolerances, specialization and the division of labor allow for modern manufacturing processes through the use of factories and assembly lines, providing employment opportunities for semi-skilled or unskilled workers that were unimaginable without it.
This model of a specialized education is a very common educational model in universities around the world. It is almost the exclusive model in Europe and Asia. It is the model all of your professors followed in graduate school. Many of us—myself included—also partook of it as undergraduates. This is the model most people think of when they think of a college education. It was the model I thought of until after I was hired by Wabash College and exposed to a liberal arts education.
A liberal education, such as one may receive at Wabash College, also has nothing to do with modern political allegiances. It also does not refer to the fine arts such as art, music, and theater, although these certainly play a large and important role at Wabash. Instead, the phrase comes from the Latin artes liberales, in which the term artes may refer to a skill or a craft. The artes liberales were the skills deemed necessary of a free person (from the Latin liber). While the skills and their association with the education of free citizens date back to the ancient Greeks, they appear to have first been grouped together in first century Rome. The number of the liberal arts has varied, but a fifth century work laid out what have come to be known as the seven classical liberal arts. The septem artes liberals consisted of the trivium of language arts (rhetoric, logic, and grammar) and the quadrivium of mathematical arts (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy). As a mathematician, I find it interesting to note that four of the seven classical liberal arts were mathematical, since the Romans considered music and astronomy to be applied arithmetic and geometry, respectively.
Today a liberal education still refers to an education for free men and women—an education that liberates the mind. It teaches students how to think, how to learn, how to judge for themselves. In the words of one of my former colleagues, it frees your mind from slavish devotion to received knowledge. To be truly free, we must be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. We must challenge what we learn. Test it. Prove it to ourselves. In the Leviathan, Hobbes said, “those men that make their own instruction from the authority of books, and not from their own mediation, [were] as much below the condition of ignorant men as men [endowed] with true science [were] above it.” Blindly following the dictates of others can lead us into great trouble. We must learn to evaluate the merits of all knowledge that we receive. We must know when to trust it, and more importantly when not to trust it.
This idea is also very important in my field of specialization. As a mathematician and computer scientist, I must know when to trust the conclusion of a theorem or the output of an algorithm. This is why we go to the trouble of creating proofs. Proofs give a firm argument for the correctness of the theorem or algorithm. Without proofs, we must continue to question our data and conclusions.
A liberal education stretches a student to learn from many fields of study. At Wabash, you are required to take a variety of courses to fulfill your distribution requirements. You will study languages, literature and fine arts, and behavioral science. You will take courses in mathematics, the natural sciences, history, philosophy, and religion. You will learn a little from a lot of subjects. You will be expected to learn different ways of learning. This will help free your mind to think in new ways.
However, this cafeteria-style distribution requirement of taking a few classes in many different areas is not unique to Wabash, or even to a liberal arts institution. It is in fact a common requirement at many colleges and universities in the United States. For example, the general education requirements I had to complete for my mathematics and physics majors at Iowa State University were nearly identical to Wabash’s distribution requirements; if anything, they were a little more stringent in that I could not count courses in my majors toward my general education requirements. My mathematics and physics courses did not count toward my general education requirements in mathematics and the natural sciences. Instead I had to take statistics, computer science, biology, and chemistry to fulfill those requirements. Even students in stereotypically professional programs such as engineering, programs which are known for allowing students very few electives, have to complete something similar to your distribution requirements. These requirements do not set you apart from your peers.
On the other hand, the Wabash College curriculum does include a few elements that, if not unique to Wabash, are rarely seen elsewhere. These are the common sophomore course (namely Cultures and Traditions) and the senior comprehensive examinations. While studying for your comprehensive exams, you will look back over your education to synthesize all that you have learned into one comprehensive whole and try to explain how it all fits together. In C&T you will engage in the grand conversation that occurs in literature. You will read texts you never would have read on your own, but they will all challenge you to think differently, if only you will listen to them. Your instructor probably will not be an expert on the text, but he or she will show you how even somebody who does not specialize in that particular field can grapple with a text and learn from it. You will see how you can learn from subjects other than your main field of study.
This learning in fields outside of one’s specialized field of knowledge is one sign of a liberated mind. Your C&T instructors are one example of this you will encounter while at Wabash, but it may not be the only one. You may find yourself having a conversation in a professor’s office over topics far removed from the courses the professor teaches. You may find yourself in a group of students and faculty at a fraternity dinner or other function arguing about many different ideas. You may even find a professor sitting beside you acting as your peer in the classroom. In my short time here, I know several professors who have sat in on courses in Greek, Latin, Spanish, philosophy, religion, etc. Take advantage of this experience and observe them. They will teach you much about being a good liberal arts student if you will let them.
A liberal education is not just about the breadth of the courses you take. You must also take an active role in your education and challenge the knowledge you receive in these courses. This is even true in a mathematics classroom, where students often mistakenly believe they cannot challenge the professor’s statements. As Hobbes said, “they that trusting only to the authority of books follow the blind blindly are like him that, trusting to the false rules of a master of fence, ventures presumptuously upon an adversary that either kills or disgraces him.” Ask yourself why you should believe what you learn. When you read a text, have a conversation with the author: Ask the author questions, and look for the author’s answers in the text. In the classroom, challenge your instructor if something seems out of place. It is possible he or she made a mistake; none of us is infallible. Even if your professor did not err, you will learn more by asking questions than you could by being a passive receptacle of knowledge.
As you embark on your Wabash education, I challenge you to immerse yourself in a true liberal education. Take courses outside of your main interests. Have long and deep conversations and arguments with your fellow students and your professors. Learn to think for yourself. Challenge the knowledge you receive. Test it. Prove it to yourself. Read good books and ask the authors questions as you read them. Strive to know the good, so that you can do the good. Take advantage of your apprenticeship in this learning community, liberate your mind, and embark on a lifetime of learning.
Dr. William Turner is an associate
professor of mathematics and computer science at Wabash College. During his time at Wabash, he has audited classes on philosophy and ancient Greek. He has received degrees from Iowa State University and North Carolina State University.
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