AS YOUNG students, we seek novelty and originality. Out with the old ways, in with the new is the mantra of our generation. Unfortunately though, in our search for uncharted paths, knee-deep in idealism, wisdom is often obscured. This becomes particularly relevant and visible in light of our guiding principles on education.
John C. Merriam, then president of the Carnegie Institute and a renowned paleontologist gave a Founder's Day Address in Old Cabell Hall; his topic was general education. In it he mused, "We realize that there is a large waste of effort both through failure on the part of the student to understand the purpose of education, and failure of the educator to transmit, in the best organized and most intelligible form, the elements of the subject which he represents." This was in 1922. It is clear, then, that the question of a good education is not a new one. Indeed, in the Western tradition, serious questions of education, its content and its character, originated a few millennia ago in Athens.
In modernity, the goal of any good university is to cultivate thoughtful citizens. But what does it mean to be a thinking person? Some passionately believe that the answer is bound up in progressive politics, at the expense of tradition in all its variations. Still others believe that monetary success, achieved with the aid of a technical education, proves a man's intellectual worth. For my two cents, a thinking person is someone who, through cultivation in the breadth of the liberal arts, becomes a life-long learner; someone who learns to be unfailingly curious about the makeup of man and his surroundings. These divergent answers comprise the varying approaches to general education. They are why curriculum reform is so difficult and why irreconcilable interests abound in the modern Academy.
To be sure, a student with only the most mercenary understanding of a good education comes to appreciate the natural world uniformed by the humanities. Sadly though, our highly specialized, scientific education has become just that. Think of, for example, the great Goethe or our own Jefferson. At Goethe's Weimar house, in his bedroom, there stands a fabulous mineral collection that he meticulously cataloged and cased. One can hardly set foot in Monticello without appreciating Jefferson's inventiveness. But these Renaissance men are in some ways a relic of the past -- of a time when liberal learning unapologetically flourished at the heights of education. Instead, in the relentless pursuit of "success" and democratization, love for the humanities gets lost in a laboratory, on a spreadsheet, in a gargantuan lecture hall, on a basketball bracket, or in the bottom of a gin bucket.
Charges of elitism, of course, come from all directions when one discusses the virtues of classical liberal learning. Hoping to avoid these accusations, however, undergraduate general education has suffered. Apparently it is not elitist to herd 500 students into the Chemistry Auditorium in order to teach basic principles of economics. It is also not elitist to watch students surf the internet during a large lecture class instead of recording notes. Apparently, the University uplifts the 'common man' by making peace with grade inflation, ever larger classes, mechanistic, factory-style learning, and a conscience-raising curriculum that is all too often ashamed of the influence of dead white men.
In the end, of course, things are always getting better and worse. To pass off as trivial the progress made in higher education would be gravely misguided. From greater access for the unprivileged and underrepresented to increased travel opportunities, robust research possibilities and expanded career counseling, the University is in so many ways a better, more just place than it once was. But to be sure, these great changes have come alongside major degradations in curriculum requirements, social outlets, and in a diminished intellectual climate.
As I face my own education with a healthy dose of realism, I know that there are many things to regret. When students have little in way of a unifying core curriculum, we have few common intellectual concerns and are left instead to discuss with our friends and acquaintances the frivolous, the mundane and the vulgar. As Dean Gordon Stewart, a participant in a national forum on general education called, "Students in the Balance," suggested, "I surely hope students are having more serious conversations than what shows up on Facebook, where the range of opinion too often courses between "That sucks" and "It's awesome."
There is no question that education is different from what it once was. In a pluralistic, heterogeneous society, many of our goals have shifted and our values have changed. But our goal of cultivating educated, well mannered and civically minded people, I hope has not changed much. In the end, it is not enough to merely contemplate the makeup of a thinking person or the University's role in educating citizens, but asking these questions of ourselves, and thereby uncovering the compromised quality of modern education, is a good place to start. Indeed, it is perhaps half the battle.
Christa Byker is a Cavalier Daily senior associate editor. She can be reached at cbyker@cavalierdaily.com.
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