Learning to Flourish Learning to Flourish A Philosophical Exploration of Liberal Education Daniel R. Denicola Continuum International Publishing Group A Bloomsbury company 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP www.continuumbooks.com © Daniel R. DeNicola, 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers. ISBN: 978-1-4411-1726-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN conTenTS Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 PaRT i Toward a Theory of Liberal Education 9 1 Mixed Messages and False Starts 11 2 Liberal Education and Human Flourishing 36 PaRT ii Paradigms of Liberal Education 65 3 Transmission of Culture 67 4 Self-Actualization 83 5 Understanding the World 98 6 Engagement with the World 113 7 The Skills of Learning 125 PaRT iii The Values and Moral Aims of Liberal Education 139 8 Core Values of Liberal Education 141 9 Intrinsic Value 158 10 Educating a Good Person 176 vi conTenTS PaRT iV Obstacles, Threats, and Prospects 205 11 Persistent Concerns 207 12 Newfound Threats 224 13 Promise and Prospects 240 Bibliography 251 Index of Names 263 Index of Terms 266 PReF ace anD acKno WleDGMenTS Sometimes, a book reflects the preoccupation of a lifetime. This is such a book. Liberal education has not only defined the environment in which I have worked, but has also been the focus of much of that work. From one perspective, my experience in liberal education has been deep and broad: as an undergraduate, graduate student, full-time professor, and visiting scholar, my field has been philosophy, especially the philosophy of education; as an alumnus, dean, college vice president, provost, trustee, workshop facilitator, and consultant, I have served in the practical contexts of decision-making and institution-building to articulate a vision of the liberal arts and to enhance programs of liberal education. From another angle, however, my experience is narrow: I have always worked in higher education, never at the pre-college level; my academic appointments have been only in the United States; I have served mostly small, independent, liberal arts colleges, primarily with “traditional” undergraduate students (though I have also had the pleasure of teaching adult undergraduates, graduate students in professional programs, returning adults students in a Masters of Liberal Studies program, and senior academic administrators in professional development programs); and I am privileged to work in a place where the liberal arts thrive. I present this biographical brief for several reasons. The first is to acknowledge that readers are likely to find both the strengths and (despite my best efforts) the limitations of my experience reflected in this book. It seems better, in the spirit of transparency, to disclose these facts at the outset. Second, I want to affirm that the call to write this book and the ideas it contains have been gestating for many years. Moreover, although it is a philosophical viii PReFace anD acKnoWleDGMenTS work, a work of educational theory, it also draws upon decades of administrative experience and the labors of educational practice. The third reason is, frankly, an attempt to gain credibility with those who have a peremptorily negative response to any tract of educational philosophy. “With all the problems facing education today, and especially with the immediate threats to the very survival of the liberal arts,” they would say, “why do we need to spend time on airy philosophical ideas?” My answer is that my experience has shown me that philosophy matters, not only in elucidating an institutional or programmatic vision, but even in day-to-day decision-making. “Is it good education?” is an excellent test of every institutional decision. I am not so much suggesting that educators all need to be guided by a pellucid ideal; rather, I am commending the habit of individual and collective philosophical reflection on practice—the clarification of aims and assumptions, the rearticulation of values and commitments, the sharpening of differences, the learning from dialogue, and the opening of a space for innovative possibilities. In that sense, despite the experience distilled here, such a book is finally and inevitably a work in progress, awaiting the distilled experience and critique of others. This is a work in four parts. Following an Introduction, the two chapters of Part I discuss the confusion of contemporary discourse about liberal education and present a concept of liberal education as a vital tradition of theory and practice. The account is, I hope, sufficiently definitive yet “thin” enough to accommodate many different historical conceptions. Part II consists of five chapters, each of which develops one of the strands or “paradigms” that represent polarities of theory and practice, and that interact to produce much of the dynamism of the tradition. In Part III, I survey some of the core concepts, values, and moral implications of liberal education. Part IV considers both perennial obstacles and contem- porary threats to the liberal arts, and then closes with a chapter on the place and prospect of liberal education in the contem- porary world. Throughout, I have situated the discussion within the broad realm of ideas created by educators and philosophers and institutions, ranging from Plato to the public, contemporary pronouncements of colleges and universities. Words of caution: this book is a philosophical exploration. Its purpose is not to prescribe a curriculum, pedagogical methods, or specific forms of institutional practice. And there are, of course, PReFace anD acKnoWleDGMenTS ix many other things this book is not: a history of education, a polemic on educational policy, a guide for teachers, an adminis- trators’ handbook, a diatribe about the current state of education, or a personal memoir. Those looking for such tracts will be disappointed. My approach, however, requires that any adequate educational theory should address educational practice holistically, including the institutional setting, the community of learners, the co-curriculum, and other elements as well as the formal curricular content and methods of instruction. Moreover, I have often taken the perspective of the learner, not only that of the educator. The first appearance of some of the central ideas and arguments of this book occurred in two recent articles. I have drawn heavily on these pieces; though their formulations have sometimes altered significantly with expansion, a few sentences are repeated verbatim or nearly so. The first is “Liberal Education and Moral Education,” which appeared in Character and Moral Education, edited by Joseph DeVitis and Tianlong Yu (Peter Lang 2011), 179–92. I am grateful to Joseph DeVitis for the invitation to write the article and to Peter Lang Publishing for permission to draw from that article and to reprint portions of it herein. The second article is “Friends, Foes, and Nel Noddings on Liberal Education.” It was delivered to a general session of the Philosophy of Education Society in April 2011, where I benefited greatly from the gracious response of Nel Noddings. That article is forthcoming, along with Noddings’ response, in Philosophy of Education 2011, edited by Rob Kunzman (Carbondale, IL: PES, 2012). Intellectual debts accumulate and can never be fully discharged— but they are gifts that can be gratefully acknowledged. In this case, they are imposing indeed, and I am delighted with the opportunity to express publicly my gratitude. To undergraduate mentors Troy Organ, Stanley Grean, and many others at Ohio University; to graduate mentors Israel Scheffler, John Rawls, Roderick Firth, Jane Roland Martin, and many others at Harvard University; to my tolerant and brilliant colleagues in philosophy at Rollins College and Gettysburg College; to the astute professionals with whom I have served in the administration of those colleges; to Thaddeus Seymour (Rollins) and Gordon Haaland (Gettysburg), presidential mentors who gave me both encouragement and scope to do my work; to the many philosophers and friends who must be nameless here, but whose happy crossings of my path I have not