Being a Liberal Arts Teacher

A week ago tonight, Jon Souza, the Troxstar, and I were prowling the streets of Eugene, drinking tasty beer at the Bier Stein and then at Falling Sky. 

I grabbed a piece of a picnic table at Falling Sky and didn't know that the other guys at the table were fellow salesmen in Jon's line of work and were in Eugene for the same sales event Jon was.

We got to talking and I said something, because I was asked about my livelihood, about being retired and that I was going to teach part time as a part of my retirement deal.  I explained that I would be teaching WR 115, a course that prepares students for our core college writing courses, the courses that fulfill requirements for academic degree work.

I pointed out that I'd be spending less time reading papers because the class size is smaller and these students, by and large, are not yet capable of writing longer essays and need a lot of help with grammar and punctuation, writing full paragraphs, structuring an essay,  and so on.

One of the guys we sat down with is a graduate of Columbia University.  He's an Ivy Leaguer.

When I pointed out what my WR 115 students needed help with, he pounced:  "Doesn't that annoy you? I mean that they aren't ready to do such fundamental things in a writing class?"

I said something to the effect that I'm not paid to be annoyed and that I simply work with my students, help them, and don't really think about where they should be.  I focus on where they are.

In fact, students' lack of preparedness has never annoyed me.

It's kept me gainfully employed!

But, I can tell you what does annoy me. 

Being lied to.  When students lie to me about why they missed class or when they cheat, that is, plagiarize, that annoys me.

Even more, I'm annoyed by the idea that college is place to come to learn skills to help one get a job.

I understand why college is seen this way.  Economic pressures are great.  The more tuition prices rise, the more college will be regarded as a financial investment, assessed as worthwhile to the degree that one gets that money back in earnings when they work.

Nonetheless it annoys me and it diminishes the potential for what a college education can be It can be an experience far more thrilling and important than a career and requires an investment  into something much more valuable than money.

You see, I'm really old school when it comes to the worth of education as well as the purposes of education.

Like the ancient Greeks, particularly Socrates, I see education not as training, not as pouring stuff into the minds of students, but as a drawing out, as a means to self-examination; I see the college years as a time to begin to explore what life means and what it means to live a well-lived life and to enter into self-examination.

My very conservative approach to classroom instruction doesn't fit well with the prevailing attitudes about education we hear everywhere.

 In the early 2010s, I hear and read people of a variety of walks of life denigrate the central mission of a humanities (or liberal arts) education as, at best, impractical, at worst, elitist.

So, when students enroll in a course of mine, I know that they do not see themselves going to school for reasons that align with how I teach. 

For many students, much of their experience in the classroom has focused on scoring well on tests, so instruction has centered, to some degree, on how to prepare students to do well on these tests.  By their nature, standardized tests are going to test measureable outcomes:  testing writing, for example, focuses on grammar, punctuation, spelling, thesis statement, topic sentences, the following of a predetermined structure in the essay, parenthetical citations, bibliographic details and other measures.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these measures, but this approach presents a serious problem.  It’s reductive.  This approach to writing reduces writing to formula and tends to encourage writing that is itself standardized. 

As I teach writing in the 2010s, I try to bring romance to an activity that has had much of the romance drained from it. 

To my way of thinking, the best academic writing grows out of love, not out of technical mastery.

Love of learning grows out of seeing that whatever we teach, whether it’s literature, philosophy, history, political science, art, theater, sociology, psychology, journalism, mathematics, business, or the sciences, it has its deepest and most enduring value when these subjects point to the big questions of human existence:  What does it mean to be a human being? What is the nature of human nature?  Does a shared human nature exist?  What is the nature of the human condition?  How do we see the world?  Why do we see it that way?  What values or world views underlie the ways we see the world?  How do we determine right from wrong?  What is the nature of goodness?  Of happiness?  Of evil?  To what degree do we look at these questions as individuals? To what degree do we have shared values?

These questions transcend the question I most often hear from students:  “How am I going to use this?”  

When students ask this question, they are asking, ”How does this apply to my major or to my career?”  I used to teach literature students who groused about having to take math (“I’ll never use it!) and used to have math majors who thought taking Shakespeare was stupid (“I’ll never use it!”).

Once again, I’ll confess how old school and romantic I am about eduation.

Colleges and universities were originally formed around the idea of the liberal arts.  The word “liberal” suggest two things:  freedom (as in “liberty”) and breadth.  The idea is that the more broadly knowledgeable a person is, the freer that person is – free to weigh, contemplate, think, and form a world view based on knowing as much as possible. 

From this perspective, my literature students who resist taking math are less free and live life less fully if they focus all of their intellectual energies on stories and poems and don’t also discipline their minds to work with the abstract principles and relationships of mathematics.

It’s why colleges and universities have general requirements.  The idea is that students are better served (and their freedom is increased) by studying a breadth of subjects rather than a following a narrow course of study.

So back to the Ivy League guy.  

Does it annoy me that my students need my help with sentence, paragraph, and essay composition?  Does it annoy me that they need my help to compose essays?

No.

What annoys me and troubles me is that my students, by and large, are not idealistic about their education.  When I introduce them to the ideals of a liberal arts education, it's news to most of my students that education could be liberating. 

What troubles me is that little of the political discussion of education addresses education's primary purpose as the broadening and deepening of thinking and trying to figure out the world.

It troubles me that tuition costs drive idealism out, heighten the pressure for an education to be a source of career training, and increases resistance to that most Old School declaration of Socrates that "the unexamined life is not worth living".  

Old School Liberal Arts education focuses sharply on self-examination, as well as social examination.  It invites the student to think critically, independently.  

Old School Liberal Arts education works from the Socratic principle that the important thing is not to live, but to live well.  It encourages one toward a well-lived life, a life of quality thinking and examining that endures.  

As a retired, Old School part-time composition instructor, I'll keep quietly and persistently working to open my students' eyes to these possibilities as they pursue their studies.

Gladly.