James O. Freedman's (1996) in Idealism and Liberal Education, (a book that reflects his experience as president of the University of Iowa from 1982 to 1987, and as president of Dartmouth College since 1987, and that consists mainly of his many speeches delivered at commencements and convocation exercises), writes that liberal education with its special commitment to the most enduring achievements of Western and Eastern civilization prepares students for our unforeseeable future through acquainting them with the cultural achievements of the past. Liberal education represents the attempt to shape the long term future of human destiny and our life on this earth and to question and impose order upon the experience of being human:
A liberal education invites students to explore the ideal of being human - the drama of discovering the darker side of the self; the responsibility of imposing meaning on one's life and one's society; the challenge of transcending the ambiguity-entangled counsel of arrogance and modesty, egotism and altruism, emotion and reason, opportunism and loyalty, individualism and conformity. (Freedman, 1996, p. 2)
In our times, where the political, social, and moral spaces that divide us on issues of equality, science, faith, tradition, and progress are far greater than what little common ground we can find, Freedman's (1996) idealistic conception of liberal education is more important than ever. The task of preparing young people for the future is an intrinsically political and civic, and also intrinsically idealistic, enterprise. Such an education transforms the whole realm of the merely human and should transform students in every segment of their being by infusing them with ideas that have a magnificent, resplendent, transcendent power.
Liberal education with its universalist basis remains unconventional and left out of mainstream academic administration and policy planning. It is unfashionable in its emphasis on values that get past the mere moment and in its uneasiness with emotionally gratifying answers. The ambiguities lead to intractable problems with a universal significance, and, at its basis, the
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human condition has intrinsic principles that underlie the lives of individuals and communities (Freedom, 1981).
Political analysis has a special significance for science and has the value-added criterion, or the utility, of explaining science to the citizens of free and democratic societies around the globe. Advancing science is a self-evident good and a positive end because it serves the a priori
conditions of human nature. The tension between the intellectual activity of literary intellectuals and scientists is longstanding13. Liberal education is a bridge between the massive range of human endeavors and the basic principles of knowledge, basic principles that are required to organize reality into intelligible structures, and that generate the criteria for the cognitive, intellectual, and moral activity that binds us as a species, and with the entwinement of the university with the civic soul of the nation:
Just as a poet seeks to express and understand the world by imposing an order on words, just as a painter seeks to convey a vision of reality by imposing an order on light and color and form, just as an historian seeks to record and explain the past by imposing an order on developments and events, so a scientist seeks to explain the riddles of the natural world invoking intellect and imagination to impose an order on the disparate facts and phenomena that he or she observes. (Freedman, 1996, p. 79)
The problem of the kind of critical consciousness pointed to by James O. Freedman originates in Socrates and in the Delphic precept to "know thyself." In the introduction to the book Civic Education and Culture, Bradley C. S. Watson (2005) claims that in liberal education the passions are tamed and the self is made social. Its essence, civically, is a process of socialization into what it means to be human and the desire to go beyond oneself in the widest possible sense. The civic kind of liberal education represents the desire to "ask the questions that cut across time and place" (London, 2010, p. 325).
13 C.P. Snow (1959) Rede Lecture The Two Cultures. Science represents one of the greatest and most magnificent achievements of human culture. It is an achievement of the mind of the highest activity, rigor, complexity, and beauty.
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Ultimately, the problem of civic virtue is a philosophical problem. Becoming liberally educated means becoming civically engaged but it also means a habit or comportment of thought, a cognitive trait of remaining on the outside of history, of questioning the very nature of history, historicity, and time itself, of the ultimate mysteries of human life and consciousness, the unanswerable and intractable questions and perplexities of human nature and the human
condition that underlie both poetry and mathematics, both philosophy and science. There are no universal rules to govern life and society in modernity, progressivism and technological advance have dissolved tradition, in dissolving tradition we have dissolved the justification of liberal education and left our colleges and universities to flounder in confusion, error, disarray, and decay.
Inquiring into the nature of universal humanity is not purely scientific and is not purely
philosophical. Perhaps the distinguishing characteristic of liberal education is that it represents an unsolvable problem and in being unsolvable is the universal basis of all problems. The most serious challenges to universality have come from post-modernism, social-constructionism, and relativism (see Chapter Three) which are the product of mainly political imperatives. Relativism dissolves the civic justification that all students require initiation into general skills such as literacy and numeracy because it annihilates even the claim of generalizable capacities at all or of traits and characteristics that are generalizable past the uniqueness of the individual subject. The trend towards post-modernism and relativism pose a serious challenge to the aims of liberal educators. The perspective of universality regards human existence as a rational whole whose various forces intersect and reciprocate, becoming attuned, in the processes of teaching and learning, to the nature of external reality (Emberley, 1994).
Liberal education remains a unique and atypical attempt to direct the long range life and development of both education and civilization. Politically, the practice of liberal education is aimed at certain universal patterns of thought and action required for full and active participation in civic life, and sets of values and ideas that are held to be of universal and transcendent
significance. Liberal education grounded in the universalist thesis represents the ongoing and never-ending attempt to found a political community based in phenomena that are more profound than mere administrative rank and salaries. Liberal education is intrinsically political precisely at the intersection where it coincides with the social and civic significance of the North
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American college and university mission. What is often missed in political and civic debates over liberal education is that the argument and controversy is over the nature of human life as such.
North American colleges and universities today are facing challenges that are not going to go away; neither are our civic and economic shortfalls. The idealist claim for universality is a pedagogical ideal to guide teaching and research. It is the only thing I know of that can mediate all competing concerns while producing a rational, democratic, liberal culture. Arguments over the missions and mandates of North American colleges and universities are toxic and poisonous, they have corrupted the halls of ivy, and are engineering the intellectual, cultural, and moral course of the nation. New ways forward need to be found for advocates of liberal education, and perhaps our best option is, as I will suggest in the next section, supported by Lee Shulman (2004), to make liberal education into a profession that adheres to the criteria and general structure of professionalism.