ESPIRITUALIDAD DE DON HONORIO: LOS MEDIOS DE SU ESPI RITUALIDAD

The Truman commission proposed to fund and otherwise support a college education for half of the nation’s population.

What education, then, did the Truman Commission prescribe for half of America’s peoples? What education is it that fits free men and women to live in a free society? Here the

Commission members again ventured into controversy. Although they were to a man highly educated in the liberal arts and sciences, they were overridingly pragmatic in their mandate for near-universal education. They could not be satisfied with a scheme that reached only one-third of the populace (the 32% with “the mental ability to complete an advanced liberal or specialized education”). Something very much like the liberal arts would have to serve, but to do so it must be both more accessible in every academic sense of the word and, as they saw it, more

immediately applicable to daily affairs. Their term for this program of higher education was “general education.”

They undertook to describe the aims of a general education and even to prescribe with some specificity what a general education curriculum should comprise. As we shall see, and as often happens when a mature and apposite institution is appropriated out of convenience for objectives peculiar to the moment, “general education” was the next of the camels’ noses to insinuate its way into public post-secondary education. The mature and apposite institution in this case is liberal arts education and the moment being the government’s unprecedented commitment to provide college education, not vocational training, to half of the population.

By “general” in this context the Commission members meant the antonym of “special.” They regarded traditional liberal arts education as too specialized and abstruse, in a paradoxical sense too applied to serve well for the mass production of postsecondary education they called for. In the section titled, “EDUCATION FOR FREE MEN—THE NEED FOR GENERAL EDUCATION,” they assert,

“Present college programs are not contributing adequately to the quality of

students’ adult lives either as workers or as citizens. This is true in large part because the unity of liberal education has been splintered by overspecialization.

“Specialization is a hallmark of our society, and its advantages to mankind have been remarkable. But in the educational program it has become a source of both strength and weakness. Filtering downward from the graduate and professional school levels, it has taken over the undergraduate years, too, and in the more extreme instances it has made of the liberal arts college little more than another vocational school, in which the aim of teaching is almost exclusively preparation for advanced study in one or another specialty.” 82

Classical liberal arts education was viewed by the Commission members, all of whom were members of professions only approached through a traditional liberal arts education, as job training for high-level professional careers. At that time, a few comparatively rarified careers were effectively only open to graduates of strong liberal arts programs, and so one negotiated that course of study to get the job, in the viewpoint of the Commission members. Even setting aside the concerns about supply-and-demand mismatches that had by then been troubling a couple of generations of educational leaders, an elite professional caste, however eminently educated and accomplished, clearly could not constitute the new learned citizenry called for in the Commission’s report.

This interpretation or conception of a liberal arts education is open to question today, as it turned out to be at the time. In essaying this peculiar take on liberal arts education and its fitness for the purposes of preserving and advancing democracy, the Commission erected what might be thought of as a straw man paradox and in so doing also created a dilemma: if vocational training was not the suitable mechanism of “education for a fuller realization of democracy in every phase of living” and liberal arts education was effectively only a variant on vocational training, then something else must serve. Something else must carry out the program of public higher education first prescribed by Jefferson and re-emphasized by Dewey.

But what?

The “what” might have to be fabricated de novo. It was by no means clear what process or institution then extant might prepare an alternative to the “college graduate [who] may have gained technical or professional training in one field of work or another, but is only incidentally,

if at all, made ready for performing his duties as a man, a parent, a citizen. Too often he is ‘educated’ in that he has acquired competence in some particular occupation, yet falls short of that human wholeness and civic conscience which the cooperative activities of citizenship require.”83

Or alternatively and expediently, something already at hand might have to be adapted to what the Commissioners construed as different purposes. According to their rhetoric, the Commission members viewed liberal arts education as specialized job training, whereas the founders and members of those colleges the Commissioners had attended had undertaken the mission of preparing learned persons. By the colleges’ own lights liberal arts education aims to create the well-educated citizenry the Truman Commission seemed to be calling for. Where liberal arts education apparently deviates from the Commission’s purposes is in its ultimate “specialization.” Any alternative would have to “provide [a] core of unity in the essential diversity of higher education…the crucial task of higher education today, therefore, is to provide a unified general education for American youth. Colleges must find the right relationship between specialized training on the one hand, aiming at a thousand different careers, and the transmission of a common cultural heritage toward a common citizenship on the other.”84

What actually transpired might seem the result of semantic invention. To wit,

“’General education’ is the term that has come to be accepted for those phases of nonspecialized and nonvocational learning which should be the common experience of all educated men and women.

General education should give to the student the values, attitudes, knowledge, and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society. It should enable him to identify, interpret, select, and build into his own life those components of his cultural heritage that contribute richly to understanding and appreciation of the world in which he lives. It should therefore embrace ethical values, scientific generalizations, and aesthetic conceptions, as well as an understanding of the purposes and character of the political, economic and social institutions that men have devised.”

Recipients of a liberal arts education may be forgiven if they read “liberal arts” where the report says “general.” The Commission wanted to insist on a real distinction between the

connotations, nevertheless. The reader may judge whether they succeeded in establishing such a distinction:

“Thus conceived, general education is not sharply distinguished from liberal

education; the two differ mainly in degree, not in kind. General education undertakes to redefine liberal education in terms of life’s problems as men face them, to give it human orientation and social direction, to invest it with content that is directly relevant to the demands of contemporary society. General education is liberal education with its matter and method shifted from its original aristocratic intent to the service of democracy. General education seeks to extend to all men the benefits of an education that liberates.”85

This locution seems to conceive of general education as a kind of applied liberal arts

education. The problems to which education seeks solutions are in the case of general education the problems that “men face.” The orientation of general education is “human,” its direction “social.” The content of general education is “relevant” to the “demands of society.”

Perhaps most pointed of the disjunctions that the Commission took pains to construct between general and liberal arts education is that of the aristocracy that liberal arts education is putatively intended to further and the democracy that their institution of general education would by contrast serve. Once established, this disjunction is put to work in the service of a novel rhetorical inversion. From the etymological bases for the very term itself, “liberal arts,” the Commission disjunctively transfers to general education the role that civilization had ascribed to liberal arts education for a millennium.

This in turn begs a deeper analysis of general education and liberal arts education and any actual distinction between them. Because of the scope of the analysis and its primacy in this paper’s exposition, this analysis is taken up in section V.

In a manifesto that anticipates today’s community colleges’ invocation of “general education,” the Commission identified “basic outcomes” that students are to be able to demonstrate because of their experience of general education. The report states that “the

purposes of general education should be understood in terms of performance, of behavior” rather than mastery of specific subject matter.

Society, and the need for each individual’s contribution to it, are the common themes in the Commission’s objectives:

1. To develop for the regulation of one’s personal and civic life a code of behavior