The ‘Common Purpose’ of Liberal Education

    

Thanks to all for the thought-provoking reflections on liberal education, and the opportunity to do so in a context where the primary concerns are human freedom and responsibility.  Corey’s essay sets up the challenge of identifying more clearly the associative nature of universities and colleges.  Then, Sternberg and Street focused the discussion on the thorny problem of defining their “common purpose”.

To ask whether universities are civil associations or enterprise associations, in Oakeshott’s terms, is illuminating.  Universities may formally “fail the test” as civil associations.  Yet, Corey points out, like civil associations, modern universities don’t seem to agree on a common purpose or summum bonum, but are organizations loosely held together by a watery fidelity, not unlike civility—a common but likely diverse tradition, common symbols, a commitment to a not clearly specified mission of education, etc.; lacking the rigor and specificity of a substantive collective goal or outcome about which to make instrumental rules for its achievement.

A central aim of Oakeshott was to present a distinctive picture of a liberal education, in the hopes that this vision (more than any utilitarian defense), would clarify in the minds of those who have had the experience, a renewed sense of its value and inspire associates, in the midst of a great variety of disciplines, bodies of knowledge, and methods, to do their part in this collective endeavor.

So, the focus on the “common purpose” of the university is crucial, and is so because both the purpose and what is common are complicated and not easily defended.  Sternberg is persuasive in arguing that Oakeshott was narrow in both what is common and in what is a purpose.  Education is both common and not common.  It is a collective endeavor and supremely solitary.  There is no question education is a cooperative transaction between learners and teachers, between those who seek knowledge and education and those who impart it.  Anyone who has carefully observed the transaction, is likely to conclude education is best done in community.  Yet, learning is deeply personal.  One can offer the invitation, but will it be answered?  Affirmative answers cannot be adequately measured in the aggregate.  One may, of course, test the number of students who can reiterate Copernicus’ theory of the motion of the heavens.  But what seems more valuable is whether Copernicus’ thinking be allowed to seep into an individual’s imagination and influence how they see the universe, and their place in it.  This is necessarily a solo affair.

Street also focuses on this “common purpose”, and does so with the admirable aim of being able to evaluate a university’s rules, laws, policies, etc., with an eye towards whether they advance the common purpose.  There are many kinds of purposes beyond the immediately useful, and education (even in schools of engineering) puts the focus on learning and not earning a living.  This is critical.  Yet, to be educated goes beyond study liberated from the need for a paycheck, it is the achievement of something more and concrete (implied in Corey’s goals of self-understanding).

What is the nature of this good, education?  The dominant mindset is, “education is important because it makes more informed voters, creative employees, competent leaders, tolerant citizens,” etc.  There is no doubt education has these salutary results and is the proximate good to other goods.  However, education itself, having an educated mind, is the goal or purpose; education is intrinsically good.

Sternberg is right in noting Oakeshott uses “purpose” in a rather specific and technical way, making the straightforward mapping of the civil and enterprise association distinction onto universities difficult.  Expanding “purposes” in teleological and functional ways does broaden the meaning and might very well include less specifiable goals/purposes/functions—like for example having the “purpose” of a civil association to be civility.  This might allow for less specifiable goods, like order, or peace, morality, human excellence, or education to qualify as goals or purposes.  And yet, this threatens to collapse the analytic value of the original associational distinction, with value and purpose becoming synonymous.  However, the significance of the distinction might be maintained if, with Oakeshott, we understand liberal education to be a descriptor of both the general endeavor that is shared, and an activity which is necessarily pursued in its specificity (hence the similarity to civil association, a moral practice, a language, among other metaphors Oakeshott is fond of).

When one learns, one learns something in particular; one reads Aristotle’s Ethics, studies the Krebs Cycle, or memorizes a poem.  Yet, in doing so, one also sees the world through another’s eyes, considers the world in terms of human excellence, or chemical causation, or moments of memorable images.   One sees the world in radically different terms—not just to appreciate the variety, but one drinks deeply enough from a handful of wells of self-understanding to both benefit from the cogency of another’s self-understanding and to develop a set of resources to construct one’s own understanding.

So, the adventure is both very concrete and purposive (in the way getting a raise or achieving tort reform might be).  And, one can engage jointly and collectively in this enterprise.  The experience opens-up, however, to become more expansive, more general, and less direct, resembling the sorts of goods civil society tries to secure.  Goods like developing an ability to see oneself in the reflection of one’s cultural inheritance, participating into the conversation of mankind, as Oakeshott puts it, where “liberal learning . . . is an education in imagination, and initiation into the art of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices; to distinguish their different modes of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to this conversational relationship and thus to make our début dans la vie humaine.”[1]

[1] Michael Oakeshott, The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education, ed. Timothy Fuller, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 39.