Reviving the connected view

...III I without which there is no whole, no center...

...Since at least the time of Descartes intellectuals have instinctively predicated the future upon the demolition of the past...

...Both are expressions of a cultural ideal, which in turn springs from moral sensitivity...

...By all the evidence, we are today at a cyclical low...

...Home Economics departments have traditionally taught the basic skills of sewing and cooking...

...I have in mind, what might be called the existential underpinnings of democratic freedom--a certain substratum of attitudes and expectations, of habits and commitments...

...Ideally, much of the senior year could be given to one or more capstone courses integrating the various disciplines...

...The elitist, ivory tower view of liberal education is of fairy recent provenance...

...Socrates tries to help with an image of a series of magnetized rings...

...Mankind, says Ivan Illich, may wither and disappear because it is deprived of basic structures of language and law and myth just as much as it can be smothered by pollution...

...It is a time for building what someone has called the intellectual stockpile that is necessary for productive professional work later on...

...Few would deny that college education has some impact on student values9 But it is far from a radical impact...

...Perhaps what we need is a moral Sputnik...

...II A second mandate of liberal education is in the realm of value formation...

...It means that students would have to be told that some subjects are indispensable to their education no matter how they might feel about it, or how much they might dislike those subjects...

...One might expect the humanities at least to hold out...

...Yet he graduated with honors...

...The enshrined distinction between knowledge and morality leaves us perplexed about how life should be directed...

...And educators have taken him even more seriously than the poets...

...The most striking feature of the recent history of the humanities in general is the extent to which they have successfully been cast in the objective mold of the "hard" sciences...

...Nor, say other critics, does it guarantee a high income...

...The connected mind is one that has deep tap roots in the collective memory of the race and measures its present possibilities for joy and despair, for achievement and failure against this memory...

...A liberally educated mind develops the ability to reach backwards in time, to identify imaginatively with the past...

...Obviously no one thinks colleges should impose values on students...

...They aim to free the mind from ignorance, the will from bondage and society from tyranny...

...To some extent they do, bobbing like a frail raft in a vast sea of objectivity and value-free methodologies...

...The iconoclastic assumptions underlying our prevailing educational philosophies are future directed and hold the past in low esteem...

...At the same time practical skills ought not to be neglected...

...The liberal arts colleges have been assigned one kind of education while the larger, tax-supported schools have been made responsible for another...

...And he adds, with a turn of the knife: "I believe that education locked into the present matrix ranks amongst the most destructive forces in our midst...

...Teachers who are teethed in these ways during their graduate training come very poorly equipped to teach in liberal arts colleges...

...In one of Plato's dialogues Socrates is "talking to an actor and asks him how he achieves his spellbinding effect on audiences...

...Whatever their motives when they embark upon their education, they soon learn that a heightened moral or political awareness is the mark of a social misfit...

...Whether the subjects taught are subjects of science or the humanities, if the teaching does not lead to a clarification of metaphysics, that is to say, of our fundamental convictions, it cannot educate man and, consequently, cannot be of real value to society...

...There is every reason in our consumer society for them to extend their franchise to the more technological aspects of household economy...

...But we laughed a lot too...

...I grant that to the extent they have been successful, they have been successful in this domain...

...This assumption does not deny the importance of new knowledge and recent discoveries...

...Nowhere in the courses he had taken could one discern anything like a liberal core...

...Education also has significant success in imparting those values that are particularly required in a technocratic society such as tolerance and flexibility9 By the same token, it tends tohave an iconoclastic effect upon such traditionalist values as community and worship...

...Rather he was measuring the many opinions sampled in dialogue against what he profoundly felt...

...I In what follows I want to make some suggestions for the reform of liberal education along three broad fronts...

...G. K. Chesterton made the same point in an interesting way...

...He loved the city, New York, but there was something very Californian about him, wacky and Dionysian...

...Religion once provided such a principle...

...Our slavish dependence on repairmen for elementary services bodes ill for the future of a free society...

...A man I1 Ilwho relished a contradiction as much as Hegel must have, and for a similar reason: it got things moving...

...The hodgepodge of courses that constituted his liberal arts education evinced no sense of Commonweal: 42 connectedness, no principle of integration...

...On all sides the evidence mounts: students can't read, they can't write, they lack elementary mathematical skills...

...They should become, let us say, value alert...

...The moral type our educational institutions are designed to produce is a calculating egoist who can bend rules expertly to self-interest...

...You always had the impression he'd started the lecture on the subway coming uptown, and was smack in the middle of it when he entered the classroom and, without usually alluding to them thereafter, dropped that ill-assorted pile of notes all over the desk...

...The hidden message beneath our present confusions appeals to the ancient troth that the desire for liberty is an elementary impulse of human nature...

...We keep busy9 The work ethic still holds some appreciable place in our scheme of values...

...It is not uncommon to hear them described as nonevaluative disciplines...

...One might conceive of value formation along a spectrum with a negative and a positive pole...

...But, graduates of our best schools have performed ignominiously in the public arena...

...This is generally the case when they come to college and quite often the case when they leave...

...If our ideas are "mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic...

...If we fail here our last line of defense collapses...

...Aristotle distinguished three kinds of knowledge: theoretical, practical and productive-depending on whether knowledge is pursued for its own sake, or as a means to conduct, or as a means to making something useful and beautiful...

...In our present society I suggest that only liberal education can stand Muselike at the head of the chain...

...Perhaps the case for democracy is as weak as the case for liberal education...

...Against this prospect liberal education can erect a restraining wall by driving deep into the mythic substance that forms the human pattern in any age...

...It is a good role of thumb to assume a rather direct correspondence between the quality of education and the quality of political life...

...The iconoclastic assumptions underlying our prevailing educational philosophies are future directed and hold the past in low esteem...

...If something was incongruous, there must be something good about it...

...He was a Catholic edition of the Sufi comic seer, Nasrudin, a mystical Charlie Chaplin9 He would talk, deliberately, in circles, synchronically...

...you'd go to him if you had a child's metaphysical questions, and hungered for really big ideas9 He would take you on a tour of outer and inner time-space, ranging about the whole history Commonweal: 48...

...It has been discovered that a college education is not needed to make large sums of money...

...III Let me make, finally, a third suggestion for the reform of liberal education, this time in the area of skills formation...

...Psychology and sociology, which for many good reasons could lay claim to being humanistic studies, opted in their infancy to imitate the value-neutral methods of the natural sciences...

...I take this as evidence that we do not educate in light of a reasoned cultural ideal...

...We have few reliable criteria for identifying what is genuinely worth pursuing and what not, few measures of argued realism to mark the way, few tested convictions concerning the good, the just, or the beautiful...

...The ultimate value questions remain essentially unchanged: what is the good life and how are we to attain it...

...It takes extraordinary courage and vision to face wave after wave of unformed human substance, thrown at us like armed divisions in an endless war, day after day, year after year, generation after generation9 Each effort in education is, as Eliot said of art, "a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating9 But there is really nothing surprising about the difficulty...

...The actor thinks it has something to do with inspiration...

...And, like Macbeth, we want the future in the instant...

...Historians want to be considered social scientists...

...It stirs up too many vested interests and prejudices...

...Students, and here my own experience bears out what "studies demonstrate, are largely apathetic toward the political process, woefully naive about the origin, history and mechanics of democratic values, and indifferent to the multiple threats to freedom in our time, which in the end are threats to their own freedom...

...The career mania that has overtaken educational policies in recent times is, of course, equally unbalanced...

...Liberal education must integrate all three--what I have called culture formation, value formation and skills formation...

...His books include The New Iconoclasm...

...In this way they are evaluated and eventually accredited...

...Without this vital connection our mental and moral abilities are markedly foreshortened...

...The concept of excellence that prevails in the one will prevail in the other...

...The teaching of literature, as one writer has pointed out, has become a sub-species of cryptography...

...This is education's dimension of ultimacy...

...Some momentous event that would galvanize our moral resources the way the original Sputnik advanced our scientific and technological prowess...

...One uni2 February 1979:45 versify president has gone so far as to make mandatory a competency test for graduating seniors...

...Resistant and elusive at first, it in the end repays our efforts with delight9 Thus it is that so many philosophies have come to 2 February 1979:43 rest in the realm of contemplation...

...The values that are pretty likely to be the outcome of our present academic priorities include, to mention only some of them, competition, driving ambition, individualism to the point of selfishness, middleclass hedonism, unconcern for the commonweal and so forth...

...Education is ultimately the study and formation of the human self and, as Aristotle said, to attain any assured knowledge about the self is one of the most difficult things in the world9 The difficulty is indicative of its importance and it was for this reason that Aristotle placed it in the front rank of human activity9 IN MEMORIAM: ROBERT C. POLLOCK, 1901-1978 A great educator DAVID S. TOOLAN W GREAT educator...

...Governments once provided such a principle...

...College years are a privileged time...

...The truly great intellects possess knowledge, not only of things, but also of their mutual relations...

...It lays one open to charges of authoritarianism and elitism...

...At least they don't remain there for that reason...

...Perhaps the best solution in our present system is a required double major of all undergraduates--one of career preparation and other firmly anchored in an updated version of the trivium and quadrivium...

...No male student should go forth from the ivied halls without basic skills in home maintenance--wiring, plumbing, carpentry, engine repair and the like...

...In other words, they are not academically respectable...

...If not liberal education, then what...

...O UR REGNANT and somewhat sour pragmatism holds value questions to be matters of taste or private intuitions...

...As a result, we are hard put to define and preserve the public good...

...Thus Common weal: 44 viewed, liberal education should be a training in freedom...

...Halved by sexuality, stunted in our evolution, semi-paralyzed by a consciousness of mortality, yet capable of wondrous deeds...

...To ask what kind of person they are trying to turn out is to invite an answer in instrumental terms, one that more often than not comes from the placement office...

...Nor is it a question of trying to reach value agreement9 My understanding of value formation is based upon the following premise: all ideas and intellectual systems take rise from prior value assumptions and have ethical ramifications in society and in individual lives...

...This is in part a reflection of a deeper confusion about the relationship of money to human values...

...But in the main they too are subject to the hegemony of the graduate schools and the inflexible model of rationality they impose...

...For most there is no comparable time when they can attend so fully to acquiring knowledge, developing learning skills, and coming to a disciplined understanding of the human condition...

...This is the full sense of the Socratic dictum that virtue is knowledge...

...From there through students to society at large must flow a magnetic power that constitutes a civilizing principle...

...A college education no longer guarantees basic literacy...

...But by and large it leaves value issues untouched and whole areas of the student personality dormant...

...It is ironic that as our society becomes more knowledge-intensive, our societal goals become more fragmented...

...The truly great intellect," he wrote, "is one which takes a connected view of the old and the new, past and present, far and near, and which has an insight into the influence of all these on one another BERNARD MURCHLAND, a long-time contributor, is a professor of philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University...

...No mind so free, we students judged, could possibly have arisen out of cradle American Catholicism9 So we thanked the rabbis...

...Our last best hope is education liberally conceived...

...I mean his classes always drew a crazy-quilt group, including young and old non-specialists and visiting relatives...

...John Henry Newman makes this point in his The Idea of a University...

...Schools, he said, should turn out students who know something and can do something...

...Even literature--the pillar and foundation of liberal studies--has surrendered to influential critics who have cast a masturbatory shadow over the study of language, disconnecting it from the dialectic of experience and claiming that it is primarily a vehicle for its own structures and internal sufficiency...

...They are then expected to rerun this information through some kind of testing procedure like the objective examination or research paper...

...Conversely, to abandon the task of educating liberally is to abandon the principal means at our disposal for forming and educating a responsible citizenry...

...It means, too, that administrators would have to abandon many of their self-indulgent power games and accept the creative burden of overseeing a more discriminating arrangement of the academic estate...

...The principal reason why we have failed to teach skills is because we have failed to provide the liberal context in which skills can be integrated to larger purposes...

...I'm told the throng at his funeral was comparably diverse, a fitting testimony to this most democratic of men...

...I am convinced that a primary task of liberal education today is to lead students into a thorough investigation of freedom, into the requirements of a democratic ethics, into what might be called the rituals of a democratic faith...

...The democratic imperative places high demands on individual intelligence and maturity but it always implies community and self-sacrifice...

...How steadily do we focus on the most important question of what it means to be 9h uman, on what Pascal called the grandeur and the misery of man...

...But it was not...

...So far as I can determine it emerged sometime in the Renaissance period...

...I had occasion to go over his transcript shortly after graduation and was struck by some rather remarkable gaps in his edt~cation...

...Yes--and seer, oracle, prophet, iconoclast, enchanter, mystagogue, holy fool...

...They are taught, year after year, mountains of facts on the pedagogical assumption that knowledge consists of simple parts, hard blocks of information that can be transferred directly and explicitly from the instructor (usually via the lecture method) to the students...

...I think again of Bill Armstrong (whose name has been changed to protect the guilty...

...You wouldn't go to him for a strict textual course...

...F EW MODERN voices are so wholesome...

...In the many interviews I have had with students over the years, uninspired teaching and dull subject matter are constant complaints...

...It follows from this integrated view that liberal colleges should have healthy components of career education and vocational schools ought not to spare the rod of liberal learning...

...It was Catholics, he felt sure, who would finally rescue Hegel9 But he was far more than an academic9 His classes were theophanies...

...Constant testing of this sort gradually conditions students to the current expectations of the job market and the graduate schools...

...The principal fruit of this frenetic seesaw of innovation and rejection is what is quite likely the most ignorant generation of students in the country's history...

...The future lacks the line of freedom that is clearly written in the past...

...Large sums of money are available for critical studies, commentaries, formal analyses and travel grants...

...Everyone seemed to hear him in their own tongue...

...Their best efforts are given over to converting the natives, that is to turning their students into faint carbon copies of themselves...

...Attending one of his lectures was like an encounter on the road to Emmaus, a pentecostal event9 He had the gift of tongues...

...The intellect does not work well in a vac: uum...

...But it no longer does...

...But, says Chesterton, it is the future which is dead...

...Alfred North Whitehead was one exception...

...But some ages are more golden than others...

...It is generally admitted that what colleges have done best is prepare students adequately along a variety of career tracks...

...For the liberal arts are the arts of emancipation, the free and the freeing arts...

...But once the Antaeus connection to historical ground is broken, the liberal arts float aimlessly in a false element and are easily crushed...

...Yet when I remember him, I think of the most extraordinary catholicity of spirit I've ever met...

...It is just as bootless to say that all education should be career education as it is to claim that it should inhabit a pure air above all practical considerations...

...He was a convert, we'd heard, from Judaism9 I later found he'd become a Catholic while a graduate at Harvard, at a time when that must have appeared intellectual suicide9 But he was a man to defy appearances, a born maverick...

...At the negative pole, one searches deeply into the causes of human alienation and the conflictual situations of life...

...it should tell us what our freedom is and how to use it...

...In the hardnosed professional world to which they aspire and where godfather morality is not merely the stuff movies are made of, such awareness would brand them as hopelessly unrealistic and sentimental...

...It should convey a dramatic sense of what the greatest minds have thought, what the greatest artists have wrought, what the greatest leaders have done...

...On all sides voices are raised to praise "plastic mobility," "open experience," "the apocalyptic imagination," "the destructured self," and so forth...

...Power and acquisitiveness rate high too...

...It means that faculty would have to readjust their allegiances from disciplinary to institutional goals...

...to know truly who one is and the reason why one acts is the good life...

...Students should, in addition, be taught the psychology of choice and made familiar with the techniques of internalizing values9 To choose is to be, said Sartre, 9d rawing attention, with a dramatic turn of phrase, to what has always been one of the linchpins of liberal education9 The point is, liberal education should aim to make value issues central to the intellectual life and to make it clear that a college, like other organizations, is a community of moral agents...

...As such they have become heavily research-oriented...

...In this students can't be altogether blamed for they are responding to what they are taught...

...I don't just mean the formal requirements of a free society like popular elections, due process, free speech and the like...

...Most of the actors in that reverse morality play are growing rich on royalties--or on fees from campus lectures...

...Armstrong's case gave me but one more opportunity to reflect upon the lamentable state of the liberal arts today...

...Few, for example, consider it important to declare their own value stance in the classroom...

...First of all, liberal education should impart the basic elements of a cultural formation...

...But it is becoming increasingly evident that it is a limited and largely delusory sort of success...

...Beyond this it cannot go and yet it must not aspire to less...

...But he was also a soldier, a teacher and a citizen par excellence...

...What is it that causes human ills and forces life's energies into shallow channels...

...If educators incline too much to the former view they produce students who are misfits in the world of work...

...While they fulfilled certain distribution requirements and conformed to what currently passes for the notion of a "well-rounded" education, it was clear that they were chosen pretty much at random...

...Socrates was not a professional academic (he held no degrees and did not attend Plato's Academy...

...But it is not a very satisfactory arrangement...

...But it was not...

...However, it seems to me the charge misses the point...

...Let me try to be a little clearer about what is meant by values here because it is a tricky word...

...But when Socrates presses him on the nature of this gift the actor is unable to give a very clear account of it...

...The situation is widely lamented...

...Philosophy has become notoriously analytic and wordchopping...

...On the one hand, a technological society demands discipline, hard knowledge and achievement...

...Benjamin De Mott has scored the failure of liberal education to teach value discrimination in these words: "The assimilation of all learning adventures to the norms of the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the specialized contribution to knowledge under the model of nineteenth century German scholarship has provided this society with one of the thinnest and most juiceless versions of excellence known to the West...

...But they no longer do...

...In The Aims of Education Whitehead wrote: "There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal and no liberal education which is not technical...

...Let us distinguish the theoretical and practical, he urged, but not erect false barriers between them...

...He put the history of dogma into the perspective of an evolution of human consciousness and culture...

...We have not yet made a very thorough analysis of the social problems caused by making considerable wealth available to the uneducated...

...Though he taught under the auspices of a philosophy department, I've always felt at base he was an American Catholic Hegel, that is, a theologian of history...

...He was putting into practice a technique by means of which he authenticated truth on the smithy of an integrated self...

...We may be invoking a lost and now impossible ideal...

...These would include attitudes of sympathy and cooperation, a sense of restraints and limits, a sensitivity to values and discipline, a desire for excellence, a respect for the common good and attention to duties and obligation as well as insistence on rights...

...The traditional response to this confusion has been an artificial division of labor...

...Students should be trained to detect the value matrix out of which theories emerge and become familiar with how values are formed and operate in society...

...It tells us how to play the game of life with aesthetic dan and ethical f'Lrmness...

...Schumacher plays for keeps and swims like a sturgeon against the modern current in recalling education to its ancient role of promoting metaphysical awareness...

...each "turned on...

...As I write I have before me a report of a values clarification study recently done in a GLCA college9 Students, the report stated, are not generally concerned about major social issues9 The majority of faculty queried agreed that the value dimensions of the various disciplines were little stressed...

...But we would scarcely suspect this from the manner in which our typical curriculums are plotted...

...T he role of education is to unify the self in a condition of harmony with its social and cosmic setting...

...He had taken no history, no philosophy, no English literature, no math, no art or music, and only minimal science (two courses in environmental chemistry...

...Small wonder that it is the most difficult of the human arts, more likely than all the others to fail, to lower its Sights, to sell out...

...The first casualty of this schizoid rationality is a convincing sense of moral obligation and a compelling idea of cultural excellence...

...At the positive pole one considers the legitimate ends of human conduct, those ideas that are indispensable to human fulfillment...

...Future shock can destroy what is human just as much as anything else...

...Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked 9 . .?" Indeed yes...

...With respect to our technological imperatives and corporate goals we are tough-minded and demanding...

...He was by trade a stonecutter...

...Education must impart both technique and intellectual vision...

...We often talk of the past as though it were dead...

...When we study the human situation in depth and at length we can find reason for great joy...

...indeed its present conception of education as narrowly cognitive, value-free and careeroriented must be substantially revised...

...No one would ever accuse us of being lazy for we multiply problems faster than we can solve them...

...But the alternative may in the long run be not only equally painful but disastrous as well...

...However important these are (and they are indisputably important), they lend themselves too readily to mystification...

...Thus one can defend the argument that education is our greatest moral resource9 Like other resources it can be exhausted, squandered and polluted...

...The premier assumption of the liberal arts is that it is intrinsically worthwhile to know the great ideas and deeds that shaped the past and shape us...

...and FATHER DAVID S. TOOLAN, S.J., teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Canisius College in Buffalo...

...As Jefferson put it: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and never will be...

...Beholding this sorry sight we quite naturally come to think that the solution to all our problems, the finest ideals and values, lie somewhere in the future...

...Bowen also noted that the college educated are not notably happier than others...

...As Howard Bowen pointed out in his recent Investment in Learning: "College seemingly.does not have a marked impact on attitudes of altruism and philanthropy, leading to kindness, sympathy, unselfishness, sociability, or friendhness toward other individuals...

...When we consider this dilemma closely it becomes clear that two logically incompatible principles are at work in our culture...

...From this point of view we may say that a principal goal of a liberal arts education is, as a poet has put it, to build a memory house...

...If they err on the side of narrow vocational education they do an equal disservice to their students, all too often educating them for jobs that do not exist or preparing them badly for jobs that do exist...

...They have, it is claimed, successfully trained students in the basic skills required for vocational performance...

...Until we overcome this crisis, it seems to me, all talk to the effect that we are liberally educating our youth is mere posturing...

...Thus, when he took a stand as he did most eminently against his accusers, it was one secured not only by 2 February1979:47 the soundest of arguments but also one that was consonant with his ulidivided personality...

...To grasp adequately any idea or ideology is to grasp the motivational bedrock upon which it rests...

...At the head of the series is the Muse from whom flows a powerful current through the actor to the audience...

...Vietnam could have been such a Sputnik...

...Here again a historical perspective is helpful...

...They fall outside the pale of rational discussion and cannot be tied to any stable canons of judgment...

...Make it new," Ezra Pound advised the poets...

...But we sit loose on value issues...

...Socrates stands as a classic embodiment of this ideal, an incomparable example of a man living excellently...

...Forster's magical Hindu caves--dizzying...

...W HAT WE ARE confronted with here is a crisis in academic authority, in the dual sense of determining the proper ordering of subject matters and then enforcing that order...

...When we look at what men did," he says, "we are looking at what they freely chose to do...

...The value neutrality and schizoid rationality that pervade academia translate into student attitudes of political inertia, cynicism and ignorance...

...This human datum is the gravamen of any brief for the liberal arts...

...The house of knowledge must be built upon new foundations...

...Finally, it means that society at large would have to alter radically many of its present expectations...

...To ask in these circumstances whom the humanities humanize or the liberal arts liberate is to ask meaningless questions...

...It is good to remind ourselves from time to time that democracy is an educated state rather than a natural one...

...There is a long-standing confusion in American society about the relationship between career education and liberal education...

...And faculty aren't there to make them better...

...We have affluence and technology and are knee deep in a sensate culture...

...Education may be likened to stage directions...

...l do not think here of an abstract or merely private freedom, but of concrete political freedom as well...

...When he went about testing his fellow Athenians--in the market places, on the playing fields and on the couches of late night symposia--relentlessly questioning and cross-examining them, he was not merely staging an intellectual acrobatic act for the amusement of youth...

...I I tive that alone can make work an enriching human experience...

...Students don't come to college to become better persons...

...It is the most worthwhile subject for study of all...

...The kinds of ideas that fill our minds, E. F. Schumacher argues, determine the quality of our experience...

...The problem in an affluent society is not how to make money but how to spend it wisely...

...Students graduate by the thousands each year from our colleges without ever having seriously investigated these matters...

...So they learn to play it cool (cynicism about the public interest is one of the first signs of this posture) and keep their eye on the main chance...

...For the most part, education merely reinforces the values students already have, at least in a latent state, when they come to college...

...The recent history of educational theory is a veritable junk heap of discarded ideas and experiments...

...Watergate could have been such a Sputnik...

...But this has always been to some extent true...

...Let us have done, they proclaim, with the old centered notions of coherence and structure...

...Afterwards, you knew what Hegel meant when he called cosmic history a bacchanalian revel in which not a soul is sober...

...I confess I don't see any other candidate for the position...

...We often honor such a type by calling him "adaptable," but our euphemisms do not conceal the fragmentation of personality that is inevitably the price that must be paid for lack of consistency and principle...

...It may be, as many believe, that America now lacks a civilizing principle...

...I have a specific suggestion in this respect...

...Freedom is the core value of the liberal arts tradition...

...Democracy and education make a common demand upon us...

...We do not seriously raise the question of academic authority primarily because it is an unpleasant subject...

...But how seriously do we taint the good life and inquire into the modes of human happiness...

...We are, after all, a most strange species...

...To a linear mind, it was sometimes like entering one of E.M...

...But when we consider what men will do, we cannot consider what they will choose to do...

...In either case they deprive them of the broader perspeci i i " . . . liberal education should aim to make value issues central to the intellectual life and to make it clear that a college, like other organizations, is a community of moral agents...

...It was not only truth but his truth...

...On the other hand, the requirements of a democratic ethos are slack and random, measured softly against what the situation will allow...

...The past moves on living lines whereas all futurism must be a sort of fatalism for it cannot foresee the "free part" of human action...

...There has probably never been a golden age of the liberal arts...

...The ethical imperative implicit in such pronouncements is that we must renounce belief in the possibility of gaining any reliable purchase on the continuity of human experience...

...Committees have proliferated to study the problem...