Toward a College of Liberating Arts

...Changing neighborhoods every five years or less, knowing only their fathers and mothers as significant adult figures, attending universities where students number in the tens ot thousands, young people want jraleimn In a society where boy scouts cannot go swimming without two life guaids and parental releases, where fast driving, drug taking, draft dodging, breaking and entering, cop baiting are the only ways left to know excitement, many want adventuie (at least a little) In a world where father has to take humiliation from his boss because the evaluation of his worth depends too much on the ambiguities of bureaucratic judgment, where father is boxed in a job for which he no longer has any zest or ambition, youth wants freedom, re, a chance for dignity The concept of college education I am about to offer attempts to satisfy those Utopian demands Being an academic bred, fed, and living amid words, I do not know how long it would actually take to acquire the non-liberal-arts skills in the curriculum I am proposing Furthermore, there are a lot of corporative and teacher-serving myths about how much time is required to learn anything This is really a preliminary plan, and much research would be needed to make it academically and financially viable As a design for mass education, it should not cost more than four years at an average university and, since it does not abandon the notion of the academic major, it would have to maintain the standard courses and laboratories My ideas for a "College of Liberating Arts" and its tentative structure grew out of discussions with seminar students, Israeli educators, and Peace Corps returnees, as well as a study of the French Ecole Poly-techmque and conversations with David Riesman Some of my suggestions have been tried in various experimental situations, and some have probably failed already Yet I think a program of this kind has the potential to enrich the lives of many young people who are finding little of value in the conventional university FIRST OF ALL, the College of Liberating Arts would abolish the class distinction between manual and intellectual labor, for here I must agree with Chairman Mao that the world of the future will not make that differentiation Thus every student would giaduate in full possession of an easily marketable manual craft caipentry, masomy, electricity, automobile mechanics, printing, tv repair, computer pro-gramming, welding, etc Jean Jacques Rousseau recommended this in his Emile in the 1760s because he felt Europe was entenng an age of crisis I am sure that many aristocratic emigres, trying miserably to earn a living by giving French lessons in Coblenz, must have regretted that their fathers had not taken Rousseau's admonition more sen-ously Union licensure may be a problem in some of these trades, but it should not prevent an honest and competent craftsman (and reliability is a problem with many of the counterculture artisans one meets today) from earning a living if the need ever arose The white-collar worker is caught in an apparatus that demands of him—and permits his superiors to exact from him—a greater conformity with the absuid and the demeaning than he would tolerate had he the insurance of a craft to fall back upon A graduate from the College of Liberating Arts should be tree to walk out ot a white-collar job, even a middle-management position, and find gainful employment in a trade where he would have greater autonomy And he might not lose that much in salary Women know this pioblem well, because then lack of confidence in then earning power frequently locks them into marriages that are degrading to their individuality and also, though not so obviously, to that of their husbands Hence every female graduate, too, would possess a skill nursing, group child care (qualifying her to direct a day-care center), laboratory analysis, dressmaking, cosmetology, handicrafts, and of course typing While some of these subjects are taught in high school, in a relatively desultory manner, they are usually shunned by the gills in the college prep track The new college would give women a level of competence in these crafts that would make them less dependent on the traditional professions of teacher and secretary To keep an unused skill available and up-to-date, all alumni would be expected to return periodically for quick refresher courses Graduation would not signify an end to learning Besides the craft in which he becomes professionally proficient, each student would leceive sufficient naming in automobile mechanics to diagnose his own car problems and make all but the major repairs by himself Certainly women, who are the most exploited by garages should know enough about their cars to prevent the kind of fraud that is so common today Given the sizable chunk of the average family's income that goes to transportation the ability to select a new or secondhand car wisely and to maintain it cheaply could probably save the graduate close to $10,000 ovei a 30-year period Students would also learn how to do most household repans Girls would be trained in the art of making their own clothes, in decoiating their homes, in planning their budgets They should be offered instruction in antique furniture, gourmet cooking and wines Usually the monopoly of the upper classes, this knowledge should be available to the masses, for it is an important souice of pleasure in life The College ot Liberating Arts would uphold the fundamental worth of the division of labor by sex, yet recognize that the content of sex roles is not immutable In addition to equipping women with skills that will help them avoid falling into passive dependency, it should seek to raise their status by heightening its students' (male and female) respect foi femininity and feminine values The liberation of American men will not be accomplished by telling them that they must feel free to ciy and run away from danger while women become truck drivers or managers of trucking companies It will occur when American men, especially those from working and lower-middle-class backgrounds, respect the talents of women and appreciate then products Every student at the college would be taught enough elemental y physiology and medicine to qualify him to work as a doctor's assistant or as a public health officer m a developing country He should be familiar with the chai actenstics of the more common infections and diseases as well as the symptoms of dietary deficiencies The women should understand child care and pediatrics sufficiently to determine when to call and when not to call a pediatrician All should be able to recognize the symptoms of mental illness, know the range of treatments available, and have some experience as a psychiatric attendant on a mental hospital ward Whenever possible, these studies should lead to immediate supervised application such as a part-time job in a doctor s office, the emergency room at a city hospital, or a nursery The physical education progiam, including sports and diet, would be designed to help each student learn how to keep his body fit and protect his health It would culminate in a form ot "Outward Bound" survival training to give him confidence in his ability to cope w,th any challenge in the forest, the mountains, the desert, the sea—or the inner city Long-range sailing cruises, mountain climbing trips, scuba diving lessons, and instruction in the art ot self-de-fense would offei practice m survival skills and encourage fraternity This insistence on the value ol physical education does not come from any romantic notion about the fields ot Eton It stems from the belief that for many youths the thrill of adventure and dangei is a necessary part of the development of identity, and that there are constructive ways of providing this kind of experience Moreover, just as some people express themselves most effectively with words, others do so with then hands and their bodies Physical education can be the pie-ferred path tor learning self-disci-pline and self-esteem SINCE a basic knowledge of law is a necessity for survival in modem society, every student would be taught the fundamentals of jurisprudence The graduate should know enough about the legalities of property and contract to act as his own lawyer m buying 01 selling a house or in diafting a lease He should be sufficiently well acquainted with consumer law and product liability to protect himself from fraud In general, he should know when he does need a lawyer and how to choose one who will give him his money's worth Accord ngly...

...Toward a College of Liberating Arts BY JESSE R PITTS I TEACH at a university founded in 1958 with the idea that the growing masses of students in post-Sputnik America needed the best instruction and curriculum conventional higher education could offer In those days, a course of study designed tor the tradition of the cultured gentleman was still the accepted panacea for developing the critical faculties of any youth from whatever social background Professors generally ignored the fact that, even in the elite colleges, what they were teaching was not what was being learned Perhaps 10 per cent of the students—those who aimed at an academic career—did learn the curriculum Others studied those elements of it that fit into the upper and upper-middle-class lifestyles, superficialities about literature and art symbolizing membership in the higher status groups In the classical American umveisity prior to the 1960s, professors lectured while the fraternity-sorority system did the real educating Though the "Greeks' included only about a third of the student body, they set the fashions that most of the "barbarians" tried to imitate Dunng the last decade, with a good assist from professors who had never been asked to any fraternity save Phi Beta Kappa, the "Greeks" lost much oi their undergraduate support and consequently most of their educative function Simultaneously, the faculty became increasingly discipline and graduate school oriented The few who concerned themselves with educating often turned into leadeis or endorscis of the counterculture, with its ideology of drugs, sex, rock music, anti-ahenation and antiestabhshment pio-test The results of their efforts have yet to be fully evaluated, but they have effectively broken down the elan of the traditional university By now it should be obvious that the liberal arts have largely failed to reach students from the lower-middle and working classes, particularly blacks I do not doubt that the liberal arts have an educative value even for those who do not assimilate their methods and their truths They teach certain skills that are extremely useful in white-collar life and, for that matter, in everyday mainage how to be bored politely and yawn with youi teeth clenched, how to hustle for good grades and still remain a buddy, how far to take authority seriously and how to judge what you can get away with (an art commonly called "psyching out"), how much to cheat without becoming a thief, and how a girl can be aseptically sexy with the young instructor The hbeial arts prepare the student to do well the monotonous and the irrelevant, a skill without which no complex division of labor is possible, and I mean that without irony Nor would I deny that occasionally they provide a stunning revelation that reverberates throughout one's being All the same, the most attentive and sometimes single person listening is the lecturer himself In leahty, the professor expounding about Ethelred or The Magic Mountain is often just being a piessure on the student, something to cope with, like a hole in the budget, a difficult neighbor, a nosy mother-in-law, a conceited or lecherous boss What does youth want in the meritocratic age...

...oup discussions and projects These would permit students to focus on issues significant to them and thus encouiage genuine commitment to the material under study The approach is essentially that of Rousseau's dream for Emile, though to follow it literally would require a form of individualized teaching no society could afford The most one can hope is that a discussion gioup of 10 students and one instiuctor will choose to examine a meaningful problem and arrange lectures and readings around it One topic might be Are prisons schools foi cnme9 The group would review the available data on such matters as arrest and conviction, the life pattern of people who are now committed to prison, the postprison experience of cnminals, and the sociology ot prison communities As they proceed, the students would develop the elements of an answer to the question, one that they could debate with another gioup that might take a different point of view In the end, they would covei most of the contents of a standard criminology course, but instead of following a professor's lectures or a textbook's readings, they would be pursuing the logic of the problem on their own initiative In short, they would be learning how to learn The liberal aits, after all, should be liberating, that is, they should permit the graduate to be a free man, capable of making his way wherever his vocation or fate may place him But the traditional liberal arts college is "fit to an unfit fitness," bound to an outmoded curriculum that is 11 relevant to the problems of identity, growth and pieparation for life that modern youth brings to it By offering a new model for higher education, the College of Liberating Arts might eventually have a renovative influence on the high school and junior high The problems afflicting the secondary schools largely result from their attempt to imitate the standards of the prestigious schools of education, which themselves copy from the neighboring hbeial arts college Instead of heaping abuse on the secondary schools, university professois should show the way by putting their own house in order, however painful that may be...

...there would be a course on standard legal proceduie, outlining the stages a law suit goes through, when delay is legitimate and when it is not, how much latitude a lawyer has in responding to the needs of his client It would explain the court system, how trials and appeals are conducted, the laws governing evidence, probate and divorce A seminar on the lawyer as negotiator might be optional The student should learn when and how to challenge a government bureauciat, what sources of information he is entitled to have access tc, and how to exercise his rights as a citizen Oppoitumties could be created for undergraduates to work as legal assistants, court watchers, barliffs, process servers, etc.—in other words, to see the law in operation They could also gain practical experience with legal aid societies In the age of instant polls on virtually everything, it is essential that the student understand the principles of survey research how questions should be asked and how to evaluate the reliability and validity of the results He should be able to detect poorly constructed or misleading polls by analyzing the statistical techniques employed The college would lun a "crap detector' service, assembling and disseminating assessments of various surveys Similarly, it would conduct a critical leview of mass media presentations Student teams could check on the accuracy of selected news stories, reporting their findings in a college bulletin and, it need be, in letters to the editors ot the papeis involved The student would be taught how to lead and view the mass media critically, how to detect bias and allow tor it in the evaluation ot information, and how to judge adveitising As part of its crap detector service, too, the college could compile and distribute ratings ot the prices and services tendered bv stores, lestau-rants, garages, home lepan companies, banks and landloids in the area The American Studies program would consist of courses in sociology, economics, political science, criminology, urban problems, and bureaucratic organization Instiuc-tion in American politics would focus on the structure of power, the roles of Congress and the Presidency, and U S foreign policy To improve the student's understanding of international affairs, a course in levolutionary Marxism would also be required Every student would be encouraged to gain the experience of working in some candidate's campaign for public office, or for some referendum To acqune practical experience in economics, each class might run an investment club, with every member contributing $100 earned during his first year of college and sharing the responsibility tor investigating different coiporations and dead ng about the stocks to be bought To give its students some perspective about the United States, the college would have them live abroad tor a semester, preferably in a country where English is not spoken Before leaving, they would go through a total immersion preparation, conversing, listening to recordings, reading publications, and viewing films in the appropriate language, as well as studying the nation's history, culture politics, and social struc-tuie While overseas, each student would take a job where possible or attend school, concentrating on one facet of the society that particularly interested him factory organization, the courts, family life, the arts, the mass media, or whatever Upon returning, he would write a paper about his experiences, comparing the U S and the visited country Along with these innovations, which would be tor the most part required, the college would offer the standard liberal arts courses on an optional basis, allowing students to pursue a conventional major if they wished Throughout the curriculum, however, the lecture method would be deemphasized m favor of smaller...