What's so Liberating About the Liberal Arts?

The intended audience of the "About Trinity" section on the Trinity College Web site seems obvious: students and parents who are considering the prospect of coming to our school. Consider the last sentence on that page, which states, "The accomplishments of Trinity College students, faculty and alumni continue to demonstrate the relevance - indeed, the necessity - of an excellent liberal arts education." They do not say, "The accomplishments of your peers, teachers and people who graduated from here before you.". Where is the "About You" section? Whom or what do I consult to figure out what this education intends to do for me?

What bothers me is that the "About Trinity" section seems to assume that Trinity students will inherently know why "an excellent liberal arts education" is a "necessity." I often hear people tell me that a liberal arts education is important because "A liberal arts education teaches you how to 'think.'" This sounds nice, but I am afraid I have no idea what that means. I am still not sure "how" these classes are really trying to make me "think."

Many of the humanities departments at Trinity (i.e., the non-science/mathematics majors, not just the departments whose courses satisfy the "humanities" requirement) tell us they will teach us to think "critically." The word "critically" implies the ability or tendency to point out errors and flaws. I may not devote sufficient attention to the lectures I have heard in humanities courses, but it simply does not seem true that my humanities professors are trying to make me think "critically" about what they want me to learn.

Consider philosophy, a field of study that seems "humanities" in the truest sense. I doubt that a philosophy professor will assign an essay in which students have to point out the errors or flaws of Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia or Heidegger's Being and Time. Of course, this is okay, because understanding these texts is hard enough, so professors should not expect their undergraduate students to point out flaws in the authors' reasoning. It seems like a more honest answer to my question, "What are you trying to teach me to think about" is: "I am trying to teach you how to understand the thoughts of other people."

The science departments espouse a similar "critical thinking" mission. The final paragraph of the "Overview" section of the Physics department reads, "like other fields of study in the liberal arts, a physics education teaches critical thinking that can be used in virtually any situation." I was under the impression that the thrust of a physics class is to understand physics, not criticize what it has to say.

When I am in a mathematics course, I find myself desperately trying to understand the course's content. I would never dream of criticizing calculus. Thankfully, my professor never asked me to point out the flaws in the methods that mathematicians use to approximate definite integrals. My philosophy professors and my mathematics professors taught me how to understand the course's content, not how to critique it.

Once again, this makes perfect sense. Undergraduates do not have the level of education required to criticize the thoughts of people like Newton, Kant, Jacques Barzun, Georges Cantor, James Joyce, Karl Marx, Julius Axelrod, or Niels Bohr. Any attempt made by undergraduates to criticize the thoughts of these thinkers (yes, I do hear attempts from time to time) sounds unpleasantly contrived and precocious.

The reason for this seems clear: in order to effectively criticize anything, we have to make sure that we actually understand what we seek to critique. I may be alone in thinking this, but it seems like the real reason this "liberal arts education" is a "necessity" is that we are learning how to understand.

The common adage, "Everyone is a critic" seems true enough to me. Criticizing is easy. Understanding, however, is tough and requires rigorous training; we undergo this "rigorous training" everyday in class. If all we know how to do is think "critically" we will fall into the trap of thinking that everyone but us is wrong.

David Foster Wallace delivered a speech at Kenyon College (a school whose "About" section might as well be Trinity's with "Kenyon" inserted every time the name "Trinity" appears) in which he explains what's liberating about the liberal arts: "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over [.]. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the 'rat race' - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing." A liberal arts education should liberate us by teaching us how to understand what other people have to say, not how to criticize them and make ourselves the center and guarantor of all that is "right."