Michael S. Roth - Redesigning Liberal Education: Innovative Design for a Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Education

1. William Moner, Phillip Motley, and Rebecca Pope-Ruark
2. Denise S. Bartell, Alison K. Staudinger, and David J. Voelker
3. Isis Artze-Vega, Phillip M. Carter, and Heather Russell
4. Chris W. Gallagher and Uta G. Poiger
5. Michael Reder and Ann Schenk
6. Emily Russell, Susan Rundell Singer, and Toni Strollo Holbrook
7. Laurie Ann Britt-Smith
8. Michael J. Daley, Dennis A. Frey Jr., and Catherine Zeek
9. Mary C. Wright, Maud S. Mandel, Jessica Metzler, and Christina Smith
10. Borjana Mikic
11. Rebecca Pope-Ruark, William Moner, and Phillip Motley
12. Maggie Debelius, Sherry Lee Linkon, and Matthew Pavesich
13. Lisa Gring-Pemble, Anne M. Magro, and Jacquelyn Dively Brown
14. Scott Windham, Andrea A. Sinn, Kristin Lange, Derek Lackaff, Anthony Hatcher, Evan A. Gatti, and Janelle Papay Decato
15. John Bodinger de Uriarte and Betsy Verhoeven
16. Ashley Finley
17. Randy Bass
18. William M. Sullivan
19. Nancy L. Chick and Peter Felten
20. Kristna Moss Gudrn Gunnarsdttir and Meredith Twombly
21. Michael Shanks and Connie Svabo
22. Leo Lambert

Michael S. Roth
President, Wesleyan University

Commentators on higher education like saying that colleges today are much as they were in the Middle Ages, with the sage on the stage facing a docile group of young people writing down what they hope to memorize. However, almost from the start, education has given rise to self-criticism and to efforts at continuous improvement. Sure, there are still scholars lecturing, but the content and the form have evolved as schools dominated by religion have changed into centers of scientific inquiry and as the aspirations of students have transformed from desires to enter the church to desires for invention and entrepreneurship. Whenever there are significant changes in the economy and culture, there are significant pressures on the educational system of the day to adapt to those changeseither to better prepare students to participate in the new ventures or to protect the status quo from the upstarts creating innovation. Today, higher education is buffeted by demands from a variety of perspectives, and this book examines how liberal education is adapting to those demands, their challenges, and their opportunities. Whether through general studies, interdisciplinary programs, or project-based learning, the case studies here show the vitality of liberal education and how it remains pragmatic in the contemporary American context, while the vision chapters outline the possibilities for liberal educations continued relevance.

Of course, liberal education is not just an American idea; its roots extend to the ancient world. In Western traditions going back to the Greeks, a liberal education was to be liberating, requiring freedom to study and aiming at freedom through understanding. The medieval emphasis on the seven liberal artsgrammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomypictured all of them within a framework set either by philosophy/theology or by rhetoric/oratory.

Although today in education we tend to emphasize inquiry as the fruit of these traditions (as if the seeds of modern research were planted with the sympathetic skepticism of the Socratic method), for centuries a liberal arts education was thought to consist in the deepening appreciation of great cultural achievements. A good student would be a person who knew the canons in those fields deemed to contain the finest achievements of civilization (which almost always meant Western civilization). This was a rhetorical tradition into which one was initiated so as to learn the virtues associated with the monumental works; it was not a philosophical commitment to discover truths. Several commentators on liberal education have emphasized how the philosophical and rhetorical traditions have uneasily coexisted in the American context, especially with respect to the humanities.

In contrast with the initiation offered by the rhetorical current, the philosophical stream is skeptical and focused on inquiry and critical thinkingnot an initiation into civilized rites, but rather practice at taking them down a peg. The rhetorical stream is reverential, focused on bringing new members into the common culture. The two approaches have been rechanneled in a variety of ways, giving rise to educational models that serve the whole personto use a phrase popular in contemporary Chinese discussions of liberal learning.

At least since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, these models have been significantly reconfigured in the West, not least because of the challenges that the sciences have posed to either a theologically or a classically oriented education. Inquiry and critique have replaced religion and knowledge of ancient languages as hallmarks of the modern research university, which spread from Germany to the United States in the late nineteenth century. This model of the research university has shaped higher education practices until very recently, though the reverential rhetorical tradition lingers on, especially in core curricula at the undergraduate level. Liberal education often refers to the combination of the philosophical and rhetorical traditions of how we learn as a whole person: we learn how to learn so that we can continue both inquiry and cultural participation throughout our lives. Learning becomes part of who we are.