| Introductions are typically written after the factwhen the body of the book, and usually its conclusions, have been fully formed. In this, as in other respects, this introduction and the pages I hope will follow it are atypical. As I sit here with a blank screen, if not a tabula rasa, really not knowing how or whether this experiment will succeed, the most I can do is describe my idea of what is supposed to happen in the sequel, and so offer something like a prophecy, though without benefit of foresight, or even hindsight, about how it will finally work out. |
| Several years ago, while dreading what promised to be yet another acrimonious committee meeting on some basic policy issues in liberal-arts publishing, I thought it might be profitable, as well a good deal more enjoyable, to step back and get a little perspective on the issues of the moment. My idea was to reread some of the major statements in Western philosophy of education, especially those pertaining to liberal education in general and the humanities in particular, with a view to rethinking their nature and purpose. I consider myself a humanist, though that means little more than I teach in an English Department in a College of Liberal Arts. As for anything more specific about what the humanities, the liberal arts, or a liberal education are or ought to be, however, I confess to being largely at a loss; and I suspect that most other people, including those not sharing my confessional propensity, are just as much in the dark. |
| Of course, like them I have at my disposal a number of less than enlightening definitions and rationales, such as "a liberal education broadens your horizons" or "teaches critical thinking." These can be trotted out whenever there are students to be proselytized, parents to be reassured, or legislators to be squeezed. But such commonplaces now strike me as threadbare and empty, as well as vague and quite possibly wrong. I find little comfort in them; and for someone who considers himself a humanist, the absence of anything to replace the platitudes is even further discomfiting. |
| My idea, then, was to find out what people used to think about liberal education, to see whether their notions have any more specificity and credibility than the bromides that currently pass for rationales. Especially now, when shrill cries of "Western Civilization under Attack" |
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