The Philosophy of the Curriculum-The Need for General ...

General Education and the University CrisisWm. Theodore deBaryfor failing to .impart wisdom to him. We can all be relieved that thecourt upheld Columbia, exonerating it of any contractual obligation todeliver wisdom with its diplomas, but for the student to believe thatwisdom should be a proper goal of education was not wrong. Norwould it be unnatural to expect that general education in particularshould bear much of the burden for continually stimulating and guidingthe search for such wisdom in the university.One unfavorable circumstance of general education in the pastmay have detracted from that effort. Its conduct in the early years ofcollege has associated it with a time in the life of the student whenyoung minds were reexamining their own values and discarding muchthat they had taken on faith before. A skeptical and debunking attitudeprevailed, sometimes consciously encouraged by instructors whofound it easier to put down than to build up. In the next stage of thecollege curriculum such intellectual reconstruction that took placewas in the hands of those who often had made their peace with thesmaller, more manageable world of disciplinary specialization, whosenatural tendency was to isolate problems rather than to relate them.Even among the most articulate spokesmen fo: general education,whatever the other differences among them, there has been a widespreadtendency to define the educational task in terms of training thecritical intelligence, through increasing degrees of conceptual andmethodological sophistication. I do not wish to press the point too far,but in retrospect it seems to me that even Bell's efforts to reform generaleducation by means of so-called "integrative courses" in the fourthyear tended to stress the centrality of method and the handling of concepts-"analyticmodes of conceptual inquiryUg-with relatively littleemphasis on overarching values and ends or on personal synthesis.One can share with him an instinctive distrust for anything that mightclaim to hold out final answers, and I would have no reason to deprecatethe effort at methodological synthesis that he offers as the culminationof the college experience. It does not, however, get at thelarger problem of how we keep body and soul together while the mindengages in such highly refined operations.Though I am still only posing a question and not suggesting thatthere is a single answer to it, I wonder if general education has notbeen vitiated by too heavy a reliance on questioning for questioning'ssake, or perhaps for discussion's sake, without regard to whether it producedany answers. May we not have encouraged a hypercritical attitude,disavowing any high ideals or appreciation of models in the past,and paying respect only to doubt and dissent? Or have I perhaps beenoverexposed at commencement, year after year, to conventional selfcongratulationover the enlightening power of a college educationthrough the hard, gemlike flame of its cool rationality, which has instilledan attitude of irreverence toward all received opinion and deliveredthe graduate from all illusions?I suspect that my own dissent from the supreme value of doubtand dissent will be disquieting to many, who see it as inimical to theskepticism considered so healthy in the life of the university. To me,however, skepticism is healthy only as long as it serves constructiveends and does not itself become a religion. Our recent educational experienceraises the question as to whether an overdose of critical skepticismhas not bred, in reaction, a powerful trend among many studentstoward irrationalism and mysticism, a devaluing of reason and ofthe wisdom that should come from sharing the experience of the past.From skepticism of all received values we have bred a pathetic compulsionto believe in something, anything-a romantic credulousnessplunging headlong into mindless exaltation of direct action or nakedpower, alternating with apathy and anarchy, and so on. Mostconspicuous of all, and in the long run most costly, has been ourfailure to engender a sense of the possibilities for responsible leadershipamong those who enjoyed the benefits of education.Last year, Herman Wouk returned to the Columbia campus for thededication of a Jewish bayit, and he recalled with warm feelings theexhilaration he experienced as an undergraduate there, when his'religious faith and training was challenged, and his thinking stimulated,by the pervasive atmosphere of critical questioning in the university.For him, he said, it resulted not only in a broadening of his horizonsbut a testing and deepening of his religion. Those of us preparedto respect that outcome are perhaps not safe today in assuming thatquite the same process takes place, that there is the same underlyingruggedness of spirit to carry the undergraduate through thatdemanding test. Times have changed, and the burden of inculcatingbasic values or establishing some self-discipline is no longer borne tothe same extent by family or church or secondary school. For the universityto take up all of that burden is not possible, and no one shouldsuffer the misapprehension that I expect general education to do it. Wecannot, however, go on assuming that someone else does it and deliversto us a sturdy student, toughened for the struggle, whose onlyneed is to be disabused of his idealism. That need may indeed remain,but something more will be needed for that idealism to be temperedand finally matured into wisdom.Wouk acknowledged that the threat to the survival of the Jews inthe late 1930s and 1940s had much to do with his own religious development.If I say that today the threat to the whole human race isalmost comparable and might motivate us to a deeper concern for our