The Aim of a Liberal Education – Emphasis on the Personal at the Expense of the Societal?

David Brooks, the well-known op-ed columnist for the New York Times, recently gave us pause with a piece called “What Life Asks of Us.” Brooks begins by citing a Harvard faculty committee report from a few years back that offered the following purpose of education:

“The aim of a liberal education is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

Brooks goes on to summarize the report’s implications:

“The report implied an entire way of living,” noted Brooks. “Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.”

Brooks offers that this approach is “deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness.”

Institutional Thinking

Brooks contrasts this current notion with “another, older way of living” that was discussed in a book by the political scientist Hugh Heclo called “On Thinking Institutionally.” In citing such a focus, Brooks almost hearkens back to Kennedy’s call in the early sixties.

“We are not defined by what we ask of life,” writes Brooks. “We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.”

And those institutions are crucial to Brooks. They provide “certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do.

“New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of.”

Brooks then goes to Heclo directly to offer:

“In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

Reverence for Institutionalists

Brooks is no fan of our modern culture, the one described in that Harvard faculty report.

“The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations,” writes Brooks. “There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.”

And this notion is so important to the writer:

“I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most,” Brooks adds. “Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.”

He closes with the following support for institutional thinking:

“Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

“But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.”

Different View

Over at Brian Barrington’s Blog, little reverence is expressed for Brooks’ thoughts. Barrington sees Brooks as offering nothing more than the traditional conservative line.

He goes on to note some of our prior institutional practices that were rightly questioned: slavery, the right of women to vote, and a time when child labor was an effective way to reduce factory costs.

Institutionalists would be “telling us that women should get back in their kitchens where they can be happy,” writes Barrington, “or else it will be the end of civilization as we know it. They would have been telling us that the women they most admire are the ones who stay in their kitchens where they do the work that gives meaning to their lives.”

Barrington makes some great points. Clearly, many of our most positive societal changes have come from times when individuals have in fact examined life from the outside and subsequently called into question some existing institutional behaviors, if not those institutions themselves.

Personal vs Societal

And yet we are reminded of the fundamental notion of institutions: “structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals …. identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions, and with the making and enforcing of rules governing cooperative human behavior.”

That definition, along with the premises that Brooks set forth, is precisely why his op-ed piece gave us such pause. It reminds us of Bill Bradley’s notion that the biggest challenge we face is that neither of our political parties offers a philosophy that fits our current world.

We cannot so easily dismiss what Brooks notes. It is important to ask, do we see ourselves “as debtors who owe something” or as “creditors to whom something is owed.”

There is also great merit in our young people learning that “there will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.”

At the same time, we have great concern that the emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness is in fact undermining our fundamental need for cooperative human behavior.

Somehow, we must find a proper balance between the two notions.

Which leads back to the fundamental question, what should be the aim of education, liberal or otherwise?

Flickr photo courtesy of DoubleSpeakShow.