My colleague Sam Rebelsky holds that the curriculum of an excellent liberal-arts college includes the study of social and cultural institutions. He suggests that my view of the curriculum is excessively classicist.
I concede that it is impossible for me to imagine an excellent liberal-arts college in which the faculty and the students are uninterested in social and cultural institutions. However, I am at a loss to prescribe how this interest should be reflected in the curriculum, except to observe that it is very often useful to study them historically.
In reply, Rebelsky maintains that it is equally important to study them scientifically, whenever possible and to whatever extent possible. This, too, seems to me to be correct.
Vy Barkauskas 1998 suggests that there are other ways in which the study of social and cultural institutions can be integrated into the curriculum:
Social/cultural institutions may be studied as forces which shape our thinking. Our socialization is the lens through which we view our experiences; for example, my point about the American belief in ``winning'' demonstrates how our culture shapes our attitudes. In this case, Americans are generally raised to be competitive in their thinking; American business is a good example of many societal values. However, in some other societies (particularly Asian societies), cooperation is prized. Asian businesspeople often possess extreme loyalty to their company and their coworkers. The worst social faux pas in an Asian business is to single out a member of a team and praise him for good work. The team does the work, not the individual. Anyway, the point is that socialization affects many of the attitudes we take for granted. A true liberal arts student learns to question not just the thoughts she holds, but the thinking process which leads her to think them.
Social/cultural institutions shape the individual's relation to society. As before, a liberal arts student learns to question her thinking process. She also learns to distinguish between beliefs she was raised with and beliefs which she developed on her own. This distinction is an important process in her development of self and her change from teenager to young adult. I think that these institutions enter the curriculum in the sense that each student must have at least some understanding of them in order to form a coherent, individual opinion on an issue.
The realization that many of my beliefs and values were assimilated from the surrounding culture, and that they were often arbitrary, false, or morally wrong, was an important part of my college education, and I suspect that most liberally educated people experience a similar realization, sometimes abrupt, sometimes gradual. In my case, courses in philosophy and literature were the primary occasions of this realization. For students from fundamentalist backgrounds, science and history courses are more likely to be the ones that produce it. So, while I think that the idea advanced in the quoted paragraphs is a good one, it doesn't seem to lead to any different conclusions about the curriculum.
A colleague has objected that my roster omits subjects (sociology, for instance) in which students are from the very beginning confronted with intractable questions that cannot be formulated clearly, resolved by the application of known procedures, or approached by standard methods. He asks whether it is not important for students to encounter such questions and to learn how to keep one's head when addressing them.
I don't know. It seems plausible that students develop a certain fluency of mind by wrestling with intractable problems, and thinking about questions without being able to answer them sometimes keeps one from becoming intellectually arrogant and dogmatic. On the other hand, I have known students to draw from such experiences the disastrous conclusion that answers are infinitely remote and unattainable, and thus to fall into a kind of epistemological nihilism according to which truth is a social construct or an instrument of cultural oppression.
I agree that students in an excellent liberal-arts college will encounter a variety of subjects and a variety of ways of thinking about them, and it is fair to say that my roster of subjects does not fully represent this variety. I would expect students and faculty to have many interests not specifically mentioned in that list; I certainly do. My purpose was to specify the subjects without which no liberal-arts college could be regarded as excellent, not to provide a comprehensive list of all the subjects that contribute to excellence.
created February 2, 1998
last revised February 18, 2001