815 North Broadway
Saratoga Springs,
New York, 12866
SKIDMORE PHONE
518-580-5000
Liberal Education in Context by Philip A. Glotzbach
Liberal education is a journey, not a destination.
This journey begins with a commitment to truth-seeking that is
modeled by the faculty, who make it their responsibility to inspire
a similar commitment in their students. In exploring the breadth
of liberal learning, students gain familiarity with the different
ways of interrogating the world, creating knowledge, and making
meaning that are embodied in the various academic disciplines and
art forms represented in the curriculum. And today they especially
need to become sophisticated consumers of electronic information.
In doing all this, students learn to appraise the worth of an idea
or an artwork independently of the identity of its author. To resolve
the complex, multi-dimensional problems they will encounter throughout
their working lives, our graduates will need the flexibility of
mind to draw upon insights and analogies from many different disciplines
at once. To cope effectively with the increasing pace of change
in what Peter Vail describes as the perpetual whitewater of
today's world, they must truly be prepared "to continue their quest
for knowledge."
A liberal education leads students to a deeper
understanding of the social nature of their own humanity, an understanding
that entails an equal recognition of the humanity of all other
persons with whom they share this small planet. All of us who live
in the 21st century -- from young persons just entering adulthood
to those of us with a bit more life experience -- need to be adept
travelers in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, global
milieu that scarcely could be imagined even a decade ago. Perhaps
most importantly of all, students must learn that there are
situations that call upon us to invoke moral categories and stand
behind the ethical judgments we make. As part of their development,
therefore, undergraduates should be calibrating their own moral
compasses. It is not the charge of a college to provide its students
a set of ethical values ready-made for them to adopt. However,
it is very much the charge of a serious liberal arts college such
as Skidmore to demonstrate the need for moral decision-making,
to help students critically explore available ethical frameworks,
and to empower them to make informed choices among them or create
new ones. In sum, a liberal education provides young persons entrée
to the accumulated wisdom of all previous human generations, and
in so doing ensures the preservation and extension of that intellectual
and cultural heritage for generations yet unborn.
But we need to say more to capture the full
significance of this enterprise. For at its core liberal education
is not just about transforming the lives of individual students
but about transforming -- or better, saving -- the world. The concept
of salvation invoked here should be taken less as a religious
allusion than as a metaphorical acknowledgment that the fate of
the world now rests in our own hands, and most especially in those
of successive generations of our students. Our world has need of
salvation to the extent that it still contains ignorance, needless
suffering, and social injustice. Proof that this is the case, unfortunately,
abounds in the form of
repressive, tyrannical governments,
the on-going destruction of large
segments of the global ecosystem,
the ravages of disease -- from new
threats such as the growing AIDS epidemic in the developing
world (and its resurgence in the developed world) to familiar
maladies such as malaria (which still today afflicts approximately
300 million people world wide and kills approximately 1-3 million
children each year),
the continuing repression and exploitation
of women,
a widening global gap between prosperity
and poverty (UNICEF reports that nearly 18 million children
live in poverty in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republic
alone; at the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development
it was reported that 2 billion people lack access to basic
sanitation), and
as emphasized so painfully by the
events of September 2001 and so many other acts of terror,
deep reservoirs of misdirected anger and hatred.
Such conditions are encountered all too frequently,
both around the globe and within our own privileged country. Clearly,
we inhabitants of the new century still face an enormous collective
challenge.
Colleges and universities best serve the cause
of humanity by helping students engage the two broadest dimensions
of these global challenges: First, there is the pressing need to
achieve ecologically sustainable patterns of economic development
world wide, creating the conditions of prosperity while avoiding
potentially catastrophic (and possibly irreparable) damage to our
planet's precious ecosystem. Second, we need to create the political
conditions that foster international, national, and individual
security while avoiding the Orwellian nightmare of governmental
repression that is justified by appeal to external threats. Realizing
these goals will require not only courageous and informed leaders
but also, and perhaps even more importantly, intelligent, creative,
and engaged citizens -- persons who will make meaningful differences
by living what Robert Coles has termed lives of moral leadership.
In short, our fundamental task is to educate both the mind and
the spirit: to help our students become global citizens who understand
the imperatives of their time and care enough to act on them.
To do so we must balance an unflinching awareness
of our challenges with the tools of hope. Understanding the significance
of individual contributions helps us not be daunted by the scope
of the task. The Jews Oskar Schindler saved from Hitler's madness
made this point by presenting him with a ring fashioned of gold
pried from their own teeth. They engraved the ring with a Talmudic
verse that translates as "He who saves a single life saves the
world entire." This aphorism eloquently expresses a basic human
truth that gives meaning to our work as teachers, parents, administrators,
staff, trustees, and students. For at its best, a liberal arts
college prepares its graduates to advance this work of saving the
world entire, one life at a time: increasing the store of human
knowledge, attacking social problems, creating works of art that
lift the human spirit or reveal previously unseen aspects of the
human condition, parenting well, increasing our collective wealth,
and through service giving back to the human community more than
they take for themselves. The American educator Horace Mann expressed
this point succinctly: "Be ashamed to die until you have won some
victory for humanity." The best liberal arts colleges prepare and
inspire their students to strive for these crucial victories.
These values might appear abstract, but
in fact they are both concrete and enormously practical. A high-quality
liberal education provides the cognitive skills and emotional
maturity required to excel in both the workplace and the polity
of the 21st century. Most importantly, it offers the personal
resources needed to live a sustainable life as a moral being
in a world where the ethical sign posts periodically seem to
have been knocked flat. The presidency of a national liberal
arts college such as Skidmore is truly a bully pulpit. Although
one must resist the urge to preach, it remains the president's
responsibility, from time to time, to remind both the college
community and world at large just why such institutions exist.
Creative Thought Matters.
Skidmore College · 815 North Broadway · Saratoga Springs, NY · 12866