Is this statement true, false, or uncertain? Explain fully.
"Liberal education implies integration of knowledge. Professors of liberal learning must be well-integrated people. They should avoid narrow specialization in their own discipline: their aim should be to be conversant in many disciplines. Hence their work should always be interdisciplinary, crossing the artificial boundaries set up by modern academia."
A few years ago it fell upon me to become the inflictor-in-chief of assessment upon my colleagues (as chair of the relevant committee). Here I hazard to offer you all a bit of what I learned in my stint on the "other side", focusing on the positive.
Often you hear that liberal education is useful for the business world, perhaps because liberal education does not become obsolete, or because the liberally educated write better. Nay, I say, if Newman is right about liberal education, it is a liberation from foolishness, not primarily a liberation from utility.
In this post I return to the thread of Economics and the Trivium. An important part of an economics curriculum interacts with neighboring disciplines. I suggest that students would be well served by learning how the arguments of those disciplines work, as they apply to economics.
What can we do to encourage the philosophical habit of mind? Short of founding a new university or taking over Administration Hall by storm, what can we do? I would be very interested to hear other people's experiences with reading groups, lecture series, co-taught courses, and so on.
I have been arguing that economic logic focuses on teaching students to construct and evaluate truth and falsity in economic argumentation, while economic grammar focuses on vocabulary and identification. This should help an economics department and the individual instructor decide how to differentiate between Principles and Intermediate courses (see previous post) as well as between courses like Statistics and Econometrics. Most electives fall in the logic category (insofar as the grammatical groundwork has been laid in the Principles sequence).
Perhaps "Economic Logic" strikes you as a scary pair of words. "Thinking like an economist" is the avowed goal of most economics programs (and of a best-selling economics textbook, Heyne, Boettke, and Prychitko 2005), which means both using the vocabulary correctly (as in "economic grammar"), learning to distinguish truth and falsity (as in "economic logic"), and learning to put together persuasive arguments (as in "economic rhetoric").
Then, at what point in the curriculum is economic logic taught? When should it not be taught? What should be the focus of the teacher, the take-away for the student?
The first step in education is to impress upon the student the notion of arrangement from a common center, of rule and exception, of starting from fixed points and of learning by seeing the connection of the newly acquired with the previously learned. Economics is usually taught in precisely that way. The first couple of courses in the economics curriculum introduce students to Economic Grammar.
In Newman’s view, the way that a student acquires this ability to understand the place of things in the universal system, or the significance of a particular sub-field within the discipline, is not by knowing about every subject under the sun or by attending every possible lecture or by taking lots of courses in any order. A shallow and superficial acquaintance (“a smattering”) in many sciences or many topics in not enlargement: the goal of education should be to learn a few things very well, not many badly. In the next few posts I will rely on economics syllabi from a number of top liberal-arts colleges and universities in the United States to lay out how economics can best instill the philosophic habit of mind to its students. This will be done by organizing the curriculum into the trivium.
Economics, contrary to popular belief, is not a practical discipline. It's not intended to make you rich, and we don't have a crystal ball. But precisely because economics is a liberal art—disinterested in practical application—economists easily forget the partiality of their approach. This has made economics simultaneously very successful and very dependent. Its method has been applied with great fruit in many disciplines; and we need the input of other disciplines for our own field. Economics is better studied, then, in a university, in the midst of a universal seat of knowledge that instills the philosophical habit of mind in its teachers and students.
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