Lehrman American Studies Center

All too often junior faculty, apprehensive about their first foray into the classroom, are advised to consider their audience, to tailor the message to a classroom increasingly populated with students whose formative experiences and frame of reference are wholly foreign to those only a decade their senior. "Make it relevant" these assistant professors are told. "Connect with the students." And so they labor to keep up with popular culture, or to incorporate the latest technological bells and whistles in the classroom. They become entertainers rather than educators.

But education, especially liberal education, is serious business. It is education in being an adult, in being a thoughtful, articulate, productive member of a larger community. The inscription on the gates leading into Hampen-Sydney reads, "Huc venite iuvenes ut exeatis viri," which loosely translates as "They enter as children but leave as adults." Liberal education is inappropriate for children, except in that it is an education that teaches how to move beyond the childish.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul wrote, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." The Greeks, as always, have captured this notion best and most elegantly. Their term for this maturity is spoudious, or "seriousness." The spoudious is the particular province of the adult. It is the defining quality of the adult. It is the essence of a liberal education.

But being serious does not require us to be dull and boorish. Shakespeare was witty, even though he often made the most serious of topics his subject. Aristophanes was rude and raucous in his very serious attack on the philosophic life. And though he would blush to be included among the ranks of Shakespeare and Aristophanes, Paul Cantor points out the serious side to The Simpsons, Star Trek, The X-Files and professional wrestling. The spoudious professor is the one who recognizes the importance of the enterprise and the role that he plays in encouraging students to become spoudious themselves. Seriousness of purpose does not prevent us from incorporating references to popular culture, as Cantor does. Nor does it prevent us from making effective use of information technology in the classroom. What it does require however is the constant recognition that technique is not an end in itself, but is instead in service to the goal of liberal education, namely the development of a serious adult.

Student evaluations of instruction bear out the importance of substance as well as form. Yes, it is true that professors who are funny earn better evaluations than those who are less entertaining. Yes, professors who are tall, handsome and fit fare better than their opposites. But students are quick to recognize when an instructor is shallow. They object to being pandered to, to a professor who tries desperately to relate to them, without trying to educate them. They demand to be treated seriously. And they deserve it.

Tags: Education