By Thaddeus Kozinski, July 13, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
How to evaluate a liberal-arts college's teaching excellence? As I see it, it must strike the right balance between philosophical questioning and the existentially open mindset this requires, and religious and metaphysical truth, which must constitute the institutionally embodied telos of the college, for truth is the telos of the mind, and truth about God is the telos of this telos, as it were.
The first criterion for evaluation is the rigor and sophistication with which the college trains the student in the liberal arts. How well does the particular college teach, and not just give the appearance of teaching, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and dialectic; history, mathematics, and philosophy? The second is the rightness of the end, purpose, or telos for which the liberal arts are taught, around which they are hierarchically integrated, and in the light of which the pedagogy is ordered.
Excellence or rightness in either of these criteria by itself does not make for excellent teaching, for both together are required for the effective teaching of the liberal arts. Taught without sufficient rigor, the liberal arts become jejune exercises in sentimentalism or self-expression; taught without the right telos, they become sophistical and rhetorical skills to gain power for oneself and over others, one the one hand, or mere tools for the "vastly more important" art of praying to God, on the other. The latter is religious fundamentalism, the former is secular fundamentalism. The ability to think clearly and accurately about reality so as to be capable of knowing the truth is the point and purpose of the liberal arts, and when this end is eclipsed, ignored, or denied, through either religious fanaticism or power-pragmatism, the liberal arts lose their character as true arts.
The need for rigor is easy enough to see, but determining the right telos, securing the proper integration of the liberal arts around this telos, and recognizing whether a particular college has it all put together right is a bit more obscure. One studies the liberal arts because they are necessary to provide us with a clear and comprehensive understanding of the world in which we live, and the capacity to think about reality accurately and act accordingly for the fulfillment of our nature. This intellectual understanding can and should lead eventually to the securing of material and worldly goods, like wealth, prestige, practical skills, and reputation, goods constitutive of and necessary for our temporal vocations and careers. Yet, we must remember that the study of the liberal arts is first and foremost an activity good in itself.
Whatever the worldly prestige of the liberal-arts school, no matter how proficient the professors and sophisticated the rigor with which the liberal arts are taught, if the right telos is absent, they will be taught without the proper orientation and integration, and so they will not be taught well. The liberal arts are ends in themselves, but they are not all equal: grammar is ordered to logic, grammar and logic are ordered to rhetoric, the trivium is ordered to the quadrivium, all seven liberal arts are ordered to philosophy, and philosophy itself is ordered to and informed by revealed theology. In turn, theology must be fecundated, enlivened, purified, and penetrated by philosophy and dialectics—with St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae as the model—indeed by all the liberal arts, else the queen of the sciences become rigid, dogmatic, graceless, and fundamentalist—in a word, anti-liberal.
Nevertheless, simply having the right theological telos does not guarantee the effective teaching of the liberal arts. That which is “lower” than theology can be glossed over and given short-shrift due to a fanatical religious zeal leading to a theologically totalitarian mindset. If either Socrates or Christ is banished from the liberal-arts college, the liberal arts will suffer, for an imbalanced theological totalitarianism or dictatorship of relativism will arise to supplant the loss. Both extremes display an anti-dialectical, reactionary, “answers without questions” stance, whether the answers are the true ones of Divine Revelation or false ones of some secular ideology. Such a college, if Christian in affiliation, may offer true answers, but at the expense of the dialectical, questioning, Socratic ethos (see Neil Postman’s work) that is indispensable to render true answers the answers to real questions.
So, how to strike the right balance between dialectical questioning and dogmatic answering, between seminar and lecture, between Socrates and Christ? "Dialectical traditionalism" seems a good term with which to start a discussion of what the right synthesis is and how best to obtain it personally and institutionally.
Lee Trepanier on Jul 13, 2009 at 9:20 pm
It's a difficult balancing act between teaching students liberally and not slipping into philosophical relativism. However, I think the other error, which you accurately refer to as "answers without questions," is a more common one for religious-dominated and conservative-oriented educational institutions: the supplanting of liberal education with dogmatic ideology (whether secular or religious). I would be curious how one navigates this problem at such institutions, especially since I don't teach at one.