By Gabriel Martinez, Sep 1, 2009 in Musings
Often you hear that liberal education is useful for the business world (I say this with purposeful irony). Sometimes it’s claimed that the reason is that, unlike specialized skill, liberal education does not become obsolete, so it’s a good investment. Others claim that liberally educated men of business are invaluable to their jobs because they write better, or because their utterances are studded with learned quotations. Newman would have sighed at the first suggestion; he would have agreed with the second, but only as a beginning step; and he would have railed in disgust at the last.
The way I understand Newman (and I would love to be corrected if I am wrong), he sees liberal education as a liberation from foolishness, not primarily as a liberation from utility. A liberally educated person, for Newman, has the ability to place events and facts in their proper place in the grand scheme of things. The liberally educated economist (or political theorist, or theologian, or philosopher) knows what he knows and what he doesn’t know; he knows the boundaries between disciplines and knows how to adjudicate between truth and truth.
The combination of knowing what we know in our own field of specialty, of knowing our science’s place among others, and of knowing whom to rely upon in the field of our ignorance is what Newman calls "the philosophic habit of mind," the real fruit of a university education (cf. Idea, 459-461), the mental habit of knowing when to rely on one’s approach and when on others’, of spotting mistakes and biases in partial advances, and of seeing the real overlap hidden under superficial disagreement.
Newman’s antidote against becoming "absorbed and narrowed" is not that we should pursue a multiplicity of disciplines until we possess a super-general knowledge. Acquiring more knowledge does not give us, by itself, the intellectual resources to put our science in its place. The "science of sciences" is simply and nobly "training the mind to be accurate, consistent, logical, orderly . . . a result of learning to think properly" (Ker 1990, The Achievement of John Henry Newman, 8). Perhaps paradoxically, one learns to think properly largely in the pursuit of one’s own discipline.
Conversely, an illiberally educated person (say, a philosopher, historian, economist) doesn’t know the connections between his particular approach and that of others. So he prattles on about anything, as if he knew everything. Or he is surprised and perplexed constantly, not being able to interpret news or facts within a system.
The reason why liberal education is useful in the "world" is that it gives us a desire to understand the unexpected. It makes us yearn for an interpretive key, a system of relations that gives meaning to facts. A businessman needs the ability to understand the whole and to not be surprised by dashing paradoxes. He needs to have the mental habit to turn data into information, and information into knowledge.
A fragmented education teaches you about a bit of this and a bit of that, and connects nothing: worse, it gives the student the impression that nothing needs to be connected, that everything can be wonderful and surprising and intelligible by itself. Instead, a businessman—and a scholar with the philosophical habit of mind—is hungry to understand, to fit every bit into the whole.
