In Praise of Conversation
by
Ian Johnston
Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo,
British Columbia
[This document is in the public domain, released July 1998]
In a recent edition of Harper’s,
Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia, laments the
impoverished intellectual climate of post-secondary education. His analysis
rounds up all the usual suspects, including many factors in the surrounding
culture (e.g., television) and within the university (e.g., soft grading,
consumerism). The result is bored students, whose academic life lacks
intellectually energizing debate which might challenge a complacent endorsement
of a superficial status quo. Liberal Arts education, according Edmundson, is in
big trouble.
Anyone familiar with
what goes on in Liberal Arts departments will probably heave a sigh of
agreement in many places. Still, I do have a reservation or two before signing
on, mainly because Edmundson’s analysis, like so many similar indictments,
spreads the blame very widely, invoking factors about which it is very
difficult for anyone to do anything immediately effective, but fails to take
into account what stands right at the heart of the problem, namely, the
dynamics in the classroom--something much more directly under the control of
those applauding such jeremiads. There may be little one can do about, say, the
deleterious influence of television, the ideological confusion in Liberal Arts
departments, or widespread public cynicism about politics. But these factors
may be less immediately important than something apparently more mundane, the
daily activities that go on in Liberal Arts courses under the direct
supervision of the complaining professor. Before we surrender to some cosmic
despair about our campuses, it might be in order to consider how much we
ourselves might be contributing to the malaise or at least failing to address
it intelligently.
What Edmundson
desiderates so much on university campuses is intellectually stimulating
conversation about important issues, the sort of continuing interchange through
which much of what is most educationally valuable in life takes place. His
complaint invites at least one important question: To what extent does the
Liberal Arts classroom, including his own, foster such conversations? It’s a
legitimate question, because if the courses themselves do not create and
sustain such conversations, then where are the students to acquire those
interests and skills which he finds so absent?
For it’s all very well
to think that the specific skills that students need to engage in continuing
intellectual debate are something they should automatically bring with them
from their previous education or something that they can easily pick up from
the surrounding culture. So if they don’t have the
ability, then the fault must lie out there somewhere, among all the usual
sources of intellectual mediocrity on and off campus. There may be a more
obvious answer, however: students may be unable to carry on as Edmundson would
like simply because they have never had the chance to learn how to do it. For
educationally valuable conversations do not just happen. There has to be an
appropriate forum, and students need to practice a range of skills in
listening, thinking, speaking, analyzing, and so forth; they need to develop a
certain self-confidence and an ability to interact with others, capabilities
which come only from practice, in order to contribute intelligently and to
learn from the experience. Hence the obvious response: What are Liberal Arts
courses doing to foster the conditions and activities necessary to provide what
is required?
The short answer is not
very much. In fact, they are, as often as not, part of the problem. For the
Liberal Arts undergraduate the curriculum and the institutional arrangement of
the timetable and the classroom not only do little to foster intelligent
conversation, but often seem deliberately designed to inhibit it in every way
possible: large class sizes, a fragmented curriculum, a pedagogy that encourages
(or at least does not discourage) passive listening and periodic regurgitation,
and so on. Above all, the distribution of power in the standard classroom
tacitly but effectively encourages students to keep quiet and anonymous.
Students quickly learn
that in the undergraduate classroom the professor is all-powerful. The
professor organizes the curriculum, sets the agenda day by day, controls the
delivery of the material, distributes the discussion according to her
particular desires, sets and marks the assignments, and has total control over
the student’s final grade. In most classes the only interactions which really
matter are those which take place between the student and the professor. In
fact, it is frequently possible to achieve a fine result in a Liberal Arts
class without ever speaking directly to anyone but the instructor (sometimes
not even to her) or successfully to complete a four-year degree program in
Liberal Arts without every engaging a fellow student in a meaningful
conversation about anything.
Liberal Arts teachers
frequently seek to promote classes full of discussion and tend to measure the
success of a class by the extent to which such discussion has taken place. But
in such classes the discussion is typically mediated by the teacher; the flow
of questions and answers goes through the instructor and back out to the class.
We justify this process by an appeal to the Socratic method, forgetting
sometimes that Socratic dialogues, then as now, as often as not take the form
of what Thomas Wolfe has called a monologue punctuated by worshipful
interruptions. The spatial arrangement itself determines that whatever
interaction takes place will have this character. Students all face the front
in rows; the instructor stands before them, fully in control. If there is a
student whom the instructor does not wish to hear from, it is very easy to
exclude that student from speaking. If a student does not wish to speak, there
is often relatively little the instructor can do that will not intimidate the
student into further silence in a setting so hostile to easy interpersonal
candour. Frequently there is a sense that the students are in competition,
since they carry out much of their work in isolation from each other and are
marked relative to one another. There is little in any of this to encourage a
sense that what is going on requires any unmediated interaction at all among
the students.
Many teachers, of
course, work diligently against these set conditions, often with considerable
success. But that is difficult, partly because the students’ experiences with
the institution routinely train them to be passive recipients of knowledge,
answerable only to the authority figure at the front of the room and partly
because the arrangements of the room and the timetable create tiresome
obstacles. With a good deal of effort to get to know the students and help them
to learn about each other and a willingness at times to lug furniture about and
create a situation with smaller sub-groups within the class, an instructor can
work to set up a learning environment more conducive to conversation over the
length of a course. But that is only one course, and soon enough the semester
is over, a new combination of students presents itself, and the task starts
again. It is no wonder that many professors find bucking the institutional
arrangements finally just too tiring and unproductive.
The results of this
fact are obvious enough. The social component of a Liberal Arts class is sadly
neglected. Students who start the class strangers are very likely to end the
class no better acquainted. Unlike some other courses which feature a variety
of cooperative tasks or which keep together the same combination of students
across most of the curriculum over a full year or more (as in, say, some
technology or fine and performing arts programs), Liberal Arts classes tend to
perpetuate the fragmented and isolating features dictated by the conventional
arrangements. Consequently, there is little curricular pressure to overcome the
obstacles in the way of those qualities necessary for a useful continuing
conversation: a sense of friendship, a self-confidence in one’s own skills, a
willingness to test one’s insights against those of one’s peers, a desire to
listen to others and assist them if necessary, a sense of cooperative
participation in a shared endeavour, even a knowledge of people’s names,
backgrounds, and interests.
When we contemplate the
well publicized problems with the undergraduate experience--the attrition,
absenteeism, cheating, narcotics, harassment, suicides, depression--we might do
well to focus on the extent to which the experience in the classroom itself
offers little immediate help in making the student, especially the student who
already feels a stranger to the city, the institution, and the discipline, feel
welcome. Then we might understand better why it is that there is so little
support provided informally by students to their peers, why so many students
regard their social life, if they have one, as something quite apart from their
academic work, necessary to relieve the pressure of the undergraduate setting
as quickly as possible by whatever means are most readily available and in a
way that separates the social life from the academic work. The dichotomy
between these two is one of the most pernicious features of modern Liberal Arts
education, but it is an almost inevitable consequence of the institutional
arrangements.
We might also be driven
to understand more about how the changes in undergraduate education in the past
decades have dramatically aggravated these problems. For the present
arrangements of the curriculum, with its built in distribution of power and
fragmentation, were set up in very different circumstances, at a time when the
social quality of the student’s experiences on campus were something the
professoriate could afford to ignore because, as Gerald Graff has pointed out,
there was such splendid support in the surrounding campus culture in the
various societies, athletic teams, intramural activities, fraternities,
residencies, and so forth, some of which were compulsory and all of which were
readily available to students because undergraduates were overwhelmingly
enrolled full time and thus spent a good deal of their lives on campus outside
of class, often with the full participation of members of the faculty. These
factors, combined with the much greater uniformity in the social backgrounds of
the entering students and the smaller size of the institution, ensured that on
campus the social experience of the student was by no means limited to what
went on the class and that the integration of the academic work with a rich
social experience developed more easily in the total context of the
institution.
Nowadays that
surrounding campus culture is dramatically less effective. Many students are
part-time and confine their stay on campus only to their classes; campuses have
grown immensely by the standards of the day when the present structure of the
curriculum was introduced; under the pressures of the research ethic,
professors have every incentive to minimize their interaction with students;
class sizes have increased dramatically; the social backgrounds of the student
body have become much more complex; facing the rising costs, many students
overload themselves so that they can finish more quickly or hurry off to
part-time jobs as soon as classes are over; the intellectual confusion in many
disciplines redefines the nature of departmental courses for the student every
semester; the semester system guarantees a built in stop-start rhythm to the
process; the increasing demands of the various specializations and the
multiplicity of elective options add to the confusion and to the length of time
necessary to complete the process. Such conditions help to make the college
campus an increasingly bewildering and intimidating place, as much an ordeal as
an educationally valuable experience with a rich social component.
The effects of these
conditions on the education of undergraduates manifest themselves, too, in the
frequent complaints from employers about the lack of general skills, especially
the students’ inability to interact intelligently with others, to communicate
effectively, to integrate material from a range of different sources, and to
participate in consensus building or cooperative discussions of common
problems. In the past two years, I have been a participant in a number of
curriculum committees charged with organizing university degrees, undergraduate
and graduate, closely linked to particular areas of work. It is remarkable how
often the employers and government officials on advisory boards insist, as a
first priority, that more emphasis needs to be placed in the degree programs on
those general skills most appropriate to such matters. Whatever we are presently
doing, in Liberal Arts and elsewhere, we do not seem to be providing, at least
in the view of those who evaluate graduates on the job, many of the most
important general skills which the students are going to need as soon as they
leave the institution and later in their work. Yet many of us defend the
Liberal Arts precisely because they allegedly educate students in those very
skills.
These problems have
been well known and extensively written about for years. What is surprising, in
view of the copious literature, is the scarcity of effective attempts to deal
with the source of the problem. There is no shortage of minor tinkering, but
wholesale restructuring of the way classes are delivered is much harder to
find. But it seems obvious enough, given the present conditions, that any
measure which fails to address directly the social experience of the classroom
is going to miss the main point. Yet that is what so much of the discussion
seems to be doing. Many of the arguments which focus on the problems with the
education of undergraduates in the Liberal Arts take place largely within a
context defined by the perspective of professors, administrators, ministry
officials, and philosophers of education, most of whom are products of the
present system, who work in it, and who thus are reluctant or unable to explore
any connections between its very nature and the problems they wish to deal
with. This arena has room for plenty of arguments--especially about books,
interpretative methodologies, admission requirements, ultimate purposes,
distribution requirements, ideological implications of competing book lists,
appointments of Assistant Deans of Substance Abuse, hiring more counsellors,
the deleterious effects of television, and so on--but for obvious reasons it
often tends to give insufficient weight to the perspective of the student, to
the totality of the lived experience of the undergraduate proceeding through
the system and beyond. If we wish to address that with anything more than
ineffectual adjustments, then we must go to the heart of the problem: the
social experience in the classroom.
In the light of this
situation, the continuing interest in the short-lived experiments of Meikeljohn and Tussman and the
remarkable success of the few modern programs inspired by them take on a
particular significance, something out of all proportion to the lasting effects
of the experiments on the undergraduate curriculums at Wisconsin and Berkeley.
Discussions of Meikeljohn’s and Tussman’s
programs among a traditional faculty often focus almost exclusively on the
putative merits or demerits of interdisciplinary attention to Great Books or
upon the stated objectives of such programs. What tends to receive far less
attention but which is at least as important a factor in the transforming
effect of these reforms is the radical alteration of the classroom and the
major redistribution of power which that creates.
The really dramatic
element in Tussman’s program, for example, is the
idea that the seminar must form the heart of the matter; it is there not as an
occasional supplement to the standard lecture but as the very reason for the
program. The vital point is not just that the students read, say, The
Republic or The Oresteia, but that they discuss the works together
as equals in a continuing conversation, a classroom arrangement where the
professors sit around the table as equals, not as controlling presences. That
students will find the task difficult at first, that their insights or
reactions may often be ill-informed, that the process may well be slow--all
this goes without saying. But the insights they garner will be uniquely their
own and will occur in the midst of a group of friends and intellectual
comrades. The transforming power of such an arrangement is so impressive that it
is very difficult for those who have been through it as students or professors
ever to forget. It puts to rest any notion that we might have after reading
complaints like Edmundson’s that modern students are incapable of intelligent
conversation, that the cultural forces arrayed against them are too powerful.
That point seems
confirmed by the success of at least two university programs in British
Columbia inspired by and closely modelled on Tussman’s
insights: Arts One at UBC and the Liberal Studies Program at Malaspina. The
former, now in its fourth decade, has long stood as a mark of excellence in the
first-year of undergraduate education; and the latter, now in its seventh year,
has shown that a similar emphasis is an extraordinarily valuable way of organizing
the student’s upper-division education. Both offer convincing evidence, through
the testimony and later success of the students, that major reforms which
address the ills which so concern Edmundson and others are possible if we are
prepared radically to rethink how we conduct Liberal Arts classes.
The demand for those
qualities of mind and social skills which Liberal Arts courses have
traditionally defined as their major concern is clearly increasing, yet little
is being done to alter the structure of our curriculum so that Liberal Arts
courses can address more effectively the concerns that the traditional
curricular structure is failing our students in some important ways. In many
institutions, especially the BC university-colleges, the major push seems to be
to extend as quickly as possible the very conditions which create such major
obstacles for the development of effective Liberal Arts courses. Yet the
opportunity is still there. The institutions are still sufficiently small and
flexible to effect the sorts of changes which might
shift the emphasis from lecturing to learning, from a carefully mediated talk
to an emancipating conversation. It remains to be seen whether any more of them
will take up that challenge before the rigor mortis of the traditional
curricular structure sets in permanently.