SPEECH

NATIONAL COUNSELLOR CONFERENCE 2005May 17-20

Victoria B.C.

The Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education

John Xiros CooperAssociate Dean, Arts, UBC

First let me thank you for inviting me to address

your conference. My wife is a public school teacher

here in B.C. and although not a counsellor she has

nothing but praise for the work you do in the

schools. I was in the school system at a time when

there were no school counsellors, or at least no-

one ever pointed me in their direction if they were

there. That may have been the peculiarity of that

particular educational jurisdiction. Quebec is a

very sophisticated place now, but about 40 years it

was as parochial as the Ozarks. I actually could

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have used some counselling at the time I was

finishing high school. I was very good in math and

physics and only mediocre in the humanities,

history, literature, etc. Unfortunately I kind of

loved history, literature and etc. and was only

mildly interested in math and physics. But I

trudged off to McGill in engineering physics on the

advice of my physics teacher and my parents who

thought I had it made for the job market.

I’m not sure they knew I really liked poetry

and music and philosophy instead of quadratic

equations and hydrostatics. And if they had known,

they would have sent me to the doctor and/or the

priest to exorcise the demon. In any case I was a

good boy and so I yawned and fidgeted through two

years of lectures in very old buildings at McGill

with very hard wooden benches watching the chalk

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dust settle on my math professor’s shoulders as he

mumbled his way across the front of the

amphitheatre scribbling incomprehensible symbols on

the board. When I finally plucked up my courage

sufficiently to confront mummy and daddy, I

confessed all, the poetry, the history, the novels,

the philosophy, Plato, existentialism, Bob Dylan,

the works.

They were kind, but they could see I’d gone

soft in the head. They could also see that the very

good job at the end of the science degree was

slowly disappearing into the evening sky. If they

had known the beginning lines of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’—‘Let us go then

you and I / When the evening is spread out across

the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table’—

they would have understood the sentiment I think. I

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could see my dad was more or less etherized as I

spoke. I remember quite clearly that he winced

every time I said the word poetry.

It was an exceedingly sad day in the Cooper

household the day I turned my back on science and

engineering. Ah, but there is a happy ending to

this story. I ended up doing ok with poetry, and

although my dear mother is now gone, my father is

still alive, a hale and hearty 92 year old and to

this day he has yet to figure out how I could have

spent my life studying, reading, teaching, and

writing about poetry, and, and got paid for it!

This is a mystery he will take to the grave

(not soon I hope), but he will never really ‘get’

it. I wanted to start with this little personal

story because it illustrates the fact that one

sometimes chooses the liberal arts even though

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society, while mouthing the expected pieties about

culture, shoves the young into making choices on a

narrowly economic basis rather than looking at

life, and one’s interests, whole.

But before I go on let me make a small

confession: I am uniquely unqualified to give this

talk to you. I am not a product of a liberal arts

education. I had an opportunity when I was a

student at Queen’s University in Kingston. At that

time, late 60s, it was a rather small place, it

still is to some extent when compared to the U of T

or UBC. I lasted a year in that intimate, sociable

environment. I don’t think there was anything wrong

with it. I was from Montreal and after a few months

of playing the part of being at ‘college’ I got

kind of bored and decided that I needed to get back

to the city. The rest of my education passed in

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large urban schools, with thousands of students,

classes of as many as 300 people, and very little

contact with my professors. So, when I had an

opportunity to really taste what a ‘liberal arts

education’ has to offer I found it a bit of a thin

soup.

This is perhaps a good place to look squarely

at what we mean by a liberal arts education. First

of all, it’s an American idea and it has a specific

socio-history. No doubt there are also political

dimensions to it as well. A liberal arts education

does not necessarily identify the specifics of what

one will learn, the actual subjects and contents

that are to be conveyed to the students. In its

American manifestation, a liberal arts education is

the education preserved for a social and economic

elite. And it has a particular kind of

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institutional base. I’m speaking of the small

liberal arts college—Bennington, Williams,

Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, Bard College in New York or

Willamette University in Oregon which,

incidentally, I had the pleasure of visiting in

March of this year. Willamette is a very good

example of the kind of institution that still

offers a liberal arts education.

It has 1900 students and the faculty to student

ratio is 11 to 1 and no class has more than 20

students. The faculty are virtually all Ivy League,

right down to the silver hair and bow ties. They

all seemed to have been sent over from central

casting. They may have all had the specialized

training that comes with the acquisition of a Ph.D.

but over the years their teaching has turned them

into generalists who conduct their students through

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reading and discussion of the great ideas of

Western Civilization as they are to be found in the

Great Books of literature, philosophy, history, the

classics, etc.

The students at Willamette are almost entirely

white, upper middle class, and between the ages of

18 and 21. They pay something like $28,000 US

dollars for tuition and another $10,000 for

residence. The campus is almost entirely

residential. It has no graduate programs in the

Arts and Sciences. Let me say that this in 2005 was

the least diverse campus I have ever seen. It was

like stepping into a parallel universe when

compared to my experience at UBC. There were a few

minority students here and there, African American

and Asian, but they all seemed to be gripped in

quotation marks as they walked around the

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picturesque campus. They were the symbol of its

liberality.

I was there to conduct a seminar with senior

students studying T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and to

give a public lecture on Eliot. I spent three days

on the campus immersed in a liberal arts

environment. It was very, very interesting. I had

quite a few conversations with the students in the

seminar. They were all from rather wealthy families

who normally owned businesses or were in the upper

tiers of the professions. None of the students I

talked to had much intention of going into academic

life. They certainly weren’t being groomed for

graduate school. They were going on to do MBAs, Law

or Medical degrees or, and this was the majority,

getting ready to go into the family firm. They were

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very nice kids who paid attention, did their

reading, and had acquired sufficient confidence to

speak up in class and be heard.

Willamette illustrates very well the social

history of liberal arts education. It was and

remains to some extent an education in civilizing

an economic elite. It gave to men and women who

would be the future community, state, and national

leaders something like an active culture, a set of

common ideas or books which they had read and

discussed at college. In America the liberal arts

were and are still seen as the necessary training

in leadership for what I like to call the day-to-

day ruling class, i.e. those people who run

companies, law firms, businesses, professional

organizations, philanthropic organizations and

affect the lives of millions of people on a day-

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to--day basis. The idea is to civilize the bosses,

give them a taste for learning, and a taste for

giving to the institutions where they enjoyed four

formative years of stimulating discussion,

introduction to the wider world of art, literature,

philosophy, history and, through the requirement to

participate in discussion and debate, learn the

verbal behaviours that would allow them to be

confident as leaders, or at least to know how to

perform leadership. And leadership is really the

content of the whole experience in these

institutions.

I like to contrast this with my experience

teaching in a college in Calgary in the 1980s where

most of the students were the first generation to

go beyond high school. I had a colleague at the

university there, an American from Princeton, who

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could never understand why it was so difficult to

get the students to speak up in class during

discussions of the work they were studying. Of

course his experience had been completely

different. He had gone to Princeton because his was

a Princeton family. He knew in his bones that being

able to hold your own in conversation or debate was

absolutely essential to acquiring the necessary

leadership skills. The students in Alberta did not

think they were ever going to be in positions of

power and what the powerless do is not call

attention to themselves.

But a liberal arts education in the context of

the small liberal arts college, gives the students

something else: a generational cohort. They are

able to mix and network with other young people

destined for good things in their generation. This

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was and is as important an aspect of the liberal

arts education as what was actually learned. In

fact, it is no surprise to learn that when people

look back on their college experiences what they

remember most is not that they read Plato’s Republic

but the collegiality and friendships which they

made and, in many case, continued well past

graduation. A liberal arts education can only

really work for the purposes I’ve outlined here if

there is a strong learning community in which the

learning takes place. The community and the

learning are mutually supportive. For a liberal

arts education you can’t have one without the

other. In Canada, there are examples of this kind

of educational enterprise here and there across the

country, mainly in the East, Bishops, Mount

Allison, St. Francis Xavier come to mind

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immediately. But the liberal arts college is not an

established tradition here as it is in the States.

Yet, Canadians still talk about a liberal arts

education as if it is a form of learning that is

common across the country. What is meant in this

country is the study of certain subjects,

principally in the arts and humanities. But the

curriculum of a liberal arts education has been,

for the most part, de-contextualized or disembedded

from the social and cultural learning environment

in which it developed south of the border. In

Canada, the liberal arts do not necessarily denote

a common form of learning or even a common set of

great books that all students encounter, discuss,

and write about. Nor is there any sense in the

professoriate that apart from the knowledge they

are imparting they are training people for specific

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social purposes. We talk of a liberal arts

education even when students are taught in

virtually anonymous cohorts of 200 to 400 at a

time.

Because of the institutional differences

between a small liberal arts college like Williams

and a large research university like UBC or the

University of Toronto, the emphasis when we talk of

liberal arts education in this country lies in

trying to define the skill set which one acquires

through the study of the liberal arts, i.e.

literature, philosophy, history, etc. Transferable

skills are the goal in our context, not the

training of a leadership elite. Certainly there are

universities in this country that graduate many of

our future leaders, but this aspect of their social

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function is largely incidental. Certainly not

deliberate.

So what do we mean by liberal arts education in

Canada. Mainly we mean skills. The skills are easy

enough to list, here’s a set of skills culled from

various sources. An education in the liberal arts

helps you to build

analytical and knowledge-building skills

evaluative and critical thinking skills

creative thinking skills

effective oral and written communication

critical and reflective reading skills

problem solving skills

synthesis skills and the ability to express the

results of analysis and evaluation

the ability to pose meaningful questions that

advance understanding and knowledge

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the ability to conduct research and organize

material effectively

information literacy and other skills

associated with learning how to learn

the exercise of independent judgement and

ethical decision-making

the ability to meet goals, manage time, and

complete a project successfully

self-confidence and self-understanding

the ability to cooperate with others and work

in teams

a sensitivity to individuals and tolerance of

cultural differences

an informed openness to new information

technologies.

Of course, an education in the liberal arts is not

the only way one can acquire these skills. And

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having taught university students for more than 25

years now, mainly in the study of literature, only

a very few can be really considered to have

mastered these skills in a way that is truly

noticeable. The missing ingredient in our context

is the lack of a learning community of manageable

size. In first year I teach introduction to

literature classes of 150 students. They hear me

lecture about critical reading but they get

precious little practice in actually doing it. In

the senior courses, classes are smaller but not by

much 45-50 students at a time does not create the

right kind of learning community in which these

skills can be acquired through sustained practise.

Certainly at a small liberal arts college such as

Willamette, the opportunities over four years to

learn how to be an effective communicator is

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practised and again in different contexts and with

different kinds of material. Indeed the liberal

arts skill set has a very good chance of being

learned in the small liberal arts college. Less so

in the typical large provincial university most of

our students attend.

I could go through the list of ‘skills’ I gave

you a moment ago and show how under the present

teaching and learning structures of our

universities a student’s chances of really

acquiring these skills is not good. The talented

students will probably have already manifested some

of these in skills in high school and will develop

them further in university but not necessarily

because of what we do in university. Growing

maturity and developing intelligence will do the

greater part of that job.

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You must be wondering by now when I’m going to

get to the benefits of a liberal arts education if

I’m not going to offer transferable skills as the

treasure. After all this is what Deans and other

administrators in Arts and Humanities Faculties are

always promising the new class of first year

students every year. Study in Arts and you will be

armed with a portable skill set that will do for

the battle of life. Most of this is pep talk stuff;

let me confess that I’ve indulge in it myself. But

I don’t think I believe it.

In fact, I see only one benefit to the study of

the liberal arts. And it’s the very benefit that a

liberal arts education gives the student in the

small liberal arts college. I think it can also be

acquired in our universities because it has not

much to do with learning skills as robotic

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appendages to our psyches. Let me put it as simply

as possible: the liberal arts can give the student

an opportunity to learn how to be a leader. And not

by acquiring measurable “skills”—after all Josef

Goebbels was an effective oral and written

communicator and could solve problems and be able

to synthesize knowledge (or what he thought was

knowledge) and able to conduct research and

organize material effectively. No, I don’t think I

put much stock in ‘skill acquisition’ (though as

school counsellors you might have to talk about

skills when students ask you why go into Arts).

Having said that, let me repeat, I don’t believe

that we ought to make a case for the value of a

liberal arts education on the basis of certain

transferable skills.

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I think there is a benefit and its one that

students can acquire through their actual courses

whether they are clever or not, whether they are in

small seminar groups or in large lecture halls. In

my literature classes the students may learn how to

be critical and reflective readers, but what good

is that if what they end up reading once they leave

the classroom is the kind of rubbish you find in

the media.

No, the real benefit of a liberal arts

education is the stuff you actually learn about.

The important thing about reading King Lear in my

first year class is the fact that you’ve read King

Lear. The actual knowledge one gains in the study

of that play, and perhaps in the liberal arts

generally, is far more important to the individual

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student than some skill that he will now transfer

to managing a rental car franchise.

Let me put it another way, knowledge in the

subjects covered by the liberal arts is always

learned in its human contexts. It is not simply a

matter of learning facts, ideas, or processes. The

facts are learned in ways that make them more

generally and humanly useful and relevant. An

accountant may be a very skilled manipulator of

numbers, but it doesn’t really matter whether the

work is done on Wall Street or Mars. If the liberal

arts mean anything, they mean we are never happy to

learn in a vacuum. Knowledge is always

contextualized.

Thus when one reads a novel in an English

course, one learns something about the novel, but

one also learns something about how human beings

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act and interact and how they react to each other

under stress of conflicting desires,

disappointments, aspirations. One also learns how

language works in society. Not language in a vacuum

mind you, as an abstract medium for something we

now like to call ‘communication’, but how it works

in its human contexts. How we use it to persuade

some particular person of some particular thing,

how we use it to open ourselves up to others, or,

how to close ourselves down, or, unfortunately, how

to find peace or betray someone we love, and so on

and so forth. The best education in the liberal

arts emphasizes this embeddedness of knowledge in

the world. It sensitizes us to the complexities of

a culture and throws into higher relief the

differences between cultures. You learn that even

if the numbers in a ledger work precisely the same

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way in Vancouver as they do on the moon, there is a

difference in what they mean and how one ought to

“read” them in both places.

A good deal of what’s wrong in the world has to

do with the fact that those who sometimes make

decisions that have social and political impacts

cannot think their way into a sophisticated

understanding of the human consequences of those

decisions. You may be a brilliant engineer, but if

you build a highway that destroys a viable

community you’re really worse than stupid. If

nothing else an education in the liberal arts makes

you more aware of what those ‘brilliant’

businessmen and engineers cannot, or find it

difficult to, understand.

When you learn, you may learn this and that

about geography, psychology, literature, philosophy

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etc. but you also learn, and this is the important

bit, something about the building blocks of a truly

civil society. One that is not reducible to a few

algorithms or formulae. And, perhaps even more

importantly, you learn how to deal with your

despair when you realize how far away we are from

that goal. The power to understand people, their

aspirations, their dreams, and their

disappointments and sometimes even their despair is

what makes the kind of things studied in a liberal

arts curriculum so important for an age like ours.

Don’t get me wrong, technicians, experts, and

professionals have their place. They’re absolutely

necessary, but let me tell you that it is the

people with a wider knowledge of the human world

that determine what these technical experts will

do.

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Leaders have the most difficult jobs in the

world because leaders deal with people. The person

who has mastered a technical discipline, computer

programming for example, is a very useful person,

but they will need to have learned the kind of

knowledge that can only be found in the liberal

arts context in order to rise to leadership. And

this is perhaps the real theme of my talk today,

that an education in the liberal arts teaches you,

in addition to the intellectual and emotional

skills of leadership (however they may have been

attained), the absolutely necessary knowledge of

what makes a human being, well human.

I’d rather have a person who has really grasped

the pathos and tragedy of Shakespeare’s King Lear

when dealing with human beings than the most

brilliant accountant in the world. And personally

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I think this is what people in general want from

their leaders, whether they are in business, or

politics, or big-time education. Let me offer as

evidence of this general hunger the popular movie

‘I, Robot’. And one I think which struck a chord

with many people when it was released. It is a good

illustration of what I’m getting at.

The film is a kind of allegory. Not the silly plot

twist in which the robots try to take over the

world. That’s just pure Hollywood rubbish. No,

there’s something more interesting than that in the

film. It’s the event that leads Will Smith to

distrust robots.

If you remember the opening sequence, two

people, a man and a little girl, are drowning and a

robot jumps into the water and makes a very quick

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probability calculation that Will Smith’s odds for

survival are better than the little girl who is

also about to die. The robot, having worked out the

math, then saves Smith even though Smith is yelling

that it should try to save the little girl. The

robot ignores his pleas and makes the purely

logical choice without understanding the larger

implications of what’s going on, that is, without

understanding the ethics of self-sacrifice, without

understanding Smith’s personal decision to possibly

sacrifice himself for the chance to save the little

girl, even if the chance is slim. The robot simply

carries on with its program. There’s a problem with

the purely logical choice. Smith wants the machine

to make the human choice even though the odds are

long and his own survival is at risk. In the end,

Smith survives but the really supreme ignorance of

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those clever machines stupefies him and he is

haunted by the face of the drowning girl whom the

machine could not imagine saving against all the

odds.

That is the difference between one type of

education and another. One kind leads to an

understanding that goes beyond the limits of what

one has been programmed to know. And it’s not

‘skills’ which get past the program, it’s the

knowledge that does it. It’s knowing the feel of

the nervous crisis of the speaker in Eliot’s The

Waste Land; it’s knowing about the courage of

Elizabeth Bennett in facing up to her social

superiors in Pride and Prejudice and not flinching.

These kinds of knowledge operate in another region

where thought and feeling are more open and alive.

Ideally that’s what an education in the liberal

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arts should be able to give you. And those who

actually acquire it are better suited to lead us

than those who have the advertised ‘skills’.

That’s why I like to think that those of us who

try to teach the value of the liberal arts are

educating potential leaders and not just because

they will be taking over daddy’s business in the

future. We have a greater hope in what we are

teaching than that.

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