Samuel Scoville: What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Liberal Arts Educating?

Sunday, February 21, 2010

What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Liberal Arts Educating?

Gen Ed

What are our "most compelling
reasons for a strong lasting liberal
arts education"?

(Graham referencing David Brooks)

All of us: compelling reasons, walking
manifestations: bodied embodiments
of a strong lasting liberal arts education.

Who here hasn't had a strong lasting
liberal arts education,? Raise your hand.

Proof.

Plus our national leaders--all of them
(I bet, with few exception): graduates
from strong, lasting liberal arts
educational programs.

Einstein claims the kind of thinking
that generates a problem can't be
the kind the resolves it.

I'm steeped:& permeate: swimmer
in a strong lasting liberal arts education
my human nature nurtured in a familiar
creed

Like Joe Fish: wet is inconceivable to me
not to mention dry. I'm an environmental issue.

       CONTEXT SENSITIVITY
              Empathy.

Over the past years, we’ve seen
very smart people make mistakes
because they didn’t understand the
context in which they were operating."
                             (David Brooks)

I don't.
Context is beyond me.
If I were contextually sensitive,
I wouldn't be writing this right
now but maybe bringing it up at
some scheduled 4:00 forum or
Strategic Planning Committee:
textually consensual rather than
harass mental thinking about
the box..

xxxooo, Sam

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Auto Bio

I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by a thief in the night sometime in the late 19^thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow, squeezing off a couple of rounds and sending the burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons of family notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down to Philadelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him. She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-it would have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY but INSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville

Samuel Scoville