What’s the difference and then what’s the relationship between
Liberal and Instrumental Learning?
“It is said the Gautama was so impressed with
Indian fist-fighting as an effective method of
unifying mind and body that fist art was
incorporated into the framework of Buddhism.”
A COMPLEAT RHETORIC for liberal education must address the following six questions:
1. What is "liberal" about liberal education?
2. What kinds of cultural forms are most suitable for the constitution of a liberal program?
3. What kinds of individual capacities should liberal training foster?
4. What are the characteristics of training programs designed to cultivate those capacities?
5. What is the relationship between liberal and utilitarian learning?
6. What is the ethical justification of liberal learning?
(Donald Levine. “The Liberal Arts and the Martial Arts.” )
If each of those cartoon boxes had LIKE (or as-if)
in them & if all the blind wisemen knew what they
held on to was partial, reduced, inadequate—way
incomplete but nevertheless part of the whole and
worth defending (as part & partial): this would be
a good representation of liberal art & of: edification:
arguing-out toward a shared vision.
The practice of liberal art: stand by your perspective
and point of view , declare what you hold to be true to
your idiosyncratic, non-generalizable experience,
your fragment of analytical thinking and knowledge:
say it, say it loud, say it clear: you can listen as
well as you hear: —knowing the whole is still more
than the sum of the parts.
Can you imagine the arguing that would have to be
going on and on? Arguing in the best sense, of course
(Not in the bad sense, the common sense)
Bring it on —the opposition. Got to love the "enemy."
How else get better and good? Liberal Art.
(Toward Frontiers Yet Unknown
Stalwart Pioneering,.)
[Note this analogy is worthless as representation
the liberal arts— majors and minors, prerequisites
and capstone: non-inquiry information-transfer
of skills and data, facts and stats. Different
goals, aims and measurable outcomes
altogether. No elephant in the
room]
Hi Sam.
ReplyDeleteWe had a speaker up here, Louis Mendand. He wrote a book called "The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in Higher Education".
For him, what is liberal about liberal arts is not lack of instrumentality (he says that liberal arts colleges teach an important skill: hermeneutics), but rather, the openness of disciplines compared to professional/graduate school. In other words, to the extent that the disciplines are walled off from one another, a college's curriculum is not "liberal". He advocates not for "interdisciplinarity", which tends to re-inforce disciplinary boundaries, but rather intra-disciplinarity, in which we in theater, say, bring a bit of history or science into our curriculum... He also said that disciplines should 'rub against one another': it is good if the lines are not bright.
Peter Elbow makes the same point:
ReplyDeletethat inter-discipinary is just
disciplinary: a montage, maybe.
I would dig in my heels re instrumentality, unless we're thinking of some meta-instrumentality that emerges
in any one's sense of place and performance and role "in the universe" (so to speak). A "higher" instrumentality than competence and skill and "use" in marketplace. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
I confess: talking about IT, everlasting sustainable and sustaining converse-action comes as close to my notion of the practice of liberal art as anything. IT, I said.