Public Scholars at
Hanover College
Inquiries
Volume Two, Number Three - Spring 2002
Answering the Challenge with a Challenge
The liberal arts face a great challenge in the twenty-first century. How can the liberal arts remain a viable option for students whose world seems shaped by the need to enter a profession, build a career, find a job? Where is there room in the life of such a student for a curriculum that fosters personal rather than professional development, that encourages broad interdisciplinary study rather than streamlined specialization, that aids the student in a search for a meaningful life rather than a job? How, to put it another way, can students (and their parents) commit to the study of philosophical issues as confronted in classic texts, when it might take all their time just to keep afloat in the torrential current of technical information necessary for employment in a hyper-technical world?
Ralph Hexter, whose scholarly work interweaves the study of classics and comparative literature, helps us to formulate answers to these questions by pointing out that they are not new. The question of practicality and the problem of too much information has been faced at every phase in the development of scholarly education in western culture. The answers and strategies crafted by ancient Greeks, medieval scholars, and Renaissance humanists to meet that challenge remain relevant today.
In the end, one important lesson that Professor Hexter draws from his historical survey is that the liberal arts must always meet the challenge of a new age by issuing a challenge of its own. Today, we must challenge students to dare to prepare not for their first job, but for success in life. We must challenge them to ask themselves whether it is really practical to spend their college years learning a body of technical information that will be outdated by the time they have barely begun their careers, or whether it makes more sense to spend that time learning how to educate themselves and to discern for themselves what kind of human being they wish to be.
Jeffrey Brautigam
Jeffrey Brautigam is the Director of the Center for Free Inquiry at Hanover College, where he also teaches modern European history and the history of science.