Questions Quoted

When I first "met" ShImer, I knew it was a great books school. And I came to know it as a school -- an educational community -- filled with the pursuit of great questions. Hence parts of this blog focusedon questions.

Here are a few to contemplate.

I admire the contributions of Eugene Lang, who has written much about liberal education; his questions include

In view of their acknowledged problems, have liberal arts colleges lost their relevance and do they, in terms of their traditional mission as liberal arts colleges, face extinction? If so, and the ‘natural selection process’ is allowed to proceed, does it matter? If it matters, why? What are the options for survival? And would ’responsiblecitizenship,’ as an active ingredient, contribute significantly as a force for breathing new life and vitality into the liberal arts mission? (p. 133, “Distinctively American: The Liberal Arts College"; click here for the article; click here for the innovative undergraduate institution named after Lang)

As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, I also admire as well the work of Sharon Parks 

How might the academy maintain its commitment to truth, proceed with integrity in the light of the relative character of all knowledge, and serve the formation of young adults. . . ? Is the epistemology assumed in the modern academy true? Is there an alternative epistemology, a more adequate way of perceiving the relationship of human understanding to the apprehension of the whole of reality? (Sharon Parks,  The Critical Years: Young Adults and the Search for Meaning, Faith and Commitment (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), p. 136)

What are your questions? What are our answers? 

Comments

[Susan Henking]

Hmmm on the foreign language point -- worth discussing?

[Sam]

That Lyman quote really gets to the heart of things, doesn't it? I'm in no position to even attempt to address the question as stated, but I have been pondering some related thoughts in connection to Shimer's own history. I guess I may as well post them here...

For most of the Mount Carroll period, Shimer was basically a very small LAC following a (somewhat modified version of a) curriculum designed for a very large and well-resourced university. (Mark Benney, who was of the opinion that even the U of C could barely manage to pull off the Hutchins curriculum, has some harsh words for this aspect of Shimer in _Almost a Gentleman_). Most students speak very well of the resulting experience, but *providing* that experience was an enormous strain on the school even in the best of times. Financial and other pressures ultimately forced Shimer to adopt the curricular reforms of the late 70s and early 80s, leading to the Shimer curriculum of the Waukegan/Chicago period -- thus, a student from today will find remarkably little that is unfamiliar in a catalog from 1985, but much that is unexpected in a catalog from 1975. This "Waukegan curriculum" (for lack of a better term) was a triumph of design, but IMO it no longer speaks very well to Shimer's situation.

I might put it like this: in the early Great Books decades Shimer was taking a curriculum designed for abundance and applying it to a context of scarcity; but now we are applying a curriculum designed for scarcity to a context of (in some respects) abundance. To take a relatively minor example, the old foreign language requirements were unsustainable in the Waukegan years, but in the context of Chicago there is no longer any shortage of qualified language instruction providers within an easy commute (even leaving out distance learning).

I think it may be time to consider how some of the older "general education" ideals that were partially or entirely jettisoned in the Waukegan curriculum may be able to be readopted/adapted in Shimer's new context. This also creates the opportunity for Shimer to once again leapfrog the competition -- *while* remaining true to its "traditional" identity -- rather than getting sucked into a reactionary eddy as happened in the 1940s and very nearly in the late 2000s.