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Only Connect: The Shared Goals of an AFF Blogger and the Liberal Arts
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Only Connect: The Shared Goals of an AFF Blogger and the Liberal Arts William Cronon, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, has written one of my favorite essays on the goals of a liberal arts education, which I've excerpted below. Surprisingly, his primary argument about such goals coincides perfectly, I'd say, with the goals of an Adult Dating zone blogger: Only connect. Cronon argues, in effect, that a liberal arts education "is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect." Cronon claims that ultimately the most powerful way to connect is through love, understood as agape, not<b> eros. </font></b>He concludes, "Liberal education nurtures human freedom in the service of human community, which is to say that in the end it celebrates love." I maintain that many of those who blog on Adult Dating zone are nurturing something very similar: We support each other in our freedom, particularly our sexual freedom, but also in our freedom to speak freely and openly about sex and the erotic and other concerns of the head, heart and imagination. We may come here thinking that we are coming here for sex, but, ultimately, I'd say, many of us discover that we come here and stay here for community, for friendship, out of love for those who share our embrace of freedom and the pursuit of more perfect unions. Yes, we come here not just for sex, but to overcome the frigidity of a world of cold hearts, closed minds, and deaf ears, which is also the purpose, I hope, of a liberal arts education and going to college. Bite the apple. Bite it again....and share .... Pass it on. 'Only Connect': The Goals of a Liberal Education Excerpts of an essay by William Cronon So what exactly do we mean by liberal education, and why do we care so much about it? Speaking of "liberal" education, we certainly do not mean an education that indoctrinates students in the values of political liberalism, at least not in the most obvious sense of the latter phrase. Rather, we use these words to describe an educational tradition that celebrates and nurtures human freedom. Liberal derives from the Latin liberalis, meaning "of or relating to the liberal arts," which in turn derives from the Latin word liber, meaning "free." But the word actually has much deeper roots, being akin to the Old English word leodan, meaning "to grow," and leod, meaning "people." It is also related to the Greek word eleutheros, meaning "free," and goes all the way back to the Sanskrit word rodhati, meaning "one climbs," "one grows." Freedom and growth: Here, surely, are values that lie at the very core of what we mean when we speak of a liberal education. Liberal education is built on these values: It aspires to nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom. So one very simple answer to my question is that liberally educated people have been liberated by their education to explore and fulfill the promise of their own highest talents. But what might an education for human freedom actually look like? There's the rub. Here a list of Qualities of a Liberally Educated Person 1. They listen and they hear. They work hard to hear what other people say. They can follow an argument, track logical reasoning, detect illogic, hear the emotions that lie behind both the logic and the illogic, and ultimately empathize with the person who is feeling those emotions. 2. They read and they understand. Educated people can appreciate not only the front page of the New York Times but also the arts section, the sports section, the business section, the science section, and the editorials. They can gain insight from not only the American Scholar and the New York Review of Books but also from Scientific American, the Economist, the National Enquirer, Vogue, and Reader's Digest. They can enjoy John Milton and John Grisham. 3. They can talk with anyone. 4. They can write clearly and persuasively and movingly. 5. They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems. 6. They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth. 7. They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism. This is another way of saying that they can understand the power of other people's dreams and nightmares as well as their own. They have the intellectual range and emotional generosity to step outside their own experiences and prejudices, thereby opening themselves to perspectives different from their own. From this commitment to tolerance flow all those aspects of a liberal education that oppose parochialism and celebrate the wider world: studying foreign languages, learning about the cultures of distant peoples, exploring the history of long-ago times, discovering the many ways in which men and women have known the sacred and given names to their gods. Without such encounters, we cannot learn how much people differ--and how much they have in common. 8. They understand how to get things done in the world. 9. They nurture and empower the people around them. Liberally educated people understand that they belong to a community whose prosperity and well-being are crucial to their own, and they help that community flourish by making the success of others possible. If we speak of education for freedom, then one of the crucial insights of a liberal education must be that the freedom of the individual is possible only in a free community, and vice versa. It is the community that empowers the free individual, just as it is free individuals who lead and empower the community. The fulfillment of high talent, the just exercise of power, the celebration of human diversity: Nothing so redeems these things as the recognition that what seem like personal triumphs are in fact the achievements of our common humanity. 10. They follow E. M. Forster's injunction from Howards End: "Only connect." More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. Every one of the qualities I have described here--listening, reading, talking, writing, puzzle solving, truth seeking, seeing through other people's eyes, leading, working in a community--is finally about connecting. A liberal education is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect. If I am right that all these qualities are finally about connecting, then we need to confront one further paradox about liberal education. In the act of making us free, it also binds us to the communities that gave us our freedom in the first place; it makes us responsible to those communities in ways that limit our freedom. In the end, it turns out that liberty is not about thinking or saying or doing whatever we want. It is about exercising our freedom in such a way as to make a difference in the world and make a difference for more than just ourselves. And so I keep returning to those two words of E. M. Forster's, "Only connect." I have said that they are as good an answer as any I know to the question of what it means to be a liberally educated person; but they are an equally fine description of that most powerful and generous form of human connection we call love. I do not mean romantic or passionate love, but the love that lies at the heart of all the great religious faiths: not eros, but agape. Liberal education nurtures human freedom in the service of human community, which is to say that in the end it celebrates love. Whether we speak of our schools or our universities or ourselves, I hope we will hold fast to this as our constant practice, in the full depth and richness of its many meanings: Only connect. |
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5/5/2010 7:19 pm |
This speaks so perfectly to what I want and aspire to be as well. As you know, I feel so fortunate to be a teacher, and it's much fun to be around people with lively minds, who love to learn, and yet, do not live solely or primarily in their heads, but remember that we have bodies and emotions.
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5/5/2010 7:16 pm |
Would you rather share with me a juicy papaya?
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5/5/2010 7:14 pm |
I see that wholeness, and what is beautiful and remarkable is that you achieved it without a liberal arts education at a college, which suggests that, indeed, there are other ways and places to learn such valuable qualities than in college. I must also add that, from my experience with some professors, who have advanced study beyond an undergraduate education, they do not possess in a strong and effective way some of the qualities that Cronon associates with the liberally educated person. For instance, I don't see some of us practicing humility and self-criticism or able to talk with anyone or empowering the people around them, and some academics write in a miserable, clunky jargon. My hope has always been that if people are open-minded about sex, they should be open-minded about much else. I love both your openness of mind and openness of heart and your desire and curiosity to learn....and to teach someone who has not yet gotten an advanced degree from the university of life.
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5/5/2010 2:23 am |
Would you rather share with me a juicy papaya? Inteligencia=erotismo 
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