By
Jill Beck
President, Lawrence University
I
would like to share with readers of Lawrence Today the remarks I made
at the 2006 Matriculation Convocation in September, which refer back to my
presentation
on individualized instruction at my first Lawrence convocation in 2004. Since
that time, we have made steady progress in understanding the many ways that
close interactive teaching and learning relationships between faculty
and students define both liberal education and the pedagogical traditions of
Lawrence. It has become clear that many of us at Lawrence believe individualized
learning
is a cornerstone of liberal education.
Beside me as I write is John Stuart Mill’s great work of liberal philosophy,
On Liberty, which Professor Emeritus of History William
Chaney tells me was
on the Freshman Studies reading list for many years.
While Mill’s thesis is that free discussion is a necessary social and
political practice in a free democratic society, without which informed opinions
and social conscience cannot fully
develop, he specifically advocated for free discussion as central to intellectual
development.
Free discussion, of course, is more possible in the small seminars and tutorials
that characterize learning at Lawrence than it ever could be in large lecture
classes.
Throughout this academic year, we are enjoying presentations and discussions
by distinguished visitors and by our own professors and students concerning
the importance of the individualized learning traditions at Lawrence and Oxford
Universities that may represent the epitome of what is meant by the liberal
arts.
Liberal philosophy: the individual right to free discussion
What do we mean when we say Lawrence is a liberal arts college? We all know
the things with which liberal arts education is generally associated — learning
to read closely and analytically in a variety of subjects, small classes,
creative and critical thinking, the frequent practice of writing, study abroad,
and other cultural experiences — but these do not address
the question, what are the principles of liberal education?
Liberal principles of education, like liberal political beliefs, resulted
from a series of social revolutions, including the Italian Renaissance, the
Enlightenment, the French and American Revolutions,
and the emphasis on the individual in the German Romantic and other Romantic
movements. These social, political, and artistic revolutions led to a decrease
in the absolute power of monarchical and religious institutions, and an increasing
emphasis on the individual, who was said by Jefferson to have a set of inalienable
rights, among them “liberty.”
In the political sphere, these revolutions led to more open discourse and a
greater role for social discussion and debate. One-party or monarchical rule
gave way to competing political parties and hence more public consideration
of opposing positions and arguments of pros and cons. Dissent became a characteristic
of political discussions.
Some hundred years after the American Revolution, education started to catch
up with liberal political philosophy and went through a social revolution
of its own. As a result, social structures in universities
began to change.
In
some institutions of higher learning, the distance between professors and
students began to break down. This was certainly true at Lawrence University,
founded in 1847. Lawrence was established from the start for both women and
men and for both immigrant and indigenous peoples. (Pictured: men
and women working in the college library, pre-1905) These idealistic principles of
equality appear to have greatly influenced Lawrence’s teaching philosophy,
which prominently features more equality between professors and students
than is
typical in higher
education. This tendency to equality serves, of course, to stimulate and
sustain the free discussion that Mill found so indispensable to intellectual
development.
From the Renaissance to the late 19th century, therefore, education changed
enormously, from being a top-down transmission of received knowledge, primarily
theological, to the student-centered revolution that brought us the tutorial
at Oxford and at the developing liberal arts environment of Lawrence.
What happened pedagogically, step by step, was a changeover from requirements
based uniquely on lectures and oral examinations to requirements based on
free discourse during seminars and tutorials and the frequent composition
of papers, culminating
in a written exam or performed project. These new methods of education were
designed to provide expanded and transformed opportunities and means of individualized
learning and represented a change from one-size-fits-all dogma
.
Just as importantly, the new social arrangement was characterized by much
greater freedom for the student as an individual to speak his or her mind.
Students
could agree or disagree with a professor’s claims of knowledge but
were obliged to obey the rules of evidence and argument. These rules, and
not those
of the divine rights of kings or the infallible knowledge of religious leaders,
were now academic law. Just as dissent had come to be part of political discussion
and expression, dissent came to be used in free discussion to resolve the
truth of intellectual ideas. As Mill observed in 1859, there had been a change
in the standards by which knowledge was created and judged.
Mill’s liberal philosophy of free discussion
According to Mill, liberal philosophy is most concerned with defining the
rights of the individual to free speech. In this framework, the word liberal means “free
from restraint in speech or action.” Reading On Liberty reveals that
the author was referring to free speech as both public political speech and
as free discussion with others about ideas in private settings.
For
Mill (pictured), free speech is paramount in order for individuals to demonstrate
their power of self-development in terms of understanding their own opinions
and the claims of others to truth. He held that knowledge was fallible, meaning
that it could be overturned through new evidence or argument. This is important
because, if one acts on the basis of what is assumed to be knowledge, one
may be wrong and therefore act wrongly and possibly mislead or even harm
others or oneself.
Only through discussion can we have our views challenged or refuted. Mill,
who is the father of “utilitarian philosophy,” argues that free
speech should be used to test one’s received truths. He recognized
that people tend to hold the ideas of those around them, meaning their reference
groups, such as social groups. He also noted that, once we have an opinion
or truth claim, we tend to hold it preciously, even zealously. He advocated
forcefully for people to use free speech to communicate their ideas to others,
because only through discussion can people know whether their knowledge is
fallible, in error.
According to Mill, there are three important reasons to use free discussion
in determining the truth of our claims to knowledge.
First, our opinions and claims to truth may be false. By listening to opposing
opinions and claims we may become persuaded of their truth. (On
Liberty, page 23) Through free discussion we may understand why we are wrong about
something.
Mill himself goes considerably beyond hearing “what can be said on the
contrary side.” (23) His definition of free discussion involves full
arguments between opposing views, demanding intellectual investment and the
sharpening of the powers of both reasoning and expression in order to communicate
and learn effectively.
There is a second reason for using free speech to explore the truth of our
claims to knowledge. You may be right, but you may not know fully why you are
right.
Mill argues that, although one may not know fully why something is true,
in free discussion one may learn “the grounds of one’s own opinions.” (35)
He emphatically denies that anyone can be taught the grounds of
their own opinions and says that would be mere parroting or memorizing someone
else’s
reasoning. Citizens of a fully functioning democracy need to derive their
own opinions
and determine the positions on which they would be moved to action. This
freedom of thought requires freedom of discussion, which different approaches
to education either foster (as in liberal learning) or restrict (as in instruction
based only on lectures and memorization).
Mill wrote: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little
of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them.
But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if
he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring
either opinion.” (36)
Further, Mill stated that it is not “enough that he should hear the arguments
of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied
by what they offer as refutations.” (36) Students must be able to hear
the opposing arguments “from persons who actually believe them; who defend
them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them.” (36)
This is a powerful argument for representing all points of view on a liberal
campus and of the absolute necessity for tolerance of dissenting opinions.
Knowledge must be powerfully determined through the articulation of argument,
critical analysis of the reasoning used, and counter-arguing, in order to fine-tune
our personal positions with the care that our roles in society deserve.
There is a third reason offered by Mill for developing our knowledge through
free discussion, and this is the possibility that both you and the person
you are in discussion with are right, but in complementary ways. Mill wrote: “[W]hen
the conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share
the truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the
remainder of the truth,” (45) then both — or several — minds
are required to find the full truth.
He likens truth-making to a kind of face-to-face combat: “Truth, in
the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling
and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious
and impartial to make the adjustment…it has to be made by the rough
process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.” (47)
In other words, we learn valuable lessons from each other. In an atmosphere
of free speech and inquiry, hearing from people on
opposite
sides of an issue is necessary if we are to bring all of the important aspects
of an argument into focus.
Therefore, whether in correcting our fallible knowledge, knowing the grounds
for our truthful claims, or combining and integrating the knowledge of others
into our own, we need exchange with others using free discussion. This is our
liberal education project at Lawrence:
• to support the growth of individual development through the use of free
discussion in our teaching and learning, and
• to contribute our individual viewpoints to shared discourse on matters
of meaning and importance, in an atmosphere of respect for others and for the
value of
reason.
The tutorial education of John Stuart Mill by his father, James Mill
How did Mill arrive at free discussion as the cornerstone of education? We
cannot definitively trace Mill’s philosophy to his exceptional education
under the tutelage of his father, but each of us can make up his or her own
mind on cause and effect in this case. John Stuart Mill reports that he was
already learning Greek by the age of 3. He was taught by his father, James
Mill, a distinguished historian educated at the University of Edinburgh. Do
not think that learning Greek at age 3 was because J. S. Mill was a child prodigy
or that this type of education could not have been undertaken by other pupils.
Mill provides numerous self-deprecating assessments of the deficiencies in
his ability to learn rapidly or deeply.
James Mill began his instruction by writing Greek words on cards with their
English equivalents, as children frequently are instructed in language. Grammar
did not come until later, when the boy was perhaps 6-7 years old, and Mill
recalls his first book as Aesop’s Fables, in Greek of course. At that
age he read the historian, Herodotus, and such philosophers as Isocrates
and the first six Dialogues of Plato.
In Chapter 1 of Autobiography, he sets the scene for us: “I went through
the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in the same room and at the
same table at which [my father] was writing: and as in those days Greek and
English Lexicons were not [there],…I was forced to have recourse to him
for the meaning of every word which I did not know.” (Autobiography, page 9)
Father and son also engaged in dialogue while walking on Newington Green
before breakfast. “In these walks I always accompanied him, and with my earliest
recollections of green fields and wild flowers, is mingled that of the account
I gave him daily of what I had read the day before.” (11)
The young Mill reports that his father did make him read books, however,
in which he might not have had much interest in reading himself. (Let Lawrence
students take heed of this wise
practice.)
A third aspect of his education was that the young man was asked by his father
to teach Latin to his younger sister. This was evidence of an enlightened strategy
for acquiring the ability to teach oneself, for no method is more effective
for learning than that of teaching others, and, for its time, this was an enlightened
attitude to the education of women.
James Mill was truly an exceptional educator. From ages 8-12, John Stuart
Mill read a great range of books in Latin by Virgil, Livy, Ovid, and Cicero.
He
was also reading Homer’s Iliad by then and had begun Aristotle’s
Rhetoric and Logic. It was here in the Logic that
Mill acquired his faith in hearing the reasoning of antagonists so as to “become
capable of disentangling the intricacies of confused and self-contradictory
thought” (23),
but he credited Plato’s Dialogues for providing the argumentative
structure that he was to use in his praise of free discussion in On Liberty.
Mill wrote: “The Socratic method, of which the Platonic dialogues are
the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting the errors,
and clearing up the confusions [that may beset]…the man of vague generalities
[who] is constrained either to express his meaning to himself in definite terms,
or to confess that he does not know what he is talking about….” (25)
Finally, John Stuart Mill shared one additional principle about his father’s
tutorial approach: James Mill never told his son how to read Greek
or Latin, nor did he permit anything the boy learned to be “a mere
exercise of memory.” (35) Instead, “he strove to make the understanding
not only go along with every step of the teaching, but if possible, precede
it. Anything which could
be found out by thinking, I never was told, until I had exhausted my efforts
to find it out for myself.” (35)
This then is the story of John Stuart Mill’s tutorial education. It
is not a leap, I think, from considering his individualized learning as a
splendid
example of this form of education to seeing it as the generative experience
that may have inspired and informed the writing of On Liberty.
Individualized learning at Lawrence
Learning at Lawrence follows many of the precepts of Mill’s philosophy,
including emphasis on free discussion and on providing environments in which
inquiry is foremost and where students learn by doing, reading, applying
theories, and practicing new techniques, as opposed to memorizing information
only in
preparation for test-taking. Lawrence does not put a high priority on received
knowledge but instead favors constructed knowledge gained through free and
engaged participation in the ongoing pursuit of clearer understanding.
Here are three examples of outstanding student work from last year, mentored
by faculty from our Conservatory of Music and Department of Biology.
The
purpose of tutorials is not to instruct or convey information so much as
to induce students to consider ways to evaluate evidence and make connections
among diverse pieces of evidence. This purpose was central
last year in the field work undertaken by Assistant Professor of Biology
Jodi Sedlock with her students. (Pictured, from left: Marin Damerow ’07,
Professor Sedlock, Ben Pauli ’06)
Professor Sedlock, a biologist with a second undergraduate degree in fine
arts, has always hoped that she would be able to find a way to apply her
arts background to her conservation work.
Through a fellowship from the AsiaNetwork Foundation, she brought Lawrence
students with her to the Philippines to participate in a survey of the bat
community within Mount Isarog Natural Park.
The students not only learned to work with the bats, they also learned, as
their teacher says, “what it means to be a poor Filipino whose life depends
on exploiting the very resources that we [were] working to protect.” After
the field work was completed, she stayed on with two Lawrentians to work
with the Camerines Sur State Agricultural College to assist with developing
educational
materials.
She observes that “[a]rt is a wonderful tool for communicating conservation
science to people whose every action directly affects the land and its inhabitants….[W]e
produced an educational poster in the local language that explained very
simply the value of bats and what farmers can do to ensure their survival.
This poster
and an associated brochure have been distributed to villages around the park
and to elementary schools.”
The alternation of teacher and student roles in learning allows the student
to learn if his or her claims are wrong, one of Mill’s
benefits of free discussion. Peer learning is another benefit of environments
that foster exchange and that encourage collaborative effort in order collectively
to accumulate greater truth and clearer understanding. Associate Professor
of Biology Bart De Stasio’s field work with his students in aquatic
biology and a small-group tutorial on cancer research taught by Beth De
Stasio ’83,
associate professor of biology and the Raymond H. Herzog Professor of Science,
both achieved these goals.
According to its course description, the Cancer Biology tutorial
was designed to promote an understanding of “the molecular origins
of cancer [and] the methods used to diagnose and treat cancers of various
types and stages” and to “build a large-scale model of the pathways
of cancer induction.” The tutorial aimed “[t]o improve students’ ability[ies]
to read, discuss, and evaluate primary literature in molecular and cell
biology [and to] allow students to gain an understanding of the long-term
scientific
enterprise, including approaches, methods, interpretations, and the sociology
of science.”
Students in aquatic biology courses with Bart De Stasio ’82 begin
their learning process by participating in field-sampling excursions to
lakes and
rivers around Wisconsin. Lately, his students have been examining changes
in food-web interactions in Lake Winnebago following invasion by zebra
mussels, as well as performing ecological monitoring of aquatic invasive
species in
the lower Fox River. The latter project is part of the state effort to
reopen the lock-and-dam navigational system on the Fox River.
(Pictured: Robert Boeckman ’06 uses computer-assisted image
analysis to determine plankton size structure in Green Bay, Lake Michigan,
during a
summer research project with Professor Bart De Stasio ’82.)
“Learning to function as part of a team is important,” Professor
De Stasio has written, “and often [is] necessary, when large projects are
attempted or where conditions might become hazardous. However, this type of collective
learning also provides important individual skills needed to tackle, effectively,
more independent work. Students progressively increase their abilities
and confidence to [undertake] independent research in biology courses,
with many
conducting senior projects.”
The
final example is a work of music composition by David Werfelmann ’06
(pictured), which demonstrates free and highly developed expression through
music writing
and performance. David’s faculty mentors on this
project were Joanne Metcalf, assistant professor of music; Fred Sturm ’73,
the Kimberly Clark Professor of Music; and David Becker, professor of music,
with the assistance of David Berk, director of instructional technology.
Professor Metcalf states: “Serving as a mentor for The Black Pirate [project]
alongside my colleagues Fred Sturm and David Becker was especially rewarding
because it showed what the combined powers of cooperation and mutual respect
can achieve….[David Werfelmann] wanted to achieve the very best,
most professional result possible, and I was glad to push him toward it…I
think that the project not only showed David what he was capable of doing…it
showed us all (faculty, staff, and students) what is possible through trust
and cooperation.”
The project resulted in an original film score, roughly 12 minutes in length,
written by David Werfelmann to accompany an existing silent move, The
Black Pirate, and performed by 52 musicians from the conservatory.
An excerpt can be viewed at www.lawrence.edu/news/pubs/pirate/.
Conclusion
It is clear that the goals of liberal education are deeply embedded and
superbly represented in the nature of learning at Lawrence. I congratulate
the members
of the faculty for their part in sustaining
Lawrence’s
tradition of liberal excellence and look forward to celebrating their accomplishments
and those of their students across all disciplines during this academic
year.
I refer one more time to John Stuart Mill’s connection of free discussion
with intellectual development. It seems to me and to Provost and Dean of
the Faculty David Burrows that there is no more basic social context for
conducting constructive debates, on a high intellectual plane, as the conversations
that can take
place between a student and a faculty member and among students and among
faculty.
Therefore, during the course of this academic year, we look forward to
a theme year on individualized learning, featuring invited addresses, plenary
sessions,
panels, and a joint conference with Oxford University next spring.
In the process, we are exploring ways we can support effective individualized
learning, sharing ideas, best practices, and innovations. Faculty Associate
to the President Beth De Stasio is helping organize presentations and debates
devoted to determining the value of individualized learning, the essence
of the various
forms of individualized learning, and some of the important
challenges
of individualized learning programs.
One final note: We may ask ourselves: Why? To what end, with what outcomes
in sight, with what aspirations do we seek to nurture an environment of
liberal learning and free discussion at Lawrence?
In Provost Burrows’ words, it is “to help each student develop
as an individual with the cognitive abilities, sense of self, and commitment
to ethical and effective action that form the basis of a life
of fulfillment
and excellence.”
I’d like to highlight his phrase “commitment to ethical and effective
action.” Hedonism is not the desired result of individual development.
Demonstrations of egoism are not the goal of free discussions. Rather,
liberal learning is invested with the aspiration to place individuals within
a social
context, each exercising self-development in order to bring more insight
and benefit to the shared human condition. To affirm that purpose, I end
with a
quotation from John Stuart Mill:
It is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual in themselves, but by cultivating it and calling it forth, within the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation….In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. (On Liberty, 62-63)
John Stuart Mill texts cited in the President’s Message
Autobiography. Eds. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger. Toronto
and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Vol. 1 of Collected Works
of
John Stuart Mill.
On Liberty. Ed. Albury Castell. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1947.
Lawrence Today, Winter 2006
As adapted from the president's Matriculation Convocation address of September 21, 2006