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DEAN ELLEN HALL Why are we here? An approach to education in the liberal arts Wells 101 Plenary Talk
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Today, I want to talk with you about an intimate relationship. You are already deeply entrenched in it, and you will be involved in it for the rest of your life. This relationship is the one you have with your own education. I want to provoke your thinking to determine how you will connect your liberal arts education at Wells and your life. How will you acquire and adjust your views to get the most out of this experience?
Before I really begin, I want to ask you a personal question: Why are you here at Wells? Be completely honest with yourself.
I would like to read to you the mission
statement which was written over the course of two years and which all
members of the faculty had a hand in crafting and which was approved by
the Board of Trustees earlier this year:
Wells joins, through its mission, a long line of free thinkers in the liberal arts tradition. For example, a well-known, modern-day philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, a specialist in the work of the ancient philosopher Seneca, has written a great deal about liberal education: She believes a liberal education, "liberates the mind from the bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world. This is what Seneca means by the cultivation of humanity." (p. 9)
Both of these statements about liberal education, one institutionally based, and one definitional, reveal how the mind can acquire a new view toward cultivating an entire life. Another example is that of Esperanza Cordero who revealed her views to us from The House on Mango Street.
Recall the first paragraph of the novel:
We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. Each time it seemed there’d be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six: Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me.(p.3)
With this paragraph, the world of Esperanza opens up to us. We see the people, the house, the school, the poverty, the joy, the difficulties of this young woman's life.
All through the novel there are indications that Esperanza, whose name means Hope, is straining to escape: the new bike is a symbol of Esperanza’s developing independence and desire for a different life, as is her dancing at the baptism party. I am certain you have your own favorite instances of Esperanza's yearning for freedom, as well as your own stories of how you want to break free, grow, and move on.
In the last vignette, we see that the writing makes a circle, and that she has freed herself from confinement. The novel itself reveals her pathway; the subject matter of her life is her tool. She has just shared with us the world from which she has escaped, and broadened our vision by allowing us to enter her world through her eyes. We know how she has risen beyond the circumstances in which she first found herself. She is the person who did not belong and did belong. In telling her story, she shows how she did belong, and reveals how she gained her freedom. Yet this freedom and independence is in relation to her own history, family, neighborhood, community, and friends. Esperanza will not cut off her past, but instead explores the edges and will return with the news.
Here is the last vignette:
Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes
One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away.
Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away?
They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.
Pp, 109-110.
For Esperanza, hope is everything. Her story is a gripping metaphor for the power of mind and liberal education. It is a metaphor for how the world, seen differently, does indeed become a different world. Education is a way to see the world differently.
The educational philosopher Maxine Greene conceives of education this way in her work The Dialectic of Freedom: "...education is conceived as a process of futuring, of releasing persons to become different, of provoking persons to repair lacks and to take action to create themselves. Action signifies beginnings or the taking of initiatives; and, in education, beginnings must be thought possible if authentic learning is expected to occur." (p. 22)
In this room, with you, you have Wells 101 faculty members who are devoting themselves to your first-year experience as both your teacher for this course, and your advisor for your entire academic experience this year. They are here to challenge you, and to help you rise to the challenge of entering academic life in a liberal arts college. I hope they will get in your way—not in an uncivil manner—but in a way which will make you take initiatives and begin authentic learning. There are many big issues:
Why, for example, two days ago, did Northern Irish Protestants throw a pipe bomb into a group of Catholic school girls and their parents who were going to school for the first day? The next day, there were only protests, not bombs, and someone called that progress.
Why did the United States withdraw from the International Racism Conference in South Africa? Jesse Jackson insists the US never entered it. And why can’t our government apologize for the horrors of slavery?
How much do we know about the Cayuga Indian Land Claim? What do we understand about the complex issues involved?
How well versed are we in the issues of stem-cell research -- the medical and moral implications?
And what do we know of this area of the world and its importance in formative ideas regarding women and our rights? Wells College was founded in that formative era.
In your Wells 101 course, you will be reading from some seminal works— to name three; Coming of Age in Samoa, The Souls of Black Folks, and The Starry Messenger, written by people who had new views of the universe, of people, and of our societies and who provoked others to change their thinking, to change their views. That is the root. We are here to change our thinking.
But how will you bend your mind, how will you be receptive to ideas that brush against the grain of those you hold dear, but which you will be challenged to reconsider? This exploration, this discomfort is at the heart of liberal education. In every new chapter of our lives we tend to lose our way for a while, transitions are hard, but we find our way again with new paths and new meanings.
When I was your age, I went from the high mountains of Virginia to Atlanta, Georgia, to Agnes Scott College, also a women’s college. I was a protected and restricted only child of loving parents who were college graduates, but who had very few financial resources. They had sort of clawed their way into the middle class after the second World War. When I went to college, I cannot even begin to tell you how naïve I really was—I probably still don’t know. My primary driving force was fear of failure. I studied all the time my first year. Many years later my partner expressed to me that it was as if I had been an immigrant from the mountains. She was right, I think, because the experience was so foreign to me, so far from what my family had imagined, and yet I wanted to stay in this new place and make a new life for myself beyond what I had grown up with in Appalachia.
During the first year at Agnes Scott and in Atlanta, I studied French because it was required. I had to take two years of a language. It was difficult and frustrating. In the intermediate class, during the second year, we read André Gide’s La Symphonie Pastorale, inch by laborious inch. It was so painful to do the five pages of homework each night. I had to look up the definitions of the definitions. Discussing the work in French in class was terrifying and excruciating, but there was something exhilarating about that discomfort. My mind was changing, and I began to be inspired by getting to know this work so intimately.
André Gide, a Nobel Prize winner in Literature, wrote La Symphonie Pastorale in 1918. It is one of the works upon which his reputation was built. He valued sincerity and frankness and the right to think freely. The freedom of thinking is what touched me in the novel, and how one can rise from one’s circumstances to see the world anew.
The story is the first person narrative of a French pastor who, in the course of his work, finds a wild child out in the country. This was a favorite, typical of story of 18th century France. The child is actually a teenager, and the pastor takes her home to save her; he and his wife name her Gertrude—she is dirty, full of bugs, and she is blind. The pastor believes it is his moral obligation to educate her. During the course of this process he falls in love with her.
There is a great interplay in the work among seeing spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Conflicting themes arise: duty versus passion and the moral vision versus the physical ability to see with the eyes, which is, of course, not always necessary for true vision.
But what really opened things up for me as a student of 19 was how the pastor overcame the difficulty of explaining colors to his blind student.
He takes her to a concert to hear Beethoven’s 6th Symphony—The Pastoral Symphony. Gertrude asks the pastor if what he sees with his eyes is as beautiful as the scene she imagines from the Second Movement of the Symphony, which is the scene beside the brook. From that moment he uses the symphony, and the different notes and intensities of the music to teach her colors, and all the dimensions of the visual world.
As a young college student struggling with language and serious literature, I understood for the first time how to think metaphorically--how to see one thing in terms of another, how to see a bigger picture. This is a fundamental skill in all theoretical thinking and it is a challenge to develop this skill. It is also a challenge to develop another skill which the Little Prince, in another famous French work, was taught by the fox, which goes something like this; "What is essential is invisible to the eye. It is only with the heart that one can see clearly." This combination of seeing with the mind and seeing with the heart is at the center of authentic learning.
I went on to major in French literature, and to earn a master’s and a Ph.D. in medieval and Renaissance literature. In my study of French language and literature, I learned how to speak a language, how another culture thinks and acts, as well as theories of literary criticism. But mostly, I learned about human beings, both the characters in the works, and the creators of the works. So many French writers and artists throughout history were reformers, different from the mainstream, outcasts, marginalized. However, in French society there has been a deep regard for the intellectual, which has allowed these writers and artists to use their brilliances to deepen human understanding of their condition. Slowly they have become central to the intellectual life of France and the world. Through the study of literature, I learned, almost unwittingly, about the importance of social justice.
The atmosphere and the struggle for social justice were all around me in Atlanta in college in the 60’s. The city never did blow up, but there was racial unrest there. I saw the Ku Klux Klan march on major city streets. I did not march or demonstrate, but I absorbed through my faculty and college what was right and just. And I now know it was my whole experience, in and out of the classroom at Agnes Scott, which served me when I came up against a situation of social justice in my own work and life many years later. Even though I had come from a prejudiced, conservative, small-minded background, my liberal education freed my mind and my spirit to take a just action.
Ten years ago, I was a college president in South Carolina. I was recruited publicly with great fanfare and media coverage to introduce the best practices of education to this particular college. In addition to many other actions, I supported the opportunities and rights of students to explore issues of sexual orientation with a counselor, and at the recommendation of a fourteen-member search committee, I appointed an African American Woman to be the Vice President of Student Affairs and Dean of Students. She was the first person of color to be appointed to such a prominent position at that institution. My actions offended certain constituencies, and I was ordered by the board of trustees to fire my African American colleague. My colleague was an excellent Dean of Students, and I declined to do so. As a result, the board, citing "my leadership" forced me out and the dean of students out on the same day, two days after graduation.
What have I learned from such a demoralizing and painful experience? That my liberal arts education has set me free from my original circumstances in some miraculous way I never would have understood or imagined earlier in my life. Had it not been for that experience I would never have come here, been here, now with all of you. The reason I'm here is because of my liberal arts education.
Your own liberal arts education can
help you acquire an attitude for cultivating a just life. Adopt an attitude
of openness. Sometimes you will falter, but Wells College is here to assist
and challenge you in becoming who you want to be. I wish you the best on
this journey through the wide expanses of liberal arts learning. Vision
with a mission, that is why we are here.
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