Liberal education is struggling to maintain its place in the contemporary university. In some ways,
the challenges it faces are as old as liberal education itself. Plato’s dialogs provide plenty of
evidence of the difficulties that attend the attempt to find and educate pupils in philosophy. In other
ways, the challenges are peculiar to, or at least exacerbated by, the character of the modern age.
Think of the economic and social pressures that attend the democratization of higher education in a
modern mass democracy, for instance. Is it surprising that many students, parents, voters, and
politicians ask how we can justify the cost of a four-year liberal arts degree that does not
immediately place a graduate into a lucrative and productive position in the economy? Other
phenomena such as the ongoing trend toward vocational education and the rise of outcome-based
assessment can be partly attributed to these pressures.
On a deeper level, these and other trends in modern higher education (including increasing
bureaucratization, and emphases on innovation, utility, and social change) are amplifications of the
modern turn toward instrumental reason. In the history of philosophy, we see this turn, for example,
in the works of Hobbes, Hume, and Bentham, who argue that reason can be used to calculate means
but not ends, i.e., we can rationally calculate how to achieve our ends, but those ends are given to us
by our passions. The noetic function of reason that one finds in the thought of Plato and Aristotle–
the mode of reason by which we discern and choose the ends we ought to pursue–appears to be
absent, or even intentionally excluded.
This turn to instrumental reason manifests itself in a variety of ways in modern life. It contributes
to technological progress, economic growth, political efficiency, the belief in social progress, and
so forth. But the logic of instrumentality also has a tendency to overwhelm all other considerations.
The danger is not necessarily instrumental reason in itself, but, rather, the displacement of noetic
reason (and faith, for that matter) by instrumental reason,so that the question of whether we ought to
do something is simply left behind by the process of determining how to do it.
In the educational context, the worry is that instrumentalism threatens to undermine or displace
humane learning by obscuring its nature, which is ultimately problematic because it is dehuman-
izing. Just as maximizing profit without regard for its human cost, maximally exploiting the
environment, or reducing politics to a supposedly efficient bureaucracy are dehumanizing, so is the
reduction of education to outcomes or vocational training. In this context, practicing the Socratic
method might be seen as essential to maintaining and promoting our humanity in the modern age.
Certainly, we must count ourselves lucky if we can find the time and space (and participants) to
undertake it. The Socratic method does not fit well within the rigors of time and money, and it does
not meet the demand for results or outcomes.
It does, however, create a space in which persons can encounter one another as persons, in which
teacher and students can explore together the perennial questions that make us human. Rather than
simply conveying or even implanting some piece of knowledge in the student’s mind, the teacher
seeks to elicit it from the student him or herself in his or her own time. The student thus learns
through a“realization,”an“insight,”or a moment of“recognition”–in a flash it suddenly“occurs”
frankie
(Frankie)
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