These days, I’m thinking much about my love for liberal education and the ways in which it continues to be relevant in the world of screens, as the virtual begins to feel more real than the real. I find myself constantly wanting to say things to students about what a liberal education is, how it works, how you make it worthwhile, how you can make it pointless. The truth is that education is a quite delicate process, easily disrupted, or thrown off balance by any number of missteps. A central tension between liberal education and the world of screens in which it now persists is that the former seeks to equip people with various forms of attention and extend the span of each one, while the latter often divides attention, pixelates it and thus renders forms of expanded, singular, lengthy attention impossible.
In the late digital age, a significant number of students say that they find liberal education too challenging, or unnecessary, or irrelevant to their majors. Each of these critiques must be handled within its specific situation to be effectively explored, but I can generally say: liberal education is, by definition, difficult. You’ve heard the basic instructions for liberal education before: 1) Mindfully read what is assigned, and reflect on it before you talk about, and through talking about it 2) Come to class and listen intently, ask questions, and offer your own perspective 3) Give your best effort on assignments, so that the instructor can offer challenges that are actually challenges that will help you grow, rather than encouragement to finally, simply, show what you already know you can do 4) Be honest 5) Take ownership of your education—you are on earth for a limited amount of time, so make that time, including class time, meaningful for you.
In some ways, these are also basic instructions for being human, and when we show up to class and show up for class, we can practice habits for the ways we want to show up at work, yes, but also in relationships, in solitude, in tragedy—being present, listening intently, absorbing the rich, if sometimes painful, sensations and phenomena that saturate us during a life that will one day end. Again, doing this in the classroom or in real life is difficult. If you do not follow these basic instructions, however, no matter how noble and well-worn your excuses, I will tell you now and relieve you of all suspense, that liberal education, like life, will not do much for you. The time you spend in your classes will not simply seem pointless, but will have become pointless because you are not doing the basic things that must be done if liberal education is to be worthwhile at all. At that point, there is literally nothing your instructors, no matter how skilled and experienced they may be, can do make your experience as enriching as it would have been if you had done what is required.
But perhaps the tension is not so much between liberal education that wants to expand attention and digital technology that wants to shrink it. Perhaps it is more about our—students and instructors alike—tendency to refuse to accept our human condition and our world as it is, and it just so happens that right now we exercise that refusal by immersing ourselves in or seeking to escape from the cocoon of screens. At this point, we see that this is an old struggle, perhaps the oldest of human struggles—to figure out how to be human, to find some set of instructions or habits or guidelines beyond what we inherited from our parents and elders in order to live well, according to the desires and potential inside of us. Religion, philosophy, literature, and science all offer us resources if we have the skills to access them. Shakespeare was, in the famous words of Ben Johnson, “not of an age, but for all time,” and that same liberal education that so often stars The Bard also has a perennial relevance. But Shakespeare was great not because of the answers he had—you don’t walk away from his plays with definitions and statistics—but because of the questions he asked, the way Lear, Falstaff, Juliet knew that a question is a journey that might never arrive at an answer, or might arrive at several answers, or might arrive at one only for a secret to be revealed, or someone thought dead to appear on stage and change everything that you thought you knew.
The classroom, like the stage, is a contrived space, and is supposed to be a place where things can happen that don’t otherwise often happen in life, a place of greater possibilities, flexibility, spontaneity, and creative exchange, a place where our collective attention can be directed in transformational ways in the exploration of a single question. This is the foundation of a good play, and of, I daresay, a good life.