The art of leadership
This is especially true in today's world of global tension and political crossfire. But what's the best course for developing such skills and attributes? In an age of specialization, one possibility can be found at the traditional heart of American higher education — the liberal arts.
The physicist Richard Feynman once remarked that scientific understanding is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. When a scientist "has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt," Feynman noted.
This is why liberal-arts learning is so critically important for developing the brainpower we need for solving 21st-century challenges in every field ranging from international diplomacy to nanotechnology inventions. Constitutional democracy, social justice, scientific breakthroughs, a sustainable environment, freedom and healthy communities don't just happen. They require countless acts of imagination, courage and leadership.
Liberal-arts colleges, at their best, create an ideal environment for learning, for asking critical and fundamental questions, for fostering the freedom to grow and excel and, perhaps most important, for cultivating the courage to imagine, to question dogma and to confront arrogance and ignorance.
American culture encourages most students to specialize as part of the process of becoming an expert and a "success." Yet, leaders in our society are usually those who have explored a variety of intellectual disciplines and learned to understand foreign languages, diverse cultures, the scientific method, poetry, music, economics and history.
The contemporary liberal-arts academy encourages every student to imagine a better world, better businesses, better medical science, better government, better international organizations, better understanding of human nature and the possibilities for progress. Students are encouraged to imagine a world without poverty, disease, homelessness, injustice, racism, terrorism and war, for imagination must precede actualization, and we pay a high price for the failure to do so.
The liberal-arts tradition is an educational philosophy more than a body of knowledge and is as much concerned with the process of learning as it is with content. Thus, this approach views learning as a verb rather than a noun, as an ongoing process of questioning, searching, probing, exploring. Since they are arts, the liberal arts aim at active engagement rather than passive reception, at understanding rather than the memorizing of neatly packaged facts, figures and equations.
This kind of education is not necessarily liberal in a political or partisan sense. It is intentionally a liberating of the mind from ignorance. The mission is to unlock the imagination and curiosity in every student. The liberal arts are fundamentally liberating and freeing arts.
"It is about freeing oneself from one's prejudices, one's assumptions, to look again, to remain curious," notes former Amherst College President Tom Gerety. It is about freeing students from sloppy thinking, unexamined conventional wisdom, complacency and ethnocentrism. It encourages criticism as well as skepticism.
This tradition is rooted in the ancient Greek and Roman curriculum, a course of studies designed to develop powers of intelligence, observation, reasoning and imagination.
This tradition first focused on the arts of reading, listening, writing, thinking logically and speaking persuasively. The mathematical arts of arithmetic, geometry, harmonics and astronomy further prepare the student for physics, metaphysics and ethics.
Great liberal arts teachers, like the great books in all cultures, raise questions and ask what is worth knowing, what is worth affirming, what is justice, what is beauty, what is courage. Also, what does it mean to be a citizen, a human being, and what are our obligations to others, to the environment?
Shaping one's character through an examination of these questions is necessarily a bracing or even disturbing experience. There is no easy, comfortable road to learning. The liberal-arts education asks that we submit our beliefs and values to rigorous scrutiny, that we ask a lot of "what if" or counterfactual questions, that we question our intuitions, that we confront our unexamined world views with historical understanding, new theories and intercultural perspectives.
If it is true that talent is a muscle that needs constant exercise, then the aim of liberal-arts learning is to exercise and refine the intellectual talents of students and faculty, to expand on our capacity for understanding truth, justice, liberty, community, efficiency and rights.
It is with this understanding and breadth that young scientists, teachers, attorneys, artists or business professionals will find their way when faced with practical dilemmas in their chosen fields.
A liberal-arts education is an ideal place to explore what it means to discover oneself and one's obligations to others. The message is the same one Pericles encouraged in Athens — that a community's flourishing is everyone's business, and that an ethic of collaboration and empathy for others is critical to the resolution of societal problems. Liberty and duty go together; a liberally educated person grasps the importance of personal as well as civic responsibility, of civility, inclusiveness and the need to give back to one's community.
A liberating learning experience emphasizes the role courage plays in most important breakthroughs. Inventions and great art, for example, are not accomplished by cowards or wallflowers. And though we cannot inject courage into college students as a physician injects vaccine in a patient, "we can talk about the role that courage plays in every aspect of life," writes historian Page Smith. "We can make clear that the most important discoveries in science, the most important revelations in the arts, in virtually every field of human endeavor, have had a major component of courage."
Unlocking the imagination and nurturing the soul are also essential. It is only with a heart that some things can be seen. The arts put us in touch with the incredible richness of the human imagination and help us to see and imagine things we have never seen before. The artist, poet and composer are often more able to capture the paradoxes of the human condition.
The liberal education provides for the study of poetry, ceramics, music, dance, painting, theater, film, photography and digital-art technologies.
A liberal-arts education involves a critical reading and rereading of the notable texts of both Western and non-Western traditions. In reading and reflecting on great writing and great art, we test out our own ideas and clarify and strengthen our personal values.
Liberal arts includes a whole variety of science disciplines as well as arts, humanities and social studies. It did for the ancient Mediterranean cultures, and it does today. The scientific method, with its respect for skepticism, speculation, exploration, verification by repeated experiments and modification of theory to fit new data, offers essential practice in analytical thinking.
Through their exposure to rigorous methodologies in all the disciplines, students learn to pose central questions, to search for tentative answers and to try to discover which hypotheses yield the most compelling solutions.
Liberal-arts colleges emphasize breadth rather than specialization, for a primary goal of the liberal-arts college is to educate rather than train. Consistent with this aim, the student is encouraged to take courses across the curriculum in order to appreciate the interconnections among a wide array of disciplines. Training for the professions of law, medicine, engineering, finance, journalism or similar fields can come later. Indeed, most liberal-arts college graduates go on to professional or graduate studies after their undergraduate education.
A liberal-arts education encourages a tentativeness, a reflectiveness and an openness to other points of view. And it emphasizes that the greatest mistake one can make is to be afraid of making mistakes. Thus, the understanding that new challenges, boldness and risk-taking have a genius, power and magic in them for those committed to a lifetime of learning.
The liberally educated individual is, I believe, better able to help us create options and opportunities, clarify problems and choices, build morale and community, and provide a vision of the possibilities for better organizations and a better world.
Leaders with breadth can have those indispensable qualities of self-confidence, optimism and idealism that enable them to mobilize others to undertake challenges they never dreamed they could undertake.
Thomas E. Cronin is president of Whitman College in Walla Walla.