By PETER WOOD
The National Association of Scholars recently issued a statement that criticizes the movement, centered in offices of student affairs and residence life, to “educate the whole person.” I am one of the authors.
The main point of our statement, “Rebuilding Campus Community: The Wrong Imperative,” is that the whole-person approach undercuts liberal education. The movement takes advantage of the legitimate desire of students for a stronger sense of community by drawing them into programs that have a definite ideological flavor.
The term “whole person” suggests a generous gathering together of each person’s complex parts. But that’s not usually how it works. The stewards of whole-person learning typically act on the social insecurities and emotional vulnerabilities of students to foster a sense of group identity. Often that means achieving ideological conformity on issues like diversity, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the environment. Students who express doubt about any part of the agenda come under pressure to adjust their views. The “whole” students are those who embrace identity politics and realize a commitment to “change the world” in the direction favored by their residential-life or student-affairs overseers.
Am I mischaracterizing the movement? Some of the people who have responded to our statement think so. In a commentary published in The Chronicle, Richard H. Hersh and Richard P. Keeling devote serious attention to what they find variously admirable and misguided in it (The Chronicle, August 1). Although they endorse our call for a renewal of liberal education, they argue that the new student-life programs profoundly express the ideals of liberal education because they treat students as “whole people.”
Hersh and Keeling assert that liberal education is for “liberation, or emancipation,” which “requires transformation.” That’s a constricting view. Somewhere, for example, we might find room for the task of sustaining human knowledge across the generations, and preserving and perhaps improving on the culture that has been passed to us as a legacy. So the task of transformation strikes me as a little too streamlined for the complicated work of educating young men and women.
The glibness of that answer becomes even more apparent when Hersh and Keeling fault the National Association of Scholars for improperly narrowing the ideal of liberal education to cognition alone, or to ideas prized free of any emotional or meaningful social context. They argue that the transformative approach, by contrast, “is never strictly cognitive ... it engages emotions as well as ideas” and that it is more consistent with scientific findings about how people learn.
We stand accused of providing a “caricature” of that transformative approach. But it is Hersh and Keeling who impose the distinction between a dry, deracinated form of classroom education that focuses solely on cognitive aspects of the mind, and the emotively rich, whole-person approach of transformative education. Our statement doesn’t say a word about our preferring an approach that extirpates emotion from cognition.
That contrast, however, is a familiar part of the rhetoric of the transformative movement, which often depicts classroom teaching as a kind of intellectual Sahara in which nothing but the sand dunes of abstracted ideas can be found—while over in residence life or student affairs is an oasis where human complexity in all its parts can flourish. Does anyone seriously think that students in college courses reading King Lear or, for that matter, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening are confined to this imaginary Sahara? The humanities division of higher education has traditionally been focused on precisely the whole person, and it seeks to educate students not just in some isolated sliver of their cognition, but in a manner that opens their imaginations (and some would say souls) to full emotional complexity of human experience.
Other parts of the curriculum are not as centrally focused on that full-bodied account of being human, but they are far from devoid of emotional and other kinds of human content. Students of science and social science frequently attest to the emotional satisfactions of their pursuits, the pleasures of working with others inspired by the same quests, and the aesthetic achievements of discovering order in apparent chaos. The struggle to create a reasonable account of the world may foreground a disciplined form of cognition, but it has never severed itself from the deeper realities of human life, including emotions.
Real liberal-arts education confronts students with the difficult task of learning how far reason can take them in a world that is not always reasonable, and the no-less-difficult task of trying to integrate the “reasoning part” (as Plato put it) with the other dimensions of life (the appetites, the emotions, the demands of civic responsibility). The transformativists offer a shortcut: The experts in residence life and student affairs will confer emotional maturity—via social activism—on students directly and let the professors take care of the cognitive details.
The real education for the whole person remains where it always was—in a rigorous liberal-arts education. The transformational approach may have adopted some of the language of the liberal arts, but, rightly understood, the program is profoundly illiberal.
Peter Wood is executive director of the National Association of Scholars.