I was poring over the 1996 winter "elective circular," laboring to find an acceptable third course to fulfill one of my distributives. As usual, no help was forthcoming. Insensibly frustrated, I signed up for yet another political philosophy course.
Of course I am talking here about the science distributive, and I confess that I have not taken a single science course up to now. As Homer's Nestor says in the "Iliad," the gods do not bestow all their gifts on one man, and I was not born with what Pascal called "l'esprit de geometrie."
But my objection to the science distributives is more than personal. Rather it is philosophical: I do not think science distributives should be among the requirements of any liberal arts education.
The advocates of the current liberal arts education curriculum (that is, a curriculum that equally emphasizes both the humanities and the sciences) usually justify it on the pretext that elite college students should be "well-rounded" when they graduate. The source of this idea is intellectual relativism, one that asserts that all academic disciplines demand equal status and respect.
In practice, this means that fairness dictates that students be exposed to as many disciplines as is humanly possible, and hence the rationale for the various distributive requirements (including the sciences).
A proper corrective to the buffet view of liberal arts education is provided by Plato, the philosopher of education, who has one of his interlocutors in the "Laws" define education as inculcating man with the ability to "abhor what he should abhor and relish what he should relish." In other words, the purpose of education is the formation of moral and virtuous beings, whose aim should be attaining the good life.
Plato's understanding of education is not in principle opposed to liberal arts education. Allan Bloom, that great reader of Plato as well as a shrewd observer of contemporary higher education, once termed liberal arts education as "education for freedom." It should encourage the emergence of free, autonomous and responsible citizens.
Such an education must by nature concentrate upon the human things, because an awareness of the important human alternatives and possibilities is a prerequisite and guide to leading or framing the good life for oneself. Such an education rightly considers studies devoted to the knowledge of the stars, of the animal world or of mechanics as inferior and subordinate to the study of man.
It is here that the utter irrelevance of the science distributive requirement in liberal education is rendered manifest. The sciences do not offer the student anything meaningful about the fundamental human problems, such as the nature of justice or the best political regime. They are entirely silent on the normative questions regarding human life. In regards to things human, therefore, the sciences merely represent technique and not knowledge: They can at best only help to achieve the desired ends already determined by the study of things human.
The logical conclusion to be drawn from this hierarchy of the disciplines is that a comprehensive grounding in the humanities should be required of the science students, while conversely, knowledge of the sciences should not be required of the humanities students. Education in the humanities is directed toward producing man and hence apply to all students; the sciences aim at producing the scientist and apply to only those who wish to enter that profession or its related offshoots. Education, whether in its classical or liberal arts guise, should first and foremost be concerned with man rather than a particular activity of man, with the whole rather than the parts.
An argument could be made here that education in the sciences was central in the minds of most of the great thinkers of the past, including Plato, who thought that no one unversed in mathematics should study at his Academy, and even the great humanists like Goethe.
But this argument no longer has any force. Classical science was inextricably tied to human concerns: Knowledge of heaven and nature was to be support for human morality and laws.
In contrast modern science has abandoned this scheme. Although Aristophanes was wrong to portray Socrates as indifferent to human morality in his preoccupation with scientific inquiry in the "Clouds," the same indictment rings true for most practitioners of the modern science. Instead undertaking the education of natural philosophers (the classical analogue of "scientists"), the sciences now train one to become technicians, accountants and machinists.
Four courses in this technical training is precisely a requirement of Dartmouth's liberal education to which I vehemently object.
