Learning that Frees: Thinking with Roosevelt Montás about the Value of Liberal Arts

Having just recently begun a dean role at a new university, I have been thinking a lot about liberal arts and what the opportunities are at this moment for engaging everything that is inherently valuable about a liberal education. Given the vast array of forces of disruption and change that are swirling about, I am also thinking about what it might mean to re-imagine liberal arts for a new day. As someone who has benefited greatly from a liberal arts education in my own life, I am passionate about ensuring that students from all backgrounds can have the opportunity for transformational learning that an education grounded in the liberal arts offers. I also am aware that, without some kind of careful evolution in the way liberal arts is offered and supported at universities, its future is precarious. 

In such a moment, I am grateful to a colleague who has shared Roosevelt Montás’s excellent and engaging book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton, 2021). I am finding it to be a timely and informative dialogue partner at this exact moment.

In it Montás does five things that I find extremely helpful. First, he helpfully defines what liberal arts means, referring to it as a kind of education that features prominently a “concern with the condition of human freedom and self-determination” (2). In addition, he finds that while liberal education should not be understood as being in opposition to giving students career-ready skills, he also notes that it has a different focus: “Instead of asking how to make a living, liberal education asks what living is for” (3). Thus, when a student pursues a major with clear career outcomes, having that education within the context of a liberal arts foundation ensures they develop the career skills along with those deeper skills and values that promote a meaningful life in other areas.

Second, by sharing his own experience of encountering liberal education through the core curriculum at Columbia University, he provides a compelling personal example of how the liberal arts engender reflection on the most important questions about life. He explains that a liberal arts education grounded in influential texts helps a student “engage in a kind of inquiry that, when successful, produces insights with the power to transform one’s entire life” (13). It did for Montás, as it has for many, myself included.

Third, by spending individual chapters discussing Augustine, Plato, Freud, and Ghandi, he helps readers from any background see the ways in which these significant texts can provoke deep personal reflection and growth, particularly when encountered together with an informed guide and with others who are asking similar questions. For these four authors he points out that they “come from worlds that are in many ways alien to our own, but they speak with intimate familiarity about human experiences we all share” (7). Elsewhere, he concludes, “This is precisely where the greatest value of a liberal education lies: in turning students’ eyes inward, into an exploration of their own humanity under the provocation of works that have proven their power to inspire just such self-reflection” (19).

Fourth, Montás makes a strong case that, since liberal learning is about engendering the freedom to think and determine one’s choices, it is something that is valuable for all, and not just those who can attend elite institutions or who have the privilege and status to be able to afford it as a luxury. Instead he argues that liberal education is “the most powerful tool we have to subvert the hierarchies of social privilege that keep those who are down, down” (12). The people who most need it are not the elite but those who “have historically been denied the tools of political agency” (12). In this line of thinking, the question of the value of liberal arts might be reframed around who is benefiting from the devaluing of liberal education.

Fifth, based on the above, he argues that universities (and the faculty and administrators who run them) have an obligation to reflect seriously and with intention on the importance of liberal education for students and society, and to do the hard work of creating robust core curricula that represent a shared understanding of these fundamental questions. He explains, “In this time of fundamental change, perhaps our greatest need is for clarity and conviction about the values and purposes of higher education” (225). And further, “The corona virus pandemic has exposed the depth of social inequality in America and may give our generation the necessary spur to address it. Making liberal education available and accessible to all students is the most important contribution that higher education can make to this effort” (225).

From Montás I take encouragement and inspiration to continue pressing forward at my institution with the sometimes-challenging conversation about what the goals of university general education are, and how best to support those in the undergraduate curriculum, core curriculum, and first year experience. Montás does not shy away from the hard questions including about his own curriculum which is grounded in Western texts, many of which require us to raise important questions about colonialism, oppression, gender inequality, lack of representation, and so on. He suggests that the debates about these issues, among faculty, with students, and with the public, are part of the rich process of engaging the traditions which have shaped our cultures today, as well as part of the process of imagining new possibilities. Montás also provides some helpful principles that undergird the Columbia University curriculum and useful frameworks for having those conversations within the faculty as a whole without having to start from scratch.

In the moment we are in today where many are trying to make sense of their lives and of this uncertain world in which we live, an education grounded in the liberal arts and in conversation with thinkers who have shaped the development of our world can be a powerful tool. Such an education can help ensure that in the face of a surplus of information, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, we can still learn to think freely (the liber in liberal arts) for ourselves—and to do so in meaningful dialogue with others asking the same fundamental questions.

Maintenance Learning, Shock Learning, and Innovative Learning

In his classic work On Becoming a Leader, Warren Bennis talks about three kinds of learning: maintenance learning, shock learning, and innovative learning. I find this three-fold distinction provides a valuable lens for understanding the fast pace and unprecedented scope in which change is occurring in higher education today. Some of the changes happening around us appear to be driven more by economic and practical realities than by educational or pedagogical philosophies. Particularly in the realm of theological education, typically a more traditional segment of the educational world, changes in delivery modes and in pedagogy facilitated by technology have presented challenges for many schools. In my own context, one that has already embraced the use of technologically-mediated education, faculty and students are now wrestling with what it will mean to have some master's classes that run on an eight-week session instead of a full-term of fifteen or sixteen weeks. As a way of framing that change for myself, I outline below Bennis's discussion of these three kinds of learning.

Maintenance learning is the kind of learning that facilitates and maintains the status quo; learners are largely passive and seek to acquire the knowledge and skills that an authority has deemed valuable.

Shock learning is the kind of learning that occurs because it has to occur for survival; it is often in response to a crisis and is reactive. It is characterized by a sense of the learner not being in control but having to do only what the situation requires. At the moment, this mode may characterize some of the ways schools are responding to and learning from the real societal and economic changes occurring around them. It is not the students but rather the institutions of higher education themselves that are learning by shock.

Innovative learning is a kind of learning that is more dynamic, imaginative, and creative than either maintenance learning or shock learning. Innovative learning is anticipatory, participatory, and self-directed. Bennis explains the characteristics of innovative learning as including:

• Anticipation: being active and imaginative rather than passive and habitual; 
• Learning by listening to others;
• Participation: shaping events rather than being shaped by them (Bennis, 72)

By framing learning in this active and participatory way Bennis can talk about innovative learning as “a way of realizing vision” (72). He calls it “a dialogue that begins with curiosity and is fueled by knowledge leading to understanding. It is inclusive, unlimited, and unending, knowing and dynamic. It allows us to change the way things are” (73). These descriptors themselves offer a vision of positive, optimistic, and creative ways of dealing with change.

While it may be tempting to try to paint the recent history of higher education with these broad strokes, the most fruitful use of Bennis's categories is to consider ways that schools can foster and encourage innovative learning on the part of students and faculty, and on the part of the school as a whole. Rather than entering survival mode or simply reacting to each change that occurs, the concept of “innovative learning” provides a way to engage with the changes in higher education in a positive and healthy manner, one that focuses on how the individuals involved can shape the way forward.

In considering Bennis’s views on learning, I find encouragement to make a concerted mental effort to identify and move beyond a maintenance learning or shock learning mindset, and to foster an innovative learning mindset. Faculty and students with this kind of approach are the ones who will be able to learn together in meaningful and transformative ways even in times of rapid change.