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[NOTE: This work
was published first in Hip Mama, a progressive parenting
magazine.]
Scared off by the
reputation of liberal arts colleges as elite and
expensive, a lot of broke and semi-broke parents
hope their college-bound kids will go to a state
university or rely on distance-learning: both promise
low-cost education with clear job possibilities.
But for many kids, the best option could be a liberal
arts education at a small residential school --
the kind of education that was once the exclusive
province of the rich.
Wealthy, educated
families have refused to follow recent trends. William
Durden, the former vice president of a distance-learning
program and now the president of Dickinson College
in Pennsylvania, pointed out in a recent article
that well-off families keep sending their children
to small residential institutions because they're
familiar with the doors that a liberal arts education
opens.
"Yet every time
poor, minority, immigrant, first-generation, or
otherwise disadvantaged college students stand to
benefit from a liberal-arts education," Durden
writes, "the rules of the game change."
New financial aid programs have now made many private
liberal colleges affordable, but disadvantaged students
are still urged (by high school counselors, the
media, and anxious parents) to go the low-cost route
that emphasizes job training rather than to pursue
liberal arts degrees, just as immigrants, minorities,
and the poor were pushed into vocational education
in the early twentieth century.
"The outcome
has been clear," Durden says. "The rich
have remained rich and powerful. And the poor have
remained poor and disenfranchised because they have
been diverted, yet again, from obtaining the type
of education that has served as one of the primary
avenues to leadership and power for generations."
His essay, which
appeared in the October 19, 2001 issue of The Chronicle
of Higher Education, concludes: "It is time
to let the secret out beyond the privileged."
But Durden didn't let the secret out very far: the
Chronicle is read primarily by professors and academic
administrators, not the general public; an online
subscription costs $80/year. The average working
parent wondering about college options won't be
picking an issue up anytime soon.
So Here's
the Story
Small liberal arts
colleges -- with their small class sizes, personal
attention from professors, opportunities for hands-on
independent learning, and strong bonds with other
students -- can seem like the adult equivalent of
Montessori.
"The more intimate
environment of a small college can provide a nurturing
environment which cannot be reproduced in a large
university," says surgeon Richard Miyamoto,
who graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois.
In fact, the balance
of challenge, support, and freedom that characterizes
liberal arts colleges looks a lot like higher education's
version of attachment parenting: the support and
nurturing that enable risk-taking, exposure to a
broad range of new ideas and experiences, and the
trust that students will ultimately pursue their
own interests and goals.
Small liberal arts
colleges provide face-to-face interaction in small
discussion classes with teachers who know students
by name -- and with students who know each other
by name, since they eat, live, and socialize together
as well as attend class. Rather than a talking head
at the front of a huge lecture hall, students known
only by their ID numbers, and assignments graded
by graduate assistants, as is often the case in
large research university settings, students get
the full benefits of a professor who knows them
as individuals and cares about their work, their
ideas, and their passions. Classes emphasize conversation
and debate, which help students interrogate for
themselves the concepts and texts.
A liberal arts education
pushes students to explore a variety of fields,
rather than to specialize narrowly in a job-preparation
track. This flexibility will be key to students
who, experts predict, will change careers -- not
just jobs, but careers -- an average of eight times
during their working lives. A student who has learned
how to think like a historian thinks, like a biologist
thinks, and like a poet thinks is much better equipped
to solve complex problems in shifting environments
than a student who has mastered a quantity of narrowly
defined technical information.
Learning to analyze
the phenomena around us through multiple lenses
is the core of a liberal arts education. Thinking
through multiple lenses enhances flexibility of
mind, critical thinking abilities, tolerance of
ambiguity, and ethical complexity.
In a complicated
and conflict-laden world, such qualities can't hurt.
Articulating our ideas clearly and understanding
other points of view are crucial skills, and no
collegiate experience prepares students to communicate
actively the way a residential liberal arts education
can. The classroom emphasis on dialogue is a major
part of this, and because students live on campus,
institutions can also create forums for communication
outside the classroom, like the kosher/halal dining
hall at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
The kitchen follows the dietary laws of both Islam
and Judaism, so observant Jews and observant Muslims
can come together for meals and conversation. The
liberal arts are "those special arts of mind
and spirit that," in the words of Mt. Holyoke's
course catalogue, "can free people -- at least
from ignorance, and perhaps from other poverties."
The Kind
of School that Changes Lives
Even a liberal arts
school that's not super-prestigious -- a college
with a regional reputation, for example, rather
than a national one -- can offer huge benefits:
the opportunity to be treated as an individual,
to speak up in class and debate ideas with peers
and professors, to work one-on-one with respected
intellectuals and artists. Students get to be big
fish in little ponds, the way kids are in a loving
family. At small schools, athletically inclined
students have a much better shot at making the team
(and getting playing time), and the same goes for
students interested in journalism, activism, student
government, and a full slate of other activities.
Small schools tend to support the formation of student-initiated
clubs, as well. At a small college, individuals
get to shine.
That kind of personal
attention can catapult a student into a different
life. Internationally known today for her award-winning
fiction, Helena María Viramontes is a professor
of creative writing at Cornell University and has
taught at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
in Vermont. Her fiction, which blends feminist,
race, and class consciousness to critique U.S. government
policies, is widely anthologized and taught in college
literature courses. But Viramontes was born and
raised in East L.A. where, as one of ten children
in a working-class family, she grew up all too familiar
with poverty and violence.
Immaculate Heart
College in Los Angeles changed her life. "I
am a firm believer in the small, four-year liberal
arts colleges like Immaculate Heart College,"
she told me, "because it provided education
that lasts a lifetime." Particularly motivating,
she remembers, was the focus on class discussion
rather than lectures: "The critical thinking
skills I learned, I learned by the constant challenging
of non-lecture teaching, of genuine inquiry. We
were given texts to read, to comment on, to digest,
to question, to reject, etc. We had to provide sustained
and logical arguments that kept us on our toes."
The professors at
Immaculate Heart worked to make the course material
clearly relevant to their students. "Again
and again, I felt that what I was learning was directly
connected with my life," Viramontes remembers.
"I engaged with energy the ethics, philosophy
and literature courses as if my life, my future
depended on it. And the instructors certainly convinced
me of that." Immaculate Heart closed its doors
in 1980 due to financial difficulties, but Helena
remembers the college as a crucial, life-changing
catalyst of her development as a politically engaged
writer. "I have never had such a worthwhile
and exciting experience as I did in my undergraduate
years at Immaculate Heart," she recalls. "I
suppose the school made me feel seriously about
being a citizen of the world. Moreso, the instructors
taught with this same energy and belief. We, therefore,
were not only students, but people ready and qualified
to impact our culture, our government, our world."
Her experience matches
up with the original meaning of the term "liberal
arts," which has a long history. In ancient
Greece, it was used to mean the arts necessary for
a full life as a free citizen -- which, for the
Greeks, meant active participation in the political
process. The liberal part of the term, associated
with liberty, concerns freedom in a number of ways:
the knowledge necessary for free citizens to live
well; the freedom to devote time to study, rather
than to labor manually; and the kinds of study that
will free the mind from ignorance and increase freedom
in the world. Despite the injustice embedded in
its history -- as in ancient Athens, where the freedom
of male citizens depended on the work of women and
slaves -- the idealistic sense of the term operates
in liberal arts colleges today.
Read “Your College Kids Best Choice: Why I'm
Totally Biased When I Talk About This" and
the rest of the article on the Hip Mama web site.
Castro is Associate Professor of English at
Wabash
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