By Joy Castro, Assistant Professor of English and
Charles Blaich, Daniel F. Evans Associate Professor of Social Science
Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana
Charles Blaich also is a Research Fellow with the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
LiberalArtsOnline Vol. 1, No. 4
Many universities and colleges, eager to reach potential students who cannot attend traditional classes, are now directing their resources toward developing technology that replaces the social community of the classroom with the virtual community of e-mail, discussion threads, and web links. In the excitement and the rush to keep up, the rate of change has been astonishing. At a recent presentation measuring technology's impact upon education, for example, we read with interest a slide that listed the factors that promote learning, factors like asynchronous communication and chat rooms. The last item on the long list was F2F -- face-to-face -- interactions.
While accommodating students who can only be educated via distance learning is a valuable service, there seems to be little concern about whether some basic component of a liberal arts education is lost when we demote or abandon the process of bringing people together in a room to talk to one another. Is there anything integral, needful, crucial about such a process? Or can it comfortably be let go the way of the victrola?
Could there be, for example, a connection between repeated face-to-face contact in small groups and the development of civility? We need liberally educated men and women to pursue many "outcomes" that transcend the content of any particular course, outcomes like democracy, civil society, peace, and social justice.
Distance learning, however democratic in terms of supply, may be antithetical to this aspect of the liberal arts. We all know how conducive anonymity can be to the expression of hostility. The facelessness of one's target -- whether in war or on listservs -- seems to function as an invitation to aggression.
Instead, liberally educated people must develop the courage and tact necessary to look our opponents in the eye when we state our points. We must be willing to read the expressions on the faces of those whom our comments affect. We must be willing to come back, day after day, to a situation whose tensions cannot be turned off at the flick of a switch. There is no substitute for the difficult gift of living and working with a community of known people: playing, learning, sharing meals. Arguing. Caring. In such environments, we are pushed to struggle in a civil and humane fashion with differences of opinion, of background, of belief.
While virtual communities can provide much of value -- indeed, to read a work of genius is to create a virtual community of two -- we are still embodied beings, social beings, not brains in a vat. Isolation may nurture many kinds of learning, but it does not nurture the sense of humanity, civility, and open-mindedness that is the hallmark of a liberally educated person. It does not nurture the ability to negotiate difference responsibly.
A residential community of learners, by placing intellectual material in the context of full-bodied interactions among people, can function as a crucible that transforms the whole person. It may still be the best way we have to build a capacity for empathy, compassion, and civil discourse.
Perhaps in the historical period preceding ours, when residentiality was simply a given in higher education, the concept of community-as-value did not need to be articulated. Today, it might.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author, LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.