LiberalArtsOnline Volume 6, Number 4
April 2006
Today's college student often focuses intently on how a degree will be beneficial in the future. The question of whether an education will be helpful in getting a job or starting a lucrative career weighs heavily on a student's mind, especially when he or she is faced with years of student loan payments. But what about the idea of "learning for its own sake"? Is it an ideal that still resonates with people? Our author this month, Boria Sax, reflects on this question as he considers the source of inspiration for academic work. He believes that the love of learning remains a cornerstone for colleges and universities, but says that it must be nurtured in order to thrive.
--Kathleen S. Wise, editor
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Learning the Love of Learning: Newman's Ideal Updated
by Boria Sax, Ph.D.
http://www.boriasax.com/
For Socrates in the dialogues of Plato, learning had been a perpetual ecstasy. He scorned the Sophists, who wanted to place philosophy in the service of jurisprudence rather than truth and who charged money for their services. Socrates could charge his students nothing, for he desired almost nothing beyond the opportunity to question the learned and powerful. Christians may strive to imitate Jesus, but they would not want to be crucified. Scholars, similarly, may want to be like Socrates, but they would not like to live in poverty.
Anybody who hangs around an institution of higher education for a while will hear it said that "learning should be for its own sake." That may sound bizarre, old-fashioned, and even crazy, yet it is also strangely appealing. Today it is difficult to get people to do anything "for its own sake," even to take a walk in the park. And although universities may see themselves as following the Socratic tradition, they charge money for just about everything. But academics are used to anachronisms, and many accept this idea of disinterested investigation of truth (along with the faux-Gothic arches) as a phrase to invoke at convocations or graduations.
People may not realize that an early form of this phrase, "learning for learning's sake," comes from The Idea of a University by John Henry Cardinal Newman, first published in 1851. According to Newman, the study of liberal arts is not to be pursued for either practical utility or moral virtue, but for "knowledge as its own end." To justify the founding of the Catholic University in Dublin against the objections of fellow clergy who doubted the worth of secular learning, he argued that liberal education was not intended to produce "the Christian," but "the gentleman." He went on to add that:
Surely it is intelligible to say that liberal education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation and perfection of the intellect. Perfection is considered an end in itself in our garden and parks, in cities, homes, public buildings, churches. Physical beauty is deemed desirable, and so with a beauty of our moral being, which is natural virtue. Why can not beauty, that is perfection of the intellect, be considered desirable in itself? [1]
This message has resonated far beyond the Catholic milieu in which Newman wrote, and remains the basis for debates about the role of the university today.
Thinkers such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and Derrida have taught us to constantly look for covert messages, even—or rather, especially—in seemingly innocent statements. It is easy, then, to find "hidden agendas" that support elements of a hierarchical social order in Newman's statements. If liberal education is designed to produce "the gentleman," doesn't that exclude women and people from the "lower" social classes? Furthermore, there is little or nothing in the liberal arts curriculum that does not have at least some potential practical use. Theoretical science is used to produce technology, while techniques of argument developed by philosophers are used in courts of law.
But no matter how often the ideas of Newman are refuted, they just don't seem to disappear. That is because, whatever his actual intentions, they appeal far more to the heart than to the intellect; the ideas are psychologically true. Perhaps all knowledge, or nearly all, ultimately has some use, but we do not think of that when we are caught up in the excitement of discovery. It is generally this exhilaration, and the desire to share it with students and colleagues, that moves us to become academics. The arguments of Newman may be dubious, but the experience behind them is deeply authentic. In the end, it is from this experience that institutions of higher education draw their vitality.
I would like to suggest an updated, corrected version of Newman's ideal: All academic work should always be inspired by love of learning. Uninspired research might be compared to a marriage without love. To marry in the absence of love is at best profoundly sad, and perhaps even immoral. The less romantically inclined may say that love is a necessary condition but not a sufficient one for marriage. It is perfectly okay to take other factors—such as money, prestige, or the desire to have children—into account when deciding whether to wed, but these, in the absence of love, are not enough reason to get married.
In a similar way, love of learning will not, and need not, always be a sufficient reason to do academic work, but it is a necessary one. The desire for professional advancement is only natural. The demand for practical relevance is entirely reasonable, perhaps desirable, and certainly inevitable. But, unless animated by the devotion to learning, none of these reasons is a wholly legitimate ground to undertake a work of scholarship. Work produced only for the sake of professional advancement will be mechanical, perhaps formally correct but ultimately uninteresting. Work undertaken only for a practical agenda will generally be socially manipulative.
Even as Newman articulated the ideal of learning for its own sake, it was being aggressively challenged by the demands of industry. With the Industrial Revolution, the predominant model for academic institutions became the factory. The history of colleges and universities since at least the middle of the nineteenth century consists of developing ways that bits of knowledge might be systematically produced, divided, isolated, controlled for quality, exchanged, horded, and most especially, bought and sold. Knowledge was divided into fields and then into increasingly arcane specialties, presided over by ever more complicated bureaucracies. It became the subject not only of study, but also of petty struggles for power as scholars argued over which department should teach a new course or critique a new theory. The end result was a milieu in which much of the passion and energy that might have gone into innovative teaching and scholarship was dissipated in political maneuvering.
The love of learning, like other passions or ideals, is not always easy to sustain amid the practical demands of everyday life. Universities must cultivate the desire to learn, much as countries cultivate patriotism or churches cultivate religious devotion. We should remember that religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism each embrace a huge variety of radically different beliefs. Each community remains united, however, by shared traditions, symbols, fears, and aspirations. Similarly, the academic community, for all its divisions by department or specialty, may be able to promote cohesion by concentrating on Newman's updated ideal, thus connecting members through the experiences that come with devotion to learning. Academics can do this through stories of intellectual heroes from Socrates to local school teachers. They can discuss, without sentimentality, the compromises or sacrifices that this ideal may at times entail.
Both religion and higher education invite people to consider activities and agendas that, in our everyday lives, might appear absurd. They both provide contexts, however, in which we can at least think about preposterous ideas such as, say, loving your neighbor as yourself or pursuing knowledge for its own sake. If each professional discipline is a separate house in the neighborhood, the liberal studies can function as a sort of village square before a church, with taverns and markets where all may gather to discuss the problems of the day.
Reference
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