Liberal Education and the Development
of Social Consciousness
Robert Williams | Pepperdine University
Delivered February 5, 2016
at the Fifteenth Annual Conversation on the Liberal Arts
Westmont College, Santa Barbara, CA
Liberal Education and the Development of Social Consciousness
Robert E. Williams, Jr.
Professor of Political Science
Pepperdine University
[email protected]
Gaede Institute Conversation on the Liberal Arts
Westmont College
February 4-6, 2016
In one of the many recent books defending liberal education from what seems to be a
growing number of highly placed critics, Robert J. Thompson argues that higher education ought
to foster among students “an integrated sense of identity that includes commitment to social
responsibility and civic engagement.”1 This requires the development of social consciousness,
which may be defined broadly as an awareness of oneself as a part of society and of the existence
of social problems. While social consciousness may be developed in many ways, some of which
involve painful personal experiences, liberal education seeks to create social consciousness
within the protected space of the college or university. History, philosophy, the social sciences,
literature, the arts, and other disciplines play an important role in generating awareness of
injustice and human suffering. Even learning that is pursued with the narrow aim of enhancing
the quality of life of the individual must, arguably, do so while promoting a sense of social
responsibility. This happens in many ways. For example, reading Thucydides may bring to mind
questions about the persistence of war or the fragility of democratic governance. Studying
biology may lead one to consider genetically modified organisms or other human interventions
1
Robert J. Thompson, Beyond Reason and Tolerance: The Purpose and Practice of Higher Education (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2014), xii.
2
in nature. As John Muir noted, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to
everything else in the Universe.”2 So it is in the liberal arts—and in society—as in nature.
The aim of this paper is simply to offer a few reflections on the relationship between
liberal education and the development of social consciousness. At a time when some are
suggesting that higher education should be focused on vocational concerns—that is, preparing
students to enter the workforce—we must ask whether there is still a place for courses of study
that examine questions of justice. And assuming there is, is it better to take on such questions
directly, or are there benefits in allowing students to encounter them individually and in
unexpected places? Whether directly or indirectly, how might we help students develop social
consciousness as we offer the elements of a liberal education? Before considering these
questions, let us begin with a brief look at a few perspectives on the value of liberal education for
a democratic society.
The Social Significance of Liberal Education
In spite of persistent questions—from politicians, pundits, and parents, among others—
liberal education endures in large measure due to the benefits it provides both the individual and
society. The individual gains the ability to think, to learn, and to discern. Society, in the political,
economic, social, and cultural spheres, benefits from having members with these abilities.
Indeed, much of what makes liberal education useful to the individual makes it absolutely
essential to a well-ordered society. This is especially true for democracies where citizens are
entrusted with the responsibility of governing themselves. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams,
who differed on many questions related to public policy, were in perfect agreement on the
2
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 110.
3
proposition that an educated citizenry is essential to democracy and that, for this reason,
government must offer publicly financed educational opportunities. For Jefferson, preparation
for citizenship required not just any form of education but, at the university level, one offering a
broad exposure to the liberal arts. The importance of an educational system that promotes critical
thinking is every bit as important now as it was at the founding of the Republic. Susan Jacoby
argued in an influential 2008 book that “America is . . . ill with a powerful mutant strain of
intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism.”3 What passes for political
discourse—and what attracts many voters—in an election year appears to validate her judgment
eight years later. Andrew Delbanco, making the case for college, writes, “The best chance we
have to maintain a functioning democracy is a citizenry that can tell the difference between
demagoguery and responsible arguments.”4
While the liberal education to which Jefferson was committed included neither black
Americans nor women (Jefferson’s “academical village,” the University of Virginia, began
admitting a small number of black Americans in the 1950s and became fully coeducational only
in 19705), its emancipatory character was well understood by many of those whom he excluded.
In 1829, just ten years after the University of Virginia was founded and three years after
Jefferson died, David Walker, a black shopkeeper in Boston and the son of a slave, published his
Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. In the Appeal, Walker argued that education
provided the way to freedom: “For colored people to acquire learning in this country, makes
tyrants quake and tremble on their sandy foundation.”6 Frederick Douglass was also convinced
3
Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), xx.
Andrew Delbanco, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 29.
5
Sierra Bellow, Carianne King, and Emma Rathbone, “Women at the University of Virginia,” Virginia, Spring
2011, available at http://uvamagazine.org/articles/women_at_the_university_of_virginia.
6
David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the
World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of
4
4
of the importance of education as a path to emancipation. Just as Walker was responding, in part,
to the illiberal aspects of Jefferson’s thought in making his case for the education of blacks,
Douglass was reacting to a white man’s prejudices. In his Autobiography, Douglass reports that
when Sophia Auld, his teacher, had him demonstrate his reading skills to her husband, the latter
argued that he would be spoiled by education. “If he learns to read the Bible it will forever unfit
him to be a slave. He should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it. As to
himself, learning will do him no good, but a great deal of harm.”7
Mary Wollstonecraft and a host of feminists argued for the emancipation of women
through access to education. “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an
end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and
sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep woman in the dark, because the former
only want slaves, and the latter a plaything.”8
Education, as conceived by Jefferson, Adams, and other theorists of democracy, was
valued for its utility in helping citizens manage the demands of self-government. For
Wollstonecraft, Walker, Douglass, and other members of subordinated groups, education was
considered essential to the attainment of citizenship. In part, this was because the ability to be
educated would demonstrate the capacity, and thus the humanity, of people who were thought
incapable of acting autonomously. But the feminist and abolitionist movements also valued
education for its ability to reveal to those who were oppressed the injustice of the social
structures in which they lived and the possibilities for their own emancipation. Education, in
Massachusetts, September 28, 1829, Electronic Edition, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, 2001, p. 37, available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/walker.html.
7
Quoted in Michael S. Roth, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2014), 43.
8
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), quoted in Micheline R. Ishay, ed., The Human Rights Reader: Major
Political Essays, Speeches, Documents from Ancient Times to the Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007),
182.
5
contemporary parlance, offered an opportunity for the development of social consciousness. It
continues to have this important value for society.
Social Consciousness and Social Activism
Before addressing some of the ways that liberal education promotes social consciousness,
it be worth noting the distinction between social consciousness and social activism. Social
activism moves from awareness and a sense of responsibility into the realm of action for change.
While activism may offer a clear indication that social consciousness exists, it is generally not
considered an objective in itself of liberal education. (There are important exceptions, as the
president of Grinnell College, one of the exceptions, has noted.9) One of the principal
distinctions between liberal education and vocational education is that the former assumes that
students are free to choose for themselves what to do with their educations. The point of a course
on Italian Renaissance art is not to produce art historians—although it may be good if a few
students pursue that vocation. Not everyone who takes a government class is expected to go into
politics—or political science. The job market does in fact establish limits on the vocational
relevance of the liberal arts. What those of us in these fields understand, and must at times help
others to understand, is that there is value in the study of art history and government that need
not be instrumental.
Something similar can and perhaps should be said about the promotion of social
consciousness. I teach human rights not in order to flood the world with human rights
attorneys—if I were successful in doing so the vast majority would soon be forced by the market
Raynard Kington, “The Role of Liberal Arts Colleges in Advancing Positive Social Change,” HuffPost College,
March 23, 2011, available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raynard-kington/the-role-of-liberal-arts_b_839570.html.
9
6
to choose a different way to make a living—but to make accountants and stockbrokers and high
school teachers and doctors and even art historians more aware of human rights. If, on occasion,
an awareness of human rights abuses prompts a student to explore vocational possibilities in the
field of human rights, that may be deeply gratifying. But the real measure of my success—the
measure of success for all of us engaged in liberal education—is not how thoroughly we flood
the labor market in our area of interest but in how well we affect the way people think. Is the
successful corporate lawyer moved by her art history class to support the work of museums and
contemporary artists? Is the struggling actor moved by his government class to be informed, to
attend a political event, and to vote at every opportunity? These, as much as becoming a museum
curator or a political consultant, are the indicators of success for liberal education.
The Development of Social Consciousness
Social consciousness develops in many ways and arises from many sources. As Nobel
laureate Wangari Maathai, describing her own path to environmental awareness, put it, “A great
river always begins somewhere. Often, it starts as a strong spring bubbling up from a crack in the
soil . . . . But for the stream to grow into a river, it must meet other tributaries and gain them as it
heads for a lake or the sea.”10 What happens in the classroom may be crucial, as Maathai’s
advanced studies in biology were to her development of the Greenbelt Movement, but often
coursework merely provides a framework for the interpretation of experience. Campus life,
community service, international travel, or other co-curricular or extracurricular experiences may
be essential in the development of social consciousness. This, it seems to me, is important for
those of us whose primary contact with students is in a classroom to acknowledge. To underscore
10
Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 119.
7
the point, I begin the discussion of what liberal education can contribute to the development of
social consciousness with the idea of “sympathetic knowledge,” which Jane Addams conceived
as a means of integrating living and learning.
Sympathetic Knowledge
While many types of experiential learning are conducive to the development of social
consciousness, one that was espoused and practiced by the first American woman to win the
Nobel Peace Prize deserves special attention. For Jane Addams, the key to understanding the
needs of society and responding ethically was what she called “sympathetic knowledge.” This
concept, “her most significant contribution to philosophy,” according to Maurice Hamington,11
requires engagement with people in order to understand them and their circumstances. For
Addams, the political (and the social) must be personal, both for epistemological and ethical
reasons. As Hamington notes, Addams “wants her audience to understand racism, war, and
poverty, not just as facts, but also as inscribed on the lives of fellow humans. When we
sympathetically and affectively understand the plight of others, we are more likely to care and
act in their behalf.”12
This, it seems to me, is why we want our students to hear from Holocaust survivors while
they can. It is why we encourage internships and service-learning experiences that bring students
into contact with refugees, the homeless, trafficking survivors, and incarcerated juveniles. And it
is why we value international programs that eschew enclaves in favor of engagement. There are
certainly epistemological problems inherent in our tendency to generalize on the basis of
individual encounters, but these can be addressed in the classroom. The benefits of sympathetic
knowledge are too great to set aside.
11
12
Maurice Hamington, The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 71.
Hamington, The Social Philosophy of Jane Addams, 74.
8
For Addams, it is essential for education to connect us to others who are different.
Through the connections we make and the sympathetic knowledge we thus acquire, we become
aware of social problems—the struggles of those in poverty, the prejudice directed toward those
of a different race or nationality, the human dimensions of warfare—and, thanks to the human
capacity for empathy, we acknowledge a moral responsibility to respond. As Michael Roth
describes this educational philosophy, “We learn through the connections we forge with others.
Without the imaginative effort to acknowledge the contrasts with people different from
ourselves, we fall into intellectual and moral stagnation. Through this effort, we may discover
what we might have in common with people who seemed quite different from us. This,” Roth
continues, “is why diversity has been ever more important for institutions that aim to foster
liberal learning.”13
The nature of the institution, however, establishes limits to the type and degree of
diversity that can be achieved on a college campus. While it is important for students to learn
from and develop the ability to empathize with students (as well as faculty and staff members)
who are unlike themselves, most campuses provide few encounters with those who live on the
streets, suffer from acute illness, fear deportation, work in unsafe conditions, or go hungry. This
is one of the reasons that service-learning projects, internships, and other forms of communitybased education are made a part of liberal education. Involvement in the community can provide
an opportunity to develop sympathetic knowledge.
While the work involved in community-based education for students, professors, and site
managers is significant, the educational benefits are also noteworthy as I have learned from a
service-learning project involving students in a course called Ethics and International Politics.
13
Roth, Beyond the University, 85.
9
The project has involved placements with an organization called El Rescate. El Rescate (Spanish
for “The Rescue”) was established in the Pico-Union district of Los Angeles in 1981 to serve the
legal and social welfare needs of what was then a rapidly expanding Salvadoran émigré
community.14 War, human rights abuse, and poverty prompted tens of thousands of Central
Americans to enter the United States from the 1970s through the 1990s. Including children born
in the U.S. to Salvadoran parents, there are approximately 225,000 Salvadorans now living in
Los Angeles. El Rescate is one of several organizations serving the needs of this enormous
immigrant community.
Students in Ethics and International Politics who completed their service-learning
requirements at El Rescate performed a variety of tasks. Most often, students assisted attorneys
in the preparation of documentation required in immigration cases. This involved meeting with
clients to go through utility bills, apartment leases, payment stubs, and other materials necessary
to prove residency in the United States. It also occasionally involved sitting in on interviews
conducted in an effort to establish a case for political asylum. During these interviews, clients
sometimes detailed their experiences with torture, death threats, and other forms of human rights
abuse.
Historical Knowledge
History is a mirror—often distorting, sometimes magnifying—that helps us to see
something of our own times.15 It is never, even in the most objective telling, neutral in its content
for the simple reason that “there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation.
On the origins and early work of El Rescate, see Todd Howland, “How El Rescate, a Small Nongovernmental
Organization, Contributed to the Transformation of the Human Rights Situation in El Salvador,” Human Rights
Quarterly 30 (2008): 703-757.
15
On the idea of history as a mirror, see Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978). Tuchman’s history suggested parallels between the fourteenth and twentieth
centuries.
14
10
Behind every fact . . . is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is
important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.”16 The story that emerges from the
historian’s decisions about what to include and what to omit either highlights the injustices of the
past or glosses over them. Either approach may make it possible for a student of history to
become socially aware, but the former opens the door to social consciousness more widely. Let
me illustrate with two personal examples.
Both in high school and in college there were required year-long courses in American
history. Both were excellent courses—well taught, insightful, compelling. And by “compelling”
I mean that I was persuaded to become a history major. In spite of the quality of both courses and
both teachers, the pace was such that many important events and movements in American history
were covered in a single day of class. Such is the nature of most survey courses.
Thus it was that I learned about Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme
Court case that mandated an end to racial segregation in public schools. I even learned about the
second Brown ruling, in 1955, that required public schools to be desegregated “with all
deliberate speed.” My classes did not, however, tell me about the subsequent history of Brown v.
Board beyond what happened in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. That was something that I
learned about much later as I prepared myself to teach American government. But—and this is
more pertinent to the story—it was also something that struck me, in a way that I would
characterize as an element in the development of social consciousness, a decade or two after
those high school and college surveys of American history. On a visit to the small Texas town
where I had attended school up to third grade, I saw a boarded-up elementary school on the edge
of town. It dawned on me then that my first- and second-grade classes had been all white but that
16
Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 684.
11
my third-grade class—in 1967-68—had been racially integrated. This dim memory was
confirmed later when I consulted yearbook photos. Brown v. Board of Education had come to
my town twelve years after the Supreme Court had ordered integration “with all deliberate
speed.” The education I received in high school and college had given me the tools to understand
this, but not quickly and not easily.
In contrast, a two-semester college course titled American Diplomacy provided a much
more immediate payoff in terms of social consciousness. The course was a history of U.S.
foreign policy from the beginning of the Republic to the present and, for me, it was an epiphany.
In addition to a fine but fairly conventional survey of the subject by Robert H. Ferrell, we read
William Appleman Williams’s revisionist history, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.17 It
caused me to sit up and pay attention—and to decide that I wanted to study U.S. foreign policy in
graduate school as a political scientist and not as a historian. I wanted to change the future and
not, as historians are wont to do, the past.
There are, of course, deep and longstanding debates among historians about why and how
we ought to approach the past. But regardless of one’s position in these debates, history, and the
liberal arts more generally, will always have the potential to promote social awareness.
For many students in American history courses since its first publication in 1965, an
important spur toward social consciousness has been Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the
United States. By focusing attention on individuals and groups long neglected in standard
accounts of American history—native Americans, the poor, soldiers on the front lines (rather
than generals), and factory workers, among others—A People’s History reveals many of the
17
The first edition was published the year I was born. The third edition (1972) was the one I first encountered. For
the most recent edition, see William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 50th Anniversary
Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).
12
hidden and systemic injustices spread across the timeline of American history. Concerning his
motivation Zinn wrote, “I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a greater consciousness of
class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality, and national arrogance.”18
The transformative potential in works of history is almost limitless. Charles Beard’s An
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political
Tradition loom large, as do the works of Eric Foner. John Hersey’s Hiroshima makes a simple
but powerful statement about the use of the atomic bomb against Japan at the end of World War
II. Blending history and foreign policy analysis, Andrew Bacevich and the late Chalmers
Johnson have produced important critiques of U.S. security policies more recently.
Works on the politics of race in the United States may deserve special mention in this
historical moment. From The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass to The Autobiography of
Malcolm X, the personal experiences of blacks in the United States have had a powerful impact
on readers regardless of race. Today, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ National Book Award-winning treatise
Between the World and Me is contributing to the ongoing discussion prompted by the Black
Lives Matter movement.
Of course, movies (both feature films and documentaries) can be as effective as books
when it comes to raising awareness. Questions of race and the failure of the United States to live
up to its ideals of equality are addressed in Amistad, Glory, Mississippi Burning, The Help, and
The Butler, among many other excellent feature films. War and its effects are highlighted in a
host of movies, among the best of which are, arguably, Saving Private Ryan, Dr. Strangelove,
Platoon, Gallipoli, and Breaker Morant.19
18
Zinn, 686.
For films related to a broad range of human rights issues, see Mark Gibney, Watching Human Rights: The 101
Best Films (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2013). Many films treating war, human rights, poverty, and other
themes related to international relations are discussed in an older book: Robert W. Gregg, International Relations on
19
13
Literary and Artistic Knowledge
For some, social consciousness arises more readily from an encounter with the arts.
Book groups and community theater were featured at Hull House because Jane Addams believed
that “literature and drama can enhance sympathetic knowledge as one empathizes with fictitious
characters.”20
Richard Wright’s Native Son, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Alice Walker’s The Color
Purple are among the many novels that shed light on the black experience in the United States.
On the stage, the ten plays in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle (including Pulitzer Prizewinning plays The Piano Lesson and Fences) offer additional glimpses of that experience.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, in print and on the screen, is the vehicle through which
many Americans have arrived at a deeper awareness of racial injustice.
Poverty and labor injustices have been depicted in novels such as Upton Sinclair’s The
Jungle and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Antiwar novels from Erich Maria
Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22 have prompted generations of readers to think deeply about war. The same has
been true for poetry from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Arsenal at Springfield” to
Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner.”
The visual arts offer another path to social consciousness. Picasso’s Guernica stands out
as the classic artistic statement against war, but there are others from Peter Paul Rubens’ The
Consequences of War to John Singer Sargent’s Gassed! Jean-Francois Millet’s Man with a Hoe
Film (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998). For movies addressing a broader range of social problems than either of
the aforementioned books, see Michael D. Gose, Getting Reel: A Social Science Perspective on Film (Youngstown,
NY: Cambria Press, 2006).
20
Maurice Hamington, “Jane Addams,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N.
Zalta (ed.), available at http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/addams-jane/.
14
and Diego Rivera’s The Flower Carrier force viewers to reflect on the back-breaking burden of
poverty.
Recognizing the Development of Social Consciousness
Is it possible to know when our students have achieved a measure of social
consciousness? Traditional assessment tools may be able to answer the question. Students who
can write knowledgeably about injustice on exams, in papers, or in journals have in all likelihood
gained the kind of sympathetic, historical, or literary knowledge that yields social consciousness.
But we may also find evidence of social consciousness in their activism. When we see that
students are seeking internships or service-learning placements in positions that address injustice,
it is likely that a sense of social responsibility is at work. Likewise, those who join, or sometime
form, organizations such as a campus chapter of Amnesty International or an ecology club are
probably acting on the basis of social consciousness. And when previously apathetic students
protest, campaign, or engage in public policy debates, one can be certain that social
consciousness has emerged. There may be, however, another sign that students have come to
recognize the existence of injustice: disillusionment.
At an open forum for students on the subject of diversity last fall, one student expressed
disappointment with Pepperdine. Pepperdine, he said, was not what it had seemed to be in its
promotional materials, in its videos, and in the descriptions of its recruiters. While there is no
doubt that Pepperdine presents a highly polished version of itself to prospective students, that
was not what was at the heart of this student’s observations. He was disillusioned—at least that
was my word to describe what I was hearing—by Pepperdine’s failure to live up to its ideals. I
felt a great deal of empathy for that students because I felt the same thing, although probably for
different reasons, on a different campus thirty-five years ago.
15
There is an affective aspect of disillusionment. It can involve sadness, and perhaps even
depression. But disillusionment, understood literally, means having one’s illusions stripped
away. And that is precisely what is supposed to happen with the development of critical thinking
skills. It is also, quite often, the product of coming to understand human behavior more fully.
The student of international law may find the subject inspiring when learning about Eleanor
Roosevelt’s work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Raphael Lemkin’s work on the
Genocide Convention, or Robert Jackson’s work on the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. But
when the subject turns to the role that segregationists played in blocking U.S. efforts to advance
international human rights, the low and dishonest efforts of the Liberty Lobby to prevent U.S.
ratification of the Genocide Convention, or the U.S. government’s rejection of the Rome Statute
for the International Criminal Court, disillusionment accurately describes both a cognitive
process that occurs and an emotional response that results. When the belief that all is right with
the world yields to the recognition that injustice exists, disillusionment is what we ought to
expect.
Derek Bok complained in 2003 that “faculties currently display scant interest in preparing
undergraduates to be democratic citizens, a task once regarded as the principal purpose of a
liberal education and one urgently needed at this moment in the United States.”21 Whether his
criticism was fair or not, the need Bok identified is no less urgent today. Faculty teaching in the
liberal arts must be aware that there is transformative potential in what we do. This is something
worth reminding ourselves as well as those who question the relevance of liberal education.
21
Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003), 30n.