‘The Body of Liberal Learning’
The title of my talk is ‘The body of liberal learning,’ though I could have titled it more provocatively, and polemically, ‘The liberal arts bias against the body.’ Let me explain.
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In the 17th and 18th centuries when U.S. colleges were founded, English was not an academic area of study, let alone a part of the liberal arts. The only languages worthy of a liberal arts education were ancient Greek and Latin.
In the 19th century, the liberal arts faculty at the University of Pennsylvania incredibly rejected proposals to add the new academic disciplines of history, government and economics as part of the liberal arts curriculum there. (Thelin, 86) That’s right, the liberal arts faculty rejected these now essential liberal arts fields.
In the 19th century, music and dance were purely extra-curricular activities and not considered worthy academic areas of study. After contentious debates, they eventually became legitimate majors in the liberal arts in the 20th century.
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Everything has a history and changes. The universe. The earth. Species. Societies. Languages. Religions. Families. And so, too, the liberal arts.
Their nature has never been fixed in the U.S. They have evolved historically as educators and administrators (and even legislators) argued over their fundamental purposes in reaction to the social, economic and political affairs of the time. To be more specific:
1. In the 17th, 18th and first half of the 19th centuries, one of the main goals of the liberal arts was to discipline the mind through the study of abstract subjects like Greek grammar and mathematics that had no relation to real life or the practical affairs of the world.
2. Another goal of the liberal arts during that time period was to form the manners, morality and religious piety or devotion of a Christian gentleman.
3. With the establishment of public land-grant universities in the second-half of the 19th century, the orientation of the liberal arts began to shift toward pragmatic or useful purposes. Their goals were to understand the economic, political and social problems in an emerging industrial country after the Civil War. These ‘utility defenders’ ridiculed the traditional view of disciplining the mind and learning for its own sake independently of real world concerns.
4. Also during this time, another view emerged that the main goal of the liberal arts was to form a ‘cultured’ human being. Expose students to the best ideas in the humanities, particularly in art and literature, so they can develop refined tastes and sensibilities to counter the growing influence of commercialism and common or vulgar taste.
5. In the second-half of the 20th century during the civil rights era, many universities reconceived the main purpose of the liberal arts to understand the sources of inequality and to create a more just society
6. And in our 21st century, other new goals have become prominent, such as teamwork, global responsibility, civic engagement, and intercultural understanding.
Many of these different historical purposes that I have described can still be found today in faculty and administrators’ beliefs about the goals of the liberal arts, reflecting continuing disagreement about them. That’s why disagreements about general education programs, where the liberal arts are most visible today, are the most contentious and intractable. I’ve been a part of many at Pacific.
But there has been one dimension of liberal arts learning that has been completely neglected—the training and development of the body.
My main message this morning is that, just as Pacific’s liberal arts have prepared you to develop habits of life-long learning in a breadth of areas, you should also develop habits of physical fitness and physical movement.
And physical training should become a formal part of the liberal arts curriculum through organized fitness activities—such as strength training, running, Pilates, yoga—and organized sports.
Why has the body, physical movement, been left out of the liberal arts?
I don’t know all of the historical factors, but a significant one has been the influence of the predominant schools of ancient Greek philosophy and of Christian theology and their shared view of mind-body dualism.
This is the doctrine that that the soul—what psychologists and philosophers today call the ‘mind’—is separable from the body, can exist apart from it, and that it is the most essential aspect of a human being or human existence.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle held that the highest form of human happiness was the life of theoretical contemplation, not of practical action. Why? Because theorizing was the closest that humans could get to god—the unmoved mover that set everything in motion in the universe and whose only activity is thought because the divine is immaterial or does not have a body.
And for much of Christian theology, it is the soul that has the spark of divinity and is immortal, not the body, which is the source of corrupting desires and perishes. To quote from the Gospel of John, in the beginning was the word, the logos, and not the body.
So it’s not an historical accident that the development of the mind and emphasis on theoretical understanding has had exclusive prominence in the liberal arts.
And this priority was reflected in the establishment of the first liberal arts curriculum in the 11th century in Europe, a curriculum that was appropriated by the first U.S. colleges during the colonial era before the Revolutionary War against England.
The liberal arts were, and still are, contrasted with the ‘mechanical’ arts—what today we call ‘vocational’ training—which involve the use of the body and physical movement skills. Back in the 17th century, these would be arts like building, mining, and making textiles.
The mechanical arts were for the working class who did not have the wealth, social status and leisure to study the seven original liberal arts that composed the liberal arts curriculum: grammar, rhetoric, formal logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.
Today, the liberal arts are considered those areas of study that are not focused on particular, practical or ‘professional’ skills but on the domains of human learning in the natural sciences, mathematics, the social sciences, the arts and the humanities.
But where is the development of the body and its integration with the mind?
One of the few Renaissance-era thinkers who challenged the neglect of the training of the body in the university liberal arts curriculum was Michel de Montaigne, who invented the writing genre of the ‘essay.’Montaigne criticized his curriculum at the College of Guyenne in 16th century France for its exclusive focus on developing the intellect and lack of practicality. He believed ‘the discomfort and hardship of exercise’ was good preparation for the discomforts of life (Montaigne, 1985, 59) and that ‘even games and exercises will form a good part of his study: running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, the management of horses and of weapons…It is not a soul or a body that one is training, but a man; the two must not be separated’ (Montaigne, 1985, 72).
I contend that structured and rigorous physical activity should be part of the liberal arts for the following three reasons:
1. The liberal arts train and exercise the human mind to move more freely against the obstacles of ignorance, prejudice, superstition and tradition. This freedom of thought is reflected in the Latin word ‘liberalis’ for the liberals artes. And the liberal arts not only expand freedom of thinking but display the excellences or virtues of thought.
Physical exercise can do the same. It can liberate the body by creating a greater range of freedom of movement, flexibility, and strength. It opens up new ways of experiencing oneself and the world. And physical movement can exhibit its own forms of human excellences and beauty just as thinking, speaking and writing do.
2. A central goal of a liberal arts education is to gain greater self-awareness and self-knowledge. Physical activity can provide just as profound of a learning opportunity by providing regular tests for these and other questions: who are you? what are your strengths and shortcomings? can you persist through fatigue to achieve a goal? what are your limits? can you translate your goals into reality? Can you manage your emotions under physical duress? can you handle disappointment? can you exhibit fairness and respect for others while competing?
3. Finally, developing the body is part of a holistic education. We are minds and bodies, psychological and physical beings. The liberal arts have neglected this fact. And we have undeniable evidence that physical fitness is not only essential for one’s health and well-being but also for improved cognitive functioning.
Earlier, I mentioned the ancient philosophical and theological sources of the liberal arts’ bias against the body. But the liberal arts should return to its ancient source, to the thinker that inspired the medieval liberal arts curriculum—the Athenian philosopher Plato. In his theory of a utopian society, he described an ideal education for the leaders that integrated training mind and body, what he called ‘mixing music or philosophy with gymnastic.’
The leaders were to learn mathematics, geometry, astronomy, and logic. Notice the inspiration for the first liberal arts curriculum 1300 years later in the first European universities.
Future leaders were also to experience two years of intensive physical training that would prepare them to fight on the battlefield, to develop the mental discipline to persist through their difficult academic study, and to integrate the mental and physical, soul and body, to form what Plato called a ‘well harmonized human being.’
Plato got things wrong in his account of the ideal society, but he had this right—the liberal arts should help promote the mental and physical habits to form a more well-harmonized individual.
Perhaps the liberal arts will evolve in the future to include the training of the body. In your unprecedented era of an existence that is often online and virtual, I think it is all the more imperative to be physically active throughout your life.
Continue to learn broadly, inspire others to do so, and go exercise today!
Thank you for listening.