Fish out of water

Another MDS 3001W assignment, on another essay from The University In Your Life. This one is Charles Frankel's "Teaching Fish the Meaning of Water."

1.  In Frankel’s “Teaching the Fish the Meaning of Water,” what relation does Frankel propose between liberal education and self-discovery? Using your experience this semester, what connections have you been finding between university education and the discovery of self?

   For Frankel, the process of discovering self comes not through seeking to discover yourself, but by “discovering other things – things outside you, things that formed you, things you have an obligation toward. The relationship between a liberal education and self-discovery is that a liberal education can allow you to discover these other things, and thereby yourself.
   This semester, I have continued by journey of self-discovery. In my adult life, I have gained some understanding of things outside of me and things that formed me. I have encountered greater difficulty untangling the web of things I have an obligation toward, or deciding how to fulfill those obligations. Through this course and my remaining university studies I hope to begin to answer those questions and more readily face the “inescapability of choice.”


2. Discuss the aims of liberal education in medieval Europe and the reasons those aims have changed in modern times.


   Liberal education in medieval Europe was reserved for elites. Students were taught mathematics, grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. These disciplines were believed to allow for an understanding of God's language, the world He created, and His plans for us. Such knowledge was mankind's destiny as well as its obligation to God.
   These ideas first lost sway as the church lost its place as the central organizer of society undermined the justifications for such an education. The rise of science recast learning from a merely contemplative activity to one of manipulation, not merely understanding the world but changing it. Finally, a more democratic world made it impossible to reserve education for the most privileged. These forces combined to create a new vision of education as valuable for producing virtuous citizens and a pool of wise future leaders. Frankel argues that the aims of a liberal education should be redefined again to be giving students an intellectual perspective on life.


3.  "What is the point of a Liberal Education?" Discuss your view of this and how it agrees or disagrees with Frankel's.

   Until completing the recent readings, I would have had a very hard time articulating what “point” I saw to a liberal education. I might have said that it's important to learn about a variety of things, or to see things from another perspective. I would have said that it's important not to focus just on skills for a job. My critical view on the current state of education would probably not have allowed me to form an ideal for a liberal education and what it can accomplish. Frankel's chapter, especially, has changed how I think about the purpose and ideals of a liberal education.

   The “idea of perspective, of intellectual sympathy with many points of view, of moral clarity towards and clarity about a variety of human concerns, is what I think is involved in a liberal education.” I wish that all people entering a liberal arts school would come away with, “a capacity of looking at [themself] with humor and irony as others might look at [them] and of seeing the possibility that other might be right.” I hope that in my remaining time in school, I will learn to be better able to, “generalize out of [my] experience and use generalizations to interpret [my] experience.