Scott Buchanan

“ Since it is not our policy to select only the best students for admission, but rather to aim at the normal distribution of ability that is found in the average American community, we count heavily on the normal social processes of mutual understanding to catch and amplify the teaching. Our classes exemplify in their various styles all the types of collaborative study, allowing even the dull or slow student on occasion to hold the class to the main learning purpose. ”

“ We refuse to accept this imposition wherever it would force us to sacrifice understanding to professional rote and rule of thumb. In place of these we emphasize basic concepts, basic techniques of measurement and experimentation, and general skills of the laboratory, in short those starting-points which make the rapid acquisition and revision of scientific knowledge a matter of habit and second nature. In terms of this fundamental training, our work in natural science more than meets the genuine requirements of pre-professional education. ”

“ It was generally admitted that every free citizen should be able to read, write, and reckon, and that every professional man should have a mind free enough and disciplined enough to recognize his professional ends and to understand the means which must be used to achieve them. Academies and liberal colleges were established to assure intellectual freedom and discipline to the professions and their respective schools. It was therefore necessary merely to use a few familiar phrases to identify and describe an institution that was teaching the "liberal arts and sciences." ”

“ Three hundred years ago algebra and the arts of analytic mathematics were introduced into European thought by René Descartes. This is perhaps the greatest intellectual revolution in recorded history, paralleling the other great revolutions in religion, morals, politics and industry. No liberal, and therefore no citizen of a democratic country, can afford to be ignorant of this change and its issues. It has redefined and transformed our whole natural and cultural world. ”

“ The result is that the student now must make a vocational choice at some point in his secondary education and changes it later only at great educational risk. One thing he cannot choose because it does not exist in our educational system: that is a balanced liberal education.
This situation, as soon as it is recognized, constitutes a crisis, a point where judgment and decision can be made. We can choose to restore the liberal arts, not necessarily the old curriculum, but a modern equivalent. That is what St. John's College decided to do in 1937. ”

“ The Tutorials Every good student knows that his learning must be double. He must be acquiring the skills that go with the subject matter, but he must also get to know his teacher. The converse of this is even more important for good teaching: the good teacher knows that he must be in the learning process himself and he must also know his pupil. The tutorial class, which is composed of not more than ten students meeting five times a week, provides the ideal conditions for collaborative study and for the manifold teaching and learning relations that hold in a company of good friends. ”

“ The fourth criterion demands that a great book shall raise the persistent and humanly unanswerable questions about the great themes in human experience. On the one hand this means that a great book shall be honest about the limits of its powers of exposition, admitting the paradoxes and mysteries that surround the practice of the liberal arts. ”

“ We are also emphasizing language and mathematics for reasons that will appear on later pages. On the other hand we are reading the classics in English. As we do that, certain criteria emerge and provide a new understanding of the original motives in classical liberal arts education. The criteria divide themselves into two kinds, those that are exemplified in single books and make them great, and those that appear in the effects that one book has on another and on the reader and teacher.
The first criterion is that a classic must be a master of the liberal arts. ”

“ Next comes the reading and talking teacher who is a member of the faculty: his stage of learning is somewhere between the author and the best student. There then follow the other students at distances proportional to their degree of understanding. The old-fashioned ranking of classes in the little red schoolhouse is the image that we have in mind. At the head of the class is the author-teacher, at the foot of the class the worst student in relation to the subject matter. All the others are both teachers and pupils, each learning from those above and teaching those below. ”

“ On the contrary it is possible to discover in a great work such as Dante's Divine Comedy or Newton's Principia several distinct, complete, and independent meanings, each allowing the others to stand by its side and each supporting and complementing the others. It is the business of a liberal artist to construct such works and also to analyze and understand them. ”

“ The fine arts contain the most imposing set of disciplines that have established themselves and survived in the modern world by claiming independence from the liberal arts. It is one of our aims to recover and reintegrate them with the liberal arts. We are therefore providing for them outside the curriculum and planning to reassimilate them by stages, first by including music in the curriculum, reading musical scores in the seminars, and studying harmony in the laboratory. ”

“ The worker and the tradesman in this country belong to a liberal society that demands a liberal education of all its members.
The professions that base themselves on specialization in the natural sciences have set up graduate departments that actually need more liberal education in their preparatory stages than is at present available in the elective system. In failing to get students who have that minimal general education, they have been forced to turn to a second best, a more intensive specialized preparatory training. ”

“ The major success in that minimal democratic education has made abundantly clear the need in addition for the universal distribution of critical intelligence, a minimal intellectuality which can distinguish between fact and fiction, between principle and case, between opinion and insight, between propaganda and instruction, between truth and falsity. This degree of intellectual training is absolutely necessary for the highest activities of men in democratic society, namely for both individual and common deliberation and decision in practical affairs. ”

“ There may be some doubt in the minds of the small business man and the craftsman about the utility of a liberal education for earning a living. One who shares these doubts should read the early American State Papers and follow the current discussions of the fundamental conditions and principles of American society to get free of the prejudices which we inherit from societies that base themselves on invidious class distinctions. ”

“ The medical schools, the sources of the heaviest pre-professional requirements, have expressed willingness, in some cases enthusiasm, to consider our graduates as candidates. Their faculties realize the importance of the liberal education of the physician, see that we require more hours in the laboratory than they ask for, and believe that this basic instruction will lay a good foundation for professional training. On the other hand, a warning should be given that the St. John's student is running the risk that radical innovation entails. ”

“ Mathematics belongs to the liberal arts and its development through symbolic procedures throws a great deal of light not only on speculation but upon the literary and scientific imagination. As in the case of the language tutorials, the small class of not over ten students allows individual diagnosis and instruction, and the student who has difficulties on the operational level may have special remedial laboratory exercises prescribed for him. Thus hand-minded boys may discover the liberal dimensions of their skills. ”

“ In the center and foreground stands a pair of chemical balances which represents the instruments of the modern scientific laboratory, where the liberal arts are being practiced at their best and fullest in the modern world.
A great deal is said these days about the teaching of methods, but the professional and specialist's bias has left its mark here as elsewhere. It is obvious to any teacher that there are different methods for different subject matters, but where experts and specialists disagree then free men must decide. ”

“ Among other things it means that each man must have his measure of liberal education, since choices can be neither free nor intelligent without relevant training and understanding.
These trainings and understandings are parts of the liberal arts and sciences. Each profession and vocation is partly liberal; therefore professional and vocational schools study their respective minimal amounts of theoretical science. But in addition there are basic trainings and understandings common to all vocations and therefore common necessities of all free men. ”

“ The liberal colleges, together with the public schools, are the spiritual strongholds of the liberal state which watches and insures that men shall be able to do what they ought to do.
the crisis in liberal education By a series of historical accidents following the establishment of the elective system by Eliot of Harvard in the late nineteenth century, such single-minded institutions are no longer available for the training of youth. Eliot introduced the device of free election of studies in order to absorb and assimilate the natural sciences to the liberal arts tradition. ”

“ In view of the great scientific and social problems facing the medical profession it may be wise to plan a year of graduate work in mathematics and physics between graduation and entrance to medical school. Medical schools are not asking for such additional preparation, but the needs of medical wisdom are great beyond the power of liberal education alone to meet. ”

“ This is of first importance in teaching, and its principle is almost universally violated in the textbooks that have developed in the ordinary elective system. The great books were written for the ordinary intelligent public, and they therefore have the seductive charm of works in the fine arts. They are intrinsically interesting and impose their disciplines with pleasure. ”

“ John's College is making the attempt.
The strategy is to recruit specialists in the sciences as teachers, to re-educate them in the liberal arts, and to reorganize the laboratory as an instrument of liberal rather than pre-professional training. This is the research problem that is set for the faculty, and it will continue to attack the problem step by step.
The laboratory staff contains an engineer and a medical man, scientists whose interests can range beyond the special boundaries of each science. ”

“ There is also an opportunity for each student to contribute his measure of instruction to his fellows.
The Language Tutorial The aim here is to use some external device that will induce the strengthening and disciplining of the imagination. Foreign languages have often been praised for their mental discipline, but the vagueness of the statement mirrors the decay of a pedagogical technique. The imagination is the place where the intellect touches human experience, but it cannot do its work if the imagination is not prepared to receive intellectual light. ”