Connections - An Alumni and Friends Magazine by Holy Cross College, Notre Dame, IN
How We Learn to Think & Why a College that Encourages Thinking
Still Matters
Fed up with his mother's and my demands to read more books this summer, my 15-year-old son challenged me, "Why should I have to read 'storybooks'? They're not even true, so I'm not learning anything useful!" He spit out the word "story" like it tasted bad in his mouth.
He had me cornered.
I wanted to use that tried and true parental response to everything really important, "Because I said so!" But, he was getting too old for simple answers. Instead, I stalled for time. I hate to admit it, but I tried bribery. I said I would buy him a new video game for every three books he read this summer. But, I knew that was wrong on so many levels.
I thought about it for a few days searching for a better answer. I didn't like books at his age either, but my mother encouraged me to read, and eventually I grew to love books. They entertain me, satisfy my curiosity, keep me company like a good friend, and teach me most of what I know about the world. Are these things important to a 15-year-old? He already knows everything (because all kids his age know everything). He already has plenty of friends and entertains himself with sports and a virtual gaming world that is so realistic it almost beats what I've imagined in books.
I thought about it. If there is one thing that reading books has taught me to do, it is to ruminate. Like a cow working on his meal, I think, forget about it for a while then bring it back up and think some more. Eventually, I digest the issue and answers come to me.
My son's challenge reminded me of the same problem we face here at Holy Cross College. As a liberal arts college, our students spend a lot of their time with their eyes focused on "story books." How do we justify a liberal arts education in a time of economic recession, a time when the practical and the marketable surely must outweigh the intellectual and the aesthetic?
How can reading stories get you a job? How can we ask donors to contribute to a college that emphasizes the fictional, philosophical, and theological over the practical and the technical?
How can we justify the expense of a four-year degree when so much of that time is spent, not on training for a career, but on reading stories?
After a few days, I had the "eureka moment" I was hoping for.
I realized that stories deliver something that can't be found anywhere else in any other media or art form, or in any other exercise, practice or technical training.
TV and movies don't have it. Google can't search it. Exercise can't improve it. Video games will never be able to reproduce it (no matter how close virtual reality comes to real life). Art, inventions and music are the artifacts of it but not the activity itself.
What I was doing while trying to find the answer, actually was the answer.
Thinking.
Storybooks, I realized, and for that matter, narratives of all kinds - letters, poetry, biography, histories - are step-by-step records of the human process of thinking. Books reproduce memory, analysis, assumptions, and the drawing of conclusions. They often include monologues of inner thoughts - real thinking in action, right there on paper!
We can't see, smell, feel, or hear the thoughts of others, we can only read them. In fact, as you read my words, I know they will be flowing across your consciousness influencing your own thoughts and, hopefully, you'll be generating brand new thoughts as you challenge my assumptions and come to your own conclusions. You are literally reading my mind, and that is making you think. When was the last time television made you do that?
How can we ever learn to think if we don't learn from others?
Anyone can throw a rock and hit a barn, but who can pitch a 90-mph fastball for a strike without years of coaching? Authors, philosophers, poets, theologians, and the professors who push students to understand all the shades of their written meaning are the coaches every young person needs to become a high-quality, professional thinker - someone who can think fast, tricky thoughts that hit the target.
Mathematics also trains the mind to think. And it is an important skill for describing and discovering the known physical universe. However, except at the highest levels, math deals with finding one correct answer. In social human endeavors, one answer is never enough. Math will never save a marriage, inspire a nation or heal a religious or political division. It can never explain yearning, fear, hatred, glory or love - all the things that unite or drive people apart.
Young people come to us with fuzzy thoughts - ill defined, unrefined, emotion driven, need based, self-centered, and scattered. Then, something magical happens in the process of reading great books and learning to write, critique, ask questions, and discuss them. Thoughts become clearer and more focused. Empathy for humanity develops. Understanding and focus improves. The ability to communicate clearly and specifically grows.
In this growth process, writing is the perfect complement to reading. Writing is how we prove to the world we have understood what we have read and we have learned to think and communicate. Although, we can share thoughts by speaking our minds, as it were. Writing adds its own magic to the process by forcing us to organize our thoughts and to make them clearer, more concise and more interesting.
According to two recent studies, the new writing component in the SAT test is the best predictor of college success, over math and reading comprehension. "The College Board reached that preliminary conclusion after analyzing the test scores and first-year grades for a total of 150,000 freshmen at 110 colleges. Another study, conducted by the University of California, reached a similar conclusion based on data from first-year students in that system."(Chronicle of Higher Learning.)
Writing makes you think and rethink. In the writing process, we begin to imagine how our readers may respond to our thoughts. Will they misunderstand? How can I make my thoughts clearer?
Is thinking less important today just because the Dow is down 3,000 points? Does thinking become the enemy in a recession? Most biographies of great people such as the stories of individuals who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps start with the youth's discovery of books. If individuals can pull themselves out of poverty by reading and writing, can't a society recover from recession the same way? Or, should we trade Shakespeare and St. Augustine for Excel and PowerPoint training just until the economy recovers?
Many people obviously believe we should do more training. President Obama recently proposed a $12 billion program to fund community colleges at a time when liberal arts colleges like ours are struggling and community colleges that will be receiving the funds are busting at the seams with new students.
Yes, training is important, but if students spend two years training for a career, when will they learn to think for themselves? Since when has limiting the exploration of ideas ever benefited an economy or a society for that matter?
It is true that skill training is one road to success. We need people who can fix things when they break, install machines, process blood samples, and build things. But even tradesman would benefit from supplementing two years of skill training with an extra two years of thought training. Athletes and entertainers have proven that our society will lavish wealth on the most highly-trained among us. However, how many times do you read about these people and think to yourself, "What on earth were they thinking?"
If there is one thing Holy Cross College does well, it is to teach individuals to think. They are required to think about their place in history, the world, their faith, and their community.
They learn to believe in themselves because they ask questions of themselves, hard questions, and think until the answers come. That's a process which will make them successful no matter what they do in life - doctor, lawyer, musician, candlestick maker, baseball player, parent.
They learn to question everything they read and everything people say, because analysis is only possible from questions and doubts.
What's more, through the investigation of plot, character and theme, Holy Cross students prepare themselves for the new characters, situations and ideas they will encounter in daily life.
According to Holy Cross English professor John Raymer, PhD., "Life is literally recorded in great literature. By reading stories, students will discover many types of characters who think very differently from themselves. In literature, students will face characters who are motivated by revenge, greed and lethargy as well as heroes who are motivated by forgiveness, compassion and enthusiasm. They will find role models to emulate and learn to avoid immoral characters and their temptations. Reading helps students learn how to understand, interpret and anticipate the events of life and how to triumph, as heroic characters do, over great difficulties."
Throughout history, the liberal arts have been considered the proper "training" for the leadership class. In fact the term "liberal arts" originates in Roman times, not from any political meaning for liberal, but from the Roman word for a free (libre) citizen. Liberal arts were the educational curriculums recommended for free men (who had to think for themselves) in contrast to the proper education for a slave - learning to follow instructions and do what you are told.
Today, the liberal arts are the proper education for a free society. By learning to read, write, think, and ask questions, the liberal arts free the mind from the chains of certainty. No society will remain free if we don't continue to question our leaders.
In a typical liberal arts classroom, students realize that everything in a book is subject to interpretation. Each student has their own idea of why a character acts the way they do. By listening to all the ideas circulating in a classroom, students gain a wider perspective. They learn to argue respectfully and construct their own ideas so that they are more convincing to others. They learn, as all good leaders should, to listen to, to learn from, to incorporate, and to respect the ideas of others. What better preparation could there be for the courtroom, the business board room or the congress for that matter?
Students of the liberal arts specifically learn to forgo the fanatic's temptation to see everyone who disagrees with them as the enemy. They cultivate the quality of humility and self doubt. As the personal letters of Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Churchill, Eisenhower, and Martin Luther King clearly show, these are the characteristics of great leaders.
When students accept the path of a liberal arts education over job training, they give up the comfort of certainty. There will be no training manuals to teach absolute truths such as "a screw is always tightened to the right and loosened to the left." There is no following of directions in a step-by-step manner. There is much reading, writing, interpretation, discussion, criticism, and drawing of conclusions. In short, it is the process that all great human endeavors have followed.
It prepares students for success in a world where people will doubt them, challenge them, and test them. The unique curriculum at Holy Cross even takes it one step further. After our students have read the books and written the papers, then they are nudged from the academic nest into real world situations that include service projects, international travel and internships. According to Justin Watson, PhD, Dean of Faculty, "Our liberal arts curriculum is designed for pragmatic results. Students who complete our Bachelor of Arts program have not only learned to think, but have been thoroughly prepared for 'doing' in the real world. The career success of recent alumni is a testament to this approach."
A liberal arts education prepares students for the whole problem of one person disagreeing with another person, a problem that has been with us ever since Eve decided to think for herself. We have tasted from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and have been responsible for making our own decisions ever since. And perhaps that's why we were given the Bible, a book of stories not a training manual.
It angers me that my son questions my authority, but I know it is inevitable if he is to become a man I can respect. If he is going to think for himself, then he should doubt what I tell him. Now, if I could only convince him that he needs to read more, or he will become stuck in the typical teenage mindset of thinking he knows it all and never doubts himself.