Introduction
In modern times there has been an increasing emphasis in colleges and universities, and society in general, upon the acquisition of skills and practical knowledge. For some education has become merely a means of developing skills, a means of making oneself more useful for the corporate world in the hope of thriving (or just surviving) economically. As a result we see today institutes of higher learning, even universities, which are exclusively oriented towards the development of skills and practical knowledge. Loras College on the other hand, was founded upon the hope of providing a “complete education” for those attending, and continues to insist upon a much broader program of study.
The distinction between these two types of education offered today is the same distinction evident in the difference of opinion expressed between Edison and Einstein. When Thomas Edison claimed that a college education was useless, he was in part correct. One is entirely capable of learning all the facts and skills that that one needs from books and the internet. However, Albert Einstein in 1921 responded to Edison by saying: “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.” What Einstein points to here is the “complete education” which Bishop Loras first hoped to offer when founding Loras College: an education aimed at developing the whole person rather than just their skill set.
In this portfolio I would like to defend Loras College and the liberal arts education in general by supporting Einstein’s claim with examples of my own personal benefit from this education. I am in a unique position to address this issue because I have attended both a public university featuring an almost exclusively technical education and Loras College.
Loras Dispositions
A liberal arts education at Loras College is focused around forming four dispositions within a person. These are: active learning, reflective thinking, ethical decision making, and responsible contributing. For brevity’s sake I will focus on how two of these dispositions figure into this “complete education” and have contributed to my education and formation as a human person while here at Loras.
Active Learning
This disposition is focused on developing within a person both a great desire to know and a great openness to truth in all shapes and forms. This disposition comes somewhat naturally to me, and I can always remember having a deep curiosity and desire to understand reality. This desire was early on directed by my father toward material reality and I was enthralled by the physical sciences. When I first went to college I entered an engineering program at a large public university. I learned much there about engineering, but it wasn’t enough for me. While there I continued to mature as a person and discovered that the sciences didn’t answer my deeper questions and desires. I recall taking only two non-engineering classes while there, one in English and the other on Human Sexuality. (There were more required but I had passed out of them.) I had to look outside of classes for answers to these deeper questions. I found these in the Catholic faith and became deeply involved in the Catholic Student Community there. During my third year there I felt a calling toward the priesthood and at the end of that year I left for the seminary program at Loras College.
It didn’t take long for me to notice that education was a different matter at Loras College. Although I first grumbled about all the requirements, wanting only to dive into philosophy, I later came to realize their worth. Whereas before I had received a very narrow education, now Loras College was requiring me to expand out. One semester I spent working on public speaking, another I spent exploring hands on the issues of democracy, and this latest semester I have been learning about Catholic tradition.
Above I listed two components to active learning, desire to know and openness. The first, as I have explained, is natural to me. The latter however has not always been so. My philosophy curriculum has been particularly helpful in this regard. When I first showed up I remember learning about ancient philosophers, and I remember judging each one I encountered at face value and either accepting or rejecting it. Unfortunately, this was not a good approach and I found myself uninterested in what we were learning, and I realized there was a problem. That semester (and through the remaining) through the help of my professors and especially through another visiting professor brought in by Loras College, I learned to suspend judgment on what I was being taught. I learned to approach each new philosopher with an openness and a charity to believe that they were seeking some kind of truth. With this new mindset came a flood of curiosity. Instead of viewing a philosopher whom I disagreed with as just another person who got it wrong, I began to wonder: who was this person and why did they think this, and what is so compelling about this particular belief even though it seems absurd, and what are the deeper truths in this philosophy? This newfound openness rekindled my desire to know.
A most notable example of this was a project I was given that first semester called ‘Meeting of the Minds’. We were each assigned a particular philosopher to become an expert on and then impersonate for one class period. During this class period we were to expound our philosophy alongside one other philosopher and then proceed to somewhat debate them – all in person. I was assigned two philosophers, both Stoics. However, the Stoics were a group of philosophers I had initially rejected because they denied free will and held to a strict determinism. As I began to do the research though, I found myself very sympathetic to their ethical teachings, and indeed fell in love with their philosophy. I checked out a whole slew of their books from the library and dedicated myself to getting inside each of the philosophers, both in terms of personality and beliefs. When the same project was assigned a year later in Modern Philosophy I jumped at the opportunity and personified Blaise Pascal, this time in full 18th century attire.
It was Loras College’s dedication to developing me as an active learner that made this possible. We can also see in this that the value is not in the facts I learned about the Stoic philosophers, but in “the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”
Ethical Decision Making
A person with this disposition recognizes their place in the world as one among many and realizes that their actions have consequences on themselves and on those around them. Growing up I often considered how my actions affected others, but over time this often became more of a desire to please others than a desire to be good for them. I also had a basic sense of right and wrong based off of certain social or religious stigmas, but didn’t really possess a deeper understanding of how to make ethical decisions when faced with a dilemma in which several values conflicted. I received no training in this from the public university. From my own personal search in the Catholic faith, I learned much about what is right and wrong and to an extent why it is. If I had not I would not have made the decision to enter seminary.
Loras College is dedicated to instilling within its students a deep sense of the ethical. Though I had already possessed a certain sense of it, my time at Loras has greatly deepened it. Every student at Loras is required to take an applied ethics class. As a philosophy major I took a foundational ethics class in addition. Through both of these classes I was forced to encounter alternative ways of considering the ethical: whether purely consequential or purely intentional, whether for the good of all or for the good of oneself, of divine origin or not. I was forced to consider my own criteria for making ethical decisions in light of these and refine them. I also realized that the ethical is not constrained to the big moments, the big decisions, and the big issues. Ethics applies to every moment of our lives; every little decision we make or don’t make is guided by our own ethical framework, for better or for worse. This is why Loras deems it so important to instill a sense of the ethical in each of us. It is essential to our maturing as human beings.
A recent example of an ethical dilemma has to do with leadership. It may seem trivial, but at the outset of this year I was ethically conflicted. Coming in I was the sole senior member in the seminary program, and I felt some sort of ethical obligation to take charge and lead the group, organizing things etc. Before entering seminary I had engaged in many leadership positions within the Catholic Student Community and I was very comfortable and accustomed to stepping up and doing so. On the other hand I had the feeling that this would not be well received or entirely helpful, and that it was perhaps just what I wanted to do, to exalt myself above the others. I thought a lot about this matter, going back and forth on what I should do; certainly I did need to do something. It was finally my spiritual director, a priest and Trappist monk at New Melleray Abbey near Dubuque, who put me at ease. He pointed me to parts in the New Testament where Jesus teaches about leadership and about humility. First, true leaders don’t lord it over the others, but put themselves beneath the others and serve them. Jesus washed the feet of His disciples. Second, Jesus teaches us to be humble, not to aasdexalt ourselves but to let God exalt us and in so doing we exalt Him. He taught me that I needed to let go of leadership, to humble myself and to serve the others, and that in so doing I would earn the respect of the others and become a true leader, if and when I was needed.
This was very difficult for me, but my brothers have expressed appreciation for the way I have led by not leading this year. I use this example because it shows that the ethical formation I have received at Loras College goes far beyond learning rules in a book, but that it has equipped me with the desire to seek the ethical solution even when the answer isn’t immediately accessible.
Conclusion
After examining two of Loras College’s dispositions we discover the value of the “complete education” Bishop Loras envisioned. We find that while the technical education offered in many colleges and universities today can be largely accomplished by the solitary reading of textbooks, what happens at Loras College and others like it is not so much a higher degree of education, but a different kind. It is a type of education which engages the whole person, and which is dedicated to helping form each person into the best version of him or herself. For this reason it is an education intrinsically more valuable than the purely technical kind.
