It is a good sign that today, as we meet to consider how the new world situation may affect our college education, our theme should suggest an awareness not only of the revolutionary changes going on around us but of the undiminished importance of liberal education. “Liberal Learning in a Changing World” are the terms in which one recent book has formulated the matter for us in 1964.1 To me, it is a favorable indication of the progress made in over a decade of continuing discussion. In 1950, one had to argue the point with proponents of so-called non-Western studies that a broadening of the curriculum should be considered in the context of liberal education as a whole and not simply offered as a response to the shift in the world power balance. Now that the political factor has been brought into proper relation to the broader human aspects of the problem, we may be prepared to pursue its liberal implications further.
One of these is certainly to recognize that liberal learning has always taken place in a changing world. This is not the first era to experience revolutionary change, nor are we the first teachers to deal with it. It is false to think of the West as living in a world all its own, unchallenged until now by expanding horizons. Before Plato’s time, Greece had experienced invasion from Asia, and by Alexander’s it was more deeply involved in that continent than we are today. Aristotle, the father of scholastic philosophy and also Alexander’s mentor, contemplated no static world: his bust in stone, discovered in the ruins of northern India, bears silent witness to the cultural revolution that swept East and West in those days, from Gibraltar to the Japan Sea. Nor was medieval Europe immune to change and unresponsive to the East. Its confrontation with Islam helped stimulate the revival and creative development of scholastic philosophy. And if we look beyond the Western tradition to other countries in which some kind of “liberal learning” developed, there is China, perhaps the most stable of the great civilizations, yet it was no changeless world, either. Confucius and Mencius too, as educators, faced a revolutionary situation.
The point, of course, is that “liberal learning” has always been conscious of change yet at its best has responded to it without being swept away by it. In the midst of the historical flux, it has tried to preserve what was least mutable and most universal in learning as a core around which new experience and new insights could be ordered and passed on. Mark Van Doren says, concerning the education of the young man: “His job is not to understand whatever world may flash by at the moment; it is to get himself ready for any human world at all.”2 This may seem to belittle change, but still the humane learning Van Doren reaffirms is grounded in a fundamental truth: that there is an inescapable tension between permanence and change in our lives that cannot be overcome by simply cutting ourselves adrift from the past.
Often, it seems to me, the advocates of greater world awareness often fail to reckon with this problem in its real depth. They make little allowance for the need to have deep roots in the past if one is to cope with the sudden, bewildering complexity of the present. Slowness to reform they see as motivated simply by a desire to preserve the status quo in education or to defend traditional departmental interests. Western learning, they think, has been too content with itself. Our scholars and teachers have been parochial, smug, and resistant to change.3
There is truth in this, but it is difficult to judge how much. We have no universal scale by which to measure our deficiencies against those of others, and we may be myopic in viewing our own myopia. If our knowledge of Asia, for instance, has been found wanting, so too has the Asian peoples’ knowledge of one another. If one argues that their ignorance reflects only the limitations of a Western-oriented education forced upon them in the contest for survival, one must nevertheless allow that the Asians’ seeming self-satisfaction or preoccupation with their own cultures reflected inherent limits in their environment that gave domestic needs priority over foreign ventures. Japan, and then only fitfully in its past, serves as perhaps the one exception to Jacques Barzun’s claim for Western civilization that “it is the only civilization which has had an unlimited curiosity about other civilizations.”4
Properly viewed, the great postwar upsurge of interest in other languages and cultures is a further extension of this unlimited curiosity, now that we have more means and opportunities to satisfy it. It represents especially the incorporation into the educational sphere of a type of learning that has ripened enough in the minds of scholars and thinkers so that the seeds may be more widely sown. We may be aware of the great lengths to which that dissemination must go to be truly effective, and we may look forward to advances in learning that will make our past gains seem insignificant, but progress will be surer if based more on respect for what has been accomplished than on contempt for what has not.
Consequently, in approaching our problem today, we will accept it as a challenge not to our past but to us in the present. We will recognize it as a unique opportunity for our educational system today, without justifying this new departure on the dubious ground that Western learning has been too narrow and self-centered until now. And we will regret that a book so laudable in its aims, so reasonable in its recommendations as The College and World Affairs should yield to the current compulsion to deprecate the past in order to enhance the present opportunity. It regrets that before 1945 so little had been done to “escape from the historical confines of Western culture”:
There was little change … in the general concept of the liberal arts. As late as 1943 Mark Van Doren could write a book on liberal education that neither took into consideration its application to cultures other than those of the West, nor sought new meanings in those cultures. Alfred North Whitehead also confined himself to the traditional West when he wrote on education in 1929 (although he did mention Chinese as a preferred language for study), even as he discussed in the same volume the educational implications of “Space, Time, and Relativity.”5
Admittedly, this problem has not been dealt with directly by Van Doren or Whitehead, but their writings as a whole do show an acquaintance with what lies outside the Western tradition and an appreciation of its significance to their own studies.6 If they have not chosen to discuss the so-called non-West as a separate problem in liberal education, it is perhaps from a disinclination to dichotomize their subjects in this way. But who yet has said anything more fundamental about the problem than Van Doren when discussing the role of imagination in liberal education? Since this passage may have escaped his critics, permit me to cite it:
Imagination always has work to do, whether in single minds or in the general will. It is the guardian angel of desire and decision, accounting for more right action, and for more wrong action, than anybody computes. Without it, for instance, the West can come to no conclusions about the East, which war and fate are rapidly making a necessary object of its knowledge. Statistics and surveys of the East will not produce what an image can produce: an image of difference, so that no gross offenses are committed against the human fact of strangeness, and an image of similarity, even of identity, so that nothing homely is forgotten. The capacity for such images comes finally with intellectual and moral virtue; it is not the matter of luck that some suppose it, though single imaginations of great power are pieces of luck that civilization is sometimes favored with. It is a matter of training, of the tempered and prepared character which all educated persons can share. This character is a condition for the solution of any huge problem, either in the relations of peoples—and such relations, beginning at home, call first for knowledge of self, so that in the centuries to come it will be as important for the West to know itself as to know the East, which means to know itself better than education now encourages it to do—or in the ranges of pure speculation.7
Along with Van Doren and Whitehead, there are many other poets and philosophers whose work was affected by acquaintance with the Oriental world well before the postwar boom of Oriental studies. Besides Pound, whose passion for Confucius is well known, there is Paul Claudel, who encountered Zen years ahead of the Beats, and T. S. Eliot, who plunged early into the study of India and Buddhism (though it only produced, he says, “enlightened mystification”). And besides Whitehead, there are among philosophers of this century Bertrand Russell, who wrote The Problem of China after visiting there; John Dewey, whose personal encounter with young China reflected his consciousness of it as a world-regional rather than an East/West problem; and William Ernest Hocking, philosophically as much at home in China as in New England—to say nothing of others reaching back to William James, Thoreau, Emerson, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Leibniz, or, among writers, to Yeats, Tolstoy, Wordsworth, and many more. A dialogue with the East has been going on for centuries, since the Jesuits first introduced the learning of India and China to Europe while at the same time bringing Western learning to Asia. And today it serves poorly to advance this dialogue if we imply that little has been gained by it so far.
This is why I cannot join in scolding the West, though it has become almost a ritual introit to all praise of “non-Western studies,” as in this opening to Non-Western Studies in the Liberal Arts College:
Until quite lately higher education in the United States of America has been almost completely under the sway of an illusion shared by nearly everybody of European descent since the Middle Ages—the illusion that the history of the world is the history of Europe and its cultural offshoots; that Western experience is the sum total of human experience; that Western interpretations of that experience are sufficient, if not exhaustive; and that the resulting value systems embrace everything that matters.8
In my estimation, such sweeping accusations only obscure the real issues. In the first place, the educational picture, if it ever was that black, is certainly more mixed today. Among the social sciences, some, like anthropology and political science, have been quick to reexamine basic premises and methodologies in the light of foreign-area studies; others, like economics, have been notoriously resistant. In large areas of the South and Midwest, there are now more voices raised in behalf of Asian studies; in other sections, the interest in language and area studies is lively and intense. The curiosity of educators, teachers, and students and their desire to do more is limited only by the available means. Financial help and professional guidance are what they need; encouragement and support, not prodding and preaching.
In the second place, to indict the Western academic tradition will get us nowhere. We must rather show how a world outlook is rooted in and deeply relevant to the traditional concerns of liberal learning. Superficially, one might expect the humanities to be the stronghold of Western classicism and traditionalism, whose defense mechanisms would have to be broken down before a broader, more progressive position could be established. Yet at Columbia, a pioneering movement for Oriental studies in the core curriculum was spearheaded by professors of French, English, philosophy, and American history (without an “Orientalist” on the committee). The first Oriental humanities course was launched jointly by a professor of Greek and Latin (Moses Hadas) and a political scientist (Herbert Deane). Their standpoint was not progressive or iconoclastic but liberal and humane.
And this attitude of mind seems to me crucial. If we have failed at all in our efforts to broaden the scope of education, I suspect that the fault lies less with teachers and scholars in the past—the “dreamy” poet whose thoughts were perhaps off with Du Fu in China, the philosopher whose “ivory tower” may actually have afforded a glimpse of Al Ghazali and Sankara, the philologist whose absent mind was probably fixed on a difficult Sanskrit text—and more with the “practical” men of our own society—on foundation boards, in congressional committees, and even in our highest political offices—who have often disbursed vast sums in the field of international studies and cultural exchange without educating themselves to the task. It is not that they have lacked experience in international affairs or sometimes even training in specific areas like Asia and Africa. They are handicapped just as much by ignorance of the West, of their own liberal traditions, and of a liberal learning about the East that is already ours. Hence, our problem in respect to broadening the scope of liberal education is complicated by the continuing failure of many college graduates to receive any kind of liberal education at all, Western or “non-Western.”
I shall not cite here cases of foundation preoccupation with contemporary problems, of fellowship applicants who have had to contrive justifications for classical research in terms of “contemporary relevance,” of governmental support for language study in the interests of “national defense.” “Everyone knows,” says Arthur Wright in his contribution to the Report of the Commission on the Humanities, “it is easy to persuade the board to give $950,000 to young economists working over the meager data on China’s present economy, difficult to get $120,000 for a seven-year project in the humanities (here pre-modern history) involving all the senior Chinese scholars in the country.”9
We need not deprecate what has been accomplished in current research on Communist China—the scholarly world is less ignorant of conditions there than some would have us believe—in order to demonstrate the futility of a policy that is completely preoccupied with the contemporary scene and the supposedly quantifiable factors in it.10 Wolf Ladejinsky, one of our most experienced economic advisers in the Far East, years ago indicated that the economic problem in Vietnam could be solved yet everything lost through ineptitude in dealing with the human factors. Today, South Vietnam’s economy thrives, and the country is near collapse. Americans, having poured millions into economic and military aid, are stupefied at what is happening and totally unprepared to cope with it. Why? Because no one bothered to find out what was going on in the minds of the Vietnamese people; no one was trained to analyze the religious factors in the situation. You cannot acquire an understanding of Buddhism in a few days, as the ineptitude of our journalistic efforts shows. But do we have to wait until Buddhists are rioting in the streets to realize that the traditional religions of Asia are important fields of study? And without such study, how is one to judge what kind of “Buddhists” they are, when so many of their violent acts are inconsistent with Buddhism? Thus we fail even in the handling of current problems if we lack insight into the minds and hearts of these people, into the political uses that are made of traditional beliefs, into long-term trends that alone give current data meaning and predictive value.
What a tragedy, then, that our newest multi-million-dollar foundation efforts should continue the same sterile policy, only on a grander scale, of promoting more contemporary research that will speculate over the same “meager data” and probably be out of date or irrelevant next week!
It is some consolation that the superficiality of thought around the concentrations of educational power and money is, to some degree, offset by the growing number of able men who serve as skillful mediators between scholarship and the bureaucracy, public and private. In not a few cases they have stretched the letter of an unreasonable law to provide for legitimate needs or interpreted short-sighted policies to allow for far-sighted projects. But we have to look beyond our immediate frustrations and minor successes to a long-range goal that will direct our hitherto confused efforts.
That goal I have identified as “education for a world community.” I put it this way because “education for world affairs” suggests the same preoccupation with the current world scene, of which we have grown wary. Research and reporting on the international situation is indeed essential in government, business, and our democracy for all educated people participating in it. But the first essential is to have educated people. They must be educated to live, to be truly themselves, in a world community. They must undergo the kind of intellectual chastening that is prerequisite to the exercise of any power or influence in the world. They must know themselves better than they know world affairs so that the responsibilities they assume are commensurate with their capabilities and not swollen with self-conceit—personal, national, racial, religious, social, political, and so on. Confucius and his teaching were strongly oriented to public service, to world affairs, yet he had to reconcile himself to serving out of office. Finding it impossible to engage in the politics of his time and remain true to himself, he chose the latter. We must know how to be like that.
I say “education for a world community” because, next to self-understanding, the emphasis in education should be on the bonds uniting men in a true community—not the passing world scene, but what men have most deeply in common as a basis for coming together. This is where imagination, as Van Doren says, has work to do, in helping us do justice to one another, in respecting similarities and differences among men. Increasingly, our education must be formed by such an image and such a vision. And this is why I prefer “vision” to “strategy.”11 “Strategy” seems to imply that the objective is clear enough if only the forces can be mobilized and marshaled to take it. It takes the end for granted and concentrates on the means, whereas much thinking remains to be done about both: our end—the world community—and the means of attainment that must be proportionate to it. What we have now is not in fact a clear goal but only a sense of direction or, better, a sense of being attracted by a vision that we cannot fully make out and measure because it is growing with us.
For similar reasons, I would avoid the expression “non-Western studies.” The disadvantages of this term have been discussed most recently in the report of the Commission on International Understanding, but the authors, like many others, resort to it for want of any other term that will cover the same ground—all of the neglected areas in our studies. Some of these areas, however, are as Western as we (Latin America), and for those that are not, “non-Western” sets us off in the wrong direction to find and place them in our educational system. It tends to perpetuate whatever isolationism or parochialism we have suffered from by suggesting that the significance of other civilizations lies primarily in their difference from European and North American civilization. It confirms the arbitrary separation of the world into Western and non-Western categories and therefore is divisive rather than constructive of the new sense of community that must be the basis and aim of our education. And finally, it does violence to the individual members of that community. As I have said elsewhere,
the seeming impartiality with which so many civilizations are thus equated (actually negated) tends to obscure the true proportions of their respective contributions. The positive significance of Asia in particular tends to be obscured when it is simply lumped together with other areas equally different from the modern West, which by implication becomes the norm for all.12
As used and popularized by Vera Micheles Dean, “non-Western” signified those societies that were underdeveloped and alike in their need to modernize quickly. Since, from this standpoint, their common problem was to catch up with the advanced industrial states of Western Europe and North America, the latter obviously provided the norm or yardstick to which the underdeveloped societies would be expected to measure up, hopefully by telescoping centuries of “Western” growth into decades of non-Western forced development. No doubt this distinction served to emphasize a major problem on the contemporary scene and recommend itself to students of current world affairs. But for purposes of liberal education, a longer view and wider perspective are needed. If we are not to conceive of the new world community as homogeneous with our own megalopolis, then we must arrive at a better understanding of what these other civilizations represent in themselves and what potentially they could bring into the new community that, at this early stage, it is not yet conscious of.
I realize that no one who has grown accustomed to using “non-Western” for a host of nations and a variety of sins will consider anything like “the new world community” a convenient substitute. For practical purposes, it will be satisfactory to use “language and area studies,” “regional studies,” or “international studies” as a general category, representing this new community in its diversity. Such divisions or subdivisions as “Asian studies,” “African studies,” “Russian studies,” or “East European studies” will adequately represent it in its particularity, standing for basic geographical or cultural units of more than current topical interest, which should retain their distinctive identity and significance even in the community of the future. For some, the name “Oriental studies” may be ruled out as too old-fashioned, musty with the odor of classical archeology and philology in the Near East, or considered guilty by association with such bigotry as found expression in the Oriental Exclusion Act. From a genuine scholarly viewpoint, however, this term has traditionally given recognition to the major civilizations of Asia as worthy fields of study and as generous contributors to Western culture. Such an intrinsically positive concept should not, in any case, be sacrificed to the negative and dubiously new-fashioned “non-Western” label.
Liberal education consists of any study that liberates man for a better life. Thus it is broad and inclusive but also involves a process of growth and maturation, implying distinctions of order and priority. It liberates man by giving him, first of all, power over himself, and only then perhaps power over things and over others. By disciplining his faculties, it frees them for constructive use. The arts of language, for instance, are among the most fundamental of such disciplines, so recognized in both classical and modern education. There is almost no level on which they cannot make their contribution. And the learning of foreign languages is, among these arts, one that will contribute most to the building of a new world community because it is the most genuine compliment that a man can pay to another people and their culture. That he should put himself to the trouble of learning another’s language, that he should subject himself to the discipline of study, and often of monotonous drill, is immediate evidence of a man’s readiness to humble himself, to put himself, so to speak, at another’s disposal, in order that he may enter into genuine communication with him. Understanding others makes that much difference to him.
Still, foreign language study is only one of the language arts so indispensable to civilization. To learn well one’s own language and literature—in the broadest sense—is hard enough and must retain some priority. Most of us recognize the folly of “collecting languages” when none of them is learned well, and learning well (that is, to the point of reading and enjoying a foreign literature) is all the more unlikely if one’s powers of appreciation and discrimination have not been nourished at home before they are called upon for service abroad. No doubt the language-learning capabilities of most young Americans are far from overtaxed, and more yet can be demanded of them in both secondary and higher education. Nevertheless, the polyglot cannot be our educational ideal. Overemphasis on foreign languages can stunt intellectual growth in other directions. It is futile if we learn to speak in several languages but end up with nothing to say. The gift of tongues will do little to grace a shallow mind.
Thus, most of the work of college education will remain to be done in English, and this applies to the study of foreign areas as well as to any other. I have been dismayed at the number of cases in which small liberal arts colleges have held off doing anything about Asian studies until they could offer one or more of the languages involved. No such program would be respectable, they thought, unless it were based on language study. Yet for the number of students who might take Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, or Arabic with the expectation of pursuing them to real fluency, this would be an uneconomical arrangement, an exotic frill. As a consequence, they have done nothing. Procrastination has been justified on grounds of academic respectability, abetted by a simple misconception as to educational priorities.
Language study is ultimately important for any student ready to commit himself seriously to area training. It is not essential, however, for a liberal education, and even for the college major its unavailability does not preclude substantial accomplishment. We need not choose between all or nothing. Enough scholarly research and translation has been done already so that enormous advances can be made in dispelling the ordinary student’s ignorance of Asia without exhausting the material in Western languages. Yet where resources permit, our educational system should have a place and a proper sequence for both general study in the medium of Western languages and specialized studies in other foreign languages. Experience has shown, moreover, that the greater the diffusion of this general knowledge and the more energetic the college in providing introductory courses, the more spontaneous and irrepressible is the demand generated for the addition of language instruction. It is at this stage that an effort should be made to launch language study in at least one area that would provide an opportunity for specialization.
This natural sequence in the development of the college curriculum also corresponds to the natural order in which students should get their exposure to other areas and cultures, moving from general education to special training. Language study need not necessarily be preceded by a general introduction to the area, but such an introduction should be available to all students—including the great majority who will never take up language study—during the early years of college. Its primary purpose should be to form an integral part of their liberal education, and as a secondary purpose it should expose an increasing number of students to the possibilities for specialization in time to make a decent start on the language.
The manner in which foreign areas are represented in undergraduate education will vary according to the college. In principle, we should encourage a plurality of methods, recognizing the diversity of needs, purposes, and capabilities. There is just one condition I would set. We must be prepared to justify any innovation in terms of the established curriculum and stated educational aims of our colleges. This might seem no more than obvious, but I am convinced that it is widely ignored or evaded. With the increasing mobility of both teachers and students, facilitated by liberality in granting leaves, canceling courses, and adjusting requirements in favor of study abroad, there seems to be less and less conception of the college program as an integrated learning experience. Not that there is lack of respect for the “integrity” of the curriculum—the traditional piety is still there—but fewer people have any idea of what it is.
In such circumstances, those who advocate an increasing role for language and area studies all too often rely on convenient but essentially irrelevant arguments on behalf of their proposals. An eloquent appeal is backed up by no more substantial argument than the popularity of our new courses among students or some vague assertion about the educational wave of the future. While statistical surveys of rising enrollment in language and area programs around the country may suggest to a curriculum committee that it give serious thought to what should be done in this direction, they do not render “any argument about whether such studies fit into the curriculum … purely academic.”13 Or if they do, we must understand “purely academic” in the legitimate rather than the pejorative sense of the term.
The nature of courses offered to students should properly be determined by the subject matter and the requirements of the disciplines pertaining thereto. Whether courses so defined fit into a planned curriculum must then be decided in relation to the college’s conception of itself. If it has no such idea of what it is about, the real need of that college is to become more conscious of itself before it talks about greater “awareness” of the other half of the world. Most particularly, this applies to core courses that will have to transcend departmental boundaries in order to serve their purpose. They must have some higher justification than the mere assertion of one department’s interests or popularity over against another.
Opportunism, I concede, may gain momentary redress from an imbalance that has long worked to the detriment of education for a world community. We must seize our chances where we find them. But these occasions also should find us ready to explain and justify our goals in relation to the aims of undergraduate education—in terms meaningful to those outside our own area and discipline. In the long run, unless our purposes can be constantly exposed and upheld before the college community as a whole, our gains will be insecure.
Is it unrealistic or visionary to suggest that such discussion can be conducted within a college faculty or curriculum committee in terms meaningful to all? Admittedly, many of our colleagues are still strangers to the world of which we speak. For this very reason, however, we should welcome any opportunity for discussion or debate as a means of educating and informing them. And welcome it at the same time as a means of educating ourselves. For without an appreciation of their curricular aims and choices, we cannot adjust and refine our own. Without this we, too, run the risk of becoming parochial and self-serving.
For instance, if at Columbia I know that there is no room in the basic (Western) humanities course for such philosophers as Plotinus and Pascal, it will affect my judgment as to how many and which Oriental philosophers I shall try to make room for in the Asian Humanities course. How can I claim that any college graduate ought to have read Sankara and Ramanuja if he has not read these others? If there is time enough only for the Iliad but not the Odyssey, for Milton but not Chaucer, for Lear and The Tempest but not Hamlet and Macbeth—can I ask students to read works of Oriental literature, however important in their own traditions, that do not measure up to some more universal standard? When the Psalms, the City of God, Dante’s Paradiso, St. John of the Cross, and Kierkegaard find no place on the Western list, how many Vedic hymns, Sufi poets, or Buddhist mystics can I include in the Asian “must” list? And, coming out of the classical world into the modern, if, in the light of all that crowds in upon the lower college program, my colleagues in charge of the core curriculum have decided not to insist upon each student’s receiving a basic introduction to, say, the economic problems of American society, what right have I to insist that the same student should acquaint himself with the economic problems of so-called underdeveloped countries?
On questions such as these, we are constantly forced to make practical judgments, even though we possess no final answers to many of them. In one sense, the works and writers I have cited are not truly comparable. They have a claim on our attention precisely because of their standing in their own traditions rather than because their universality can be immediately recognized or their stature fully gauged. In other words, the traditions of which they are an expression can be better understood as complementary to our own than as comparable. From this standpoint, we can only teach as much of all of them as is possible, knowing that it will never be enough.
Nevertheless, our practical choices ought to reflect some overall view of the curriculum, and from this standpoint our judgments of what should be taught about other civilizations must take into account what is taught of our own. If we ask for reexamination and readjustment of the traditional curriculum, we should be prepared to reciprocate. From a continuing faculty discussion on this basis, great mutual benefits would flow. There is no better way to promote the gradual integration that should overcome the opposition between “West” and “non-West” and generate from within the college community the new educational consciousness appropriate to a world community. More to the point here, it will help us define the relationship between education for world citizenship and specialized language and area study for the advancement of learning.
We face at least two basic problems: How much of the world can we hope to embrace in a core curriculum? And how far can we press for specialized language study in college without sacrificing other essential ingredients of a liberal education?
One approach to the first problem is to provide introductory courses to different areas or civilizations and give the student his choice. The minimum requirement then would be only that his program should include at least some exposure to another culture or another society. This will give him a different perspective on his own way of life and open his eyes to new possibilities. But a more concentrated exposure to one civilization will usually be gained at the expense of exposure to any others. In a college without the resources to offer a wider range of choice, nothing will have been lost. In better circumstances, however, some familiarity with still another civilization should provide a triangulation point for the comparisons a student tends to make between the “other” civilization and his own.
Thus arises a second approach: a survey covering several areas or civilizations in a single course.14 Whether these civilizations are introduced singly or in combination, a judgment must still be made as to which areas or civilizations have the first claim on our attention. Teaching and library resources are rarely sufficient to deal with all continents and countries, nor is the time available to the student. For this reason, again, a distinction is useful between a core curriculum and specialized training. Some civilizations merit consideration because we realize, if only imperfectly, that their achievements and experiences are no less significant than those of Western civilization. These should be represented in the core. Others simply have not attained that distinction. As problem areas in the modern world they cannot be ignored, but it will suffice if they are offered only for some students to investigate and not for all.
I have already identified four major Asian civilizations—Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese—as meriting inclusion in the first group and have explained that
to assign a higher priority … to the major Asian civilizations is justified by the greater richness and depth of their traditions, by the historical contributions to and influence upon other peoples beyond their own borders, and by the impressive continuity and stability of their traditional institutions down through the ages. It is little wonder that the natural interest of Westerners today should spontaneously incline them to learn about Asia, for here are the peoples whose technological “underdevelopment” can never be mistaken for immaturity of culture or society. Their social experience—their population problems, their political institutions, their economic dilemmas—in many ways anticipate those of the modern West. Their arts, literature, philosophy and religion in some respects achieved a refinement surpassing our own.
To focus, then, on Asian civilizations in a core curriculum is only to signify that there is more than enough matter here worthy of the student’s attention and reflection, on a level with and as challenging for him as that which he encounters in Western civilization. Global scope—with Russia, Africa, South America, and what not thrown in—need not be the criterion, when to discover any one of the major Asian civilizations is virtually to discover a whole new world, and two or three of them a new universe.15
On this basis, we are entitled to ask that an introduction to at least some of these civilizations be offered in the early years of college. The second year seems a good one in which to begin, assuming that the first is taken up with a basic introduction to Western history, thought, and literature (that is, so far as the humanities are concerned). It is not that Western civilization should always have priority, but it must for us. We are Americans and start from there—or we make a false start. For Indians and Japanese, the priorities will be different. Nothing I have said about citizenship in the world community can change that. This latter goal may give us some common direction in the future, but it does not erase our past.
Considering this basic fact of our lives and the distinctive character of the major civilizations, I question whether an omnibus course in world civilization or world literature could do justice to its individual parts. A well-thought-out sequence over at least two years might perhaps do it, but tacking Mao Zedong and Nehru on to the modern end of a contemporary civilization course or just adding the Analects and the Tale of Genji to the Hundred Great Books will not.
Another conclusion I draw from this basic fact is that study of the more remote and difficult languages should not take priority over the Western languages traditionally emphasized in our colleges and universities. If a knowledge of French or German, and sometimes Latin or Greek, has been thought essential to liberal education in the West, our new situation should not tempt us to substitute, for example, Chinese or Japanese. We can only aim at their addition beyond the normal requirements for those students whose aptitude and industry enable them to undertake more. Both types of language study qualify as liberal disciplines, but the former serve a double purpose. They are more intimately related to our own language and involved in our own culture, which means that they can help us understand our own past. The latter do this, if at all, only reflexively.
Here some may feel that I am showing altogether too much respect for tradition. At this rate, we will never move out of our own backyard. The curriculum will be so weighted down with Western baggage that few students will get the chance to specialize in a foreign language and area with hopes of achieving real competence. After two years devoted entirely to a core curriculum and fulfilling other basic requirements, how can the student squeeze in the minimum three years of language study needed for his or her field of specialization? Moreover, since this “field” means not just an area but also a standard discipline that he or she can bring to bear on that area, how can he or she further squeeze in the basic methodology of that discipline?
We are indeed in a tight spot, but rescue may not be impossible if help comes from enough different directions. One of these is the improvement of language teaching so that acceleration relieves the threatened congestion. We must hope that the satisfaction of Western-language requirements can be accomplished largely on the basis of secondary-school study. We may look forward even to some high school students coming into college with at least an introductory knowledge of Russian or Chinese, so that rapid advancement in specialization need not be at the expense of the core curriculum. We have the means also, through intensive summer study supported by NDEA, almost to double the amount of language learning possible in the last two years of college.
Thus the language problem is far from hopeless, but what about area specialization? I can be optimistic about this only if we reconsider the conventional components of an area-studies major. It is unrealistic to think that, in his junior and senior years, the student can both ground himself in a given discipline such as history, anthropology, government, or economics and also follow an interdisciplinary program that covers his area from every angle. Compelled to opt for one or the other, we can only choose the former. We must be satisfied if on graduation from college the student has received a general introduction to the area, a basic discipline that he can work in, and a command of the language appropriate to his discipline. A more comprehensive knowledge of the area will have to wait, either upon practical experience in the field or upon an interdisciplinary regional studies program at the M.A. level.
Exceptions must be allowed for, and one of them is the college that cannot afford the appropriate language instruction but happens to have a group of area specialists in established departments who can staff a respectable interdisciplinary program. Assuming, however, that aid will be forthcoming for more liberal arts colleges to launch programs in uncommon languages, the desirability of starting difficult languages early would give them priority over area study.
What we end up with is a sequence that looks something like this:
1. A core curriculum in the lower college, with an introduction to the major Asian civilizations and humanities for all students—following the basic Western courses in the second year (or where necessary the third).
2. A major in the upper college emphasizing:
a. language study begun as early as the student’s preparation for college allows, without sacrificing some Western language competence, and using summers for intensive study;
b. initiation into the basic methodology of a discipline or profession;
c. application of language and discipline to seminar research in the senior year.
3. An interdisciplinary area study program at the M.A. level or travel, study, and practical experience in the area. Both will be necessary for most students who look forward to careers as area specialists.
4. Ph.D. work in a given discipline, with all the skills and experience gained thus far brought to focus on a specific topic of research.
In this scheme, travel and study abroad would, for most students, be substituted for intensive language work in summer school or come naturally just after graduation from college. Only those who have fulfilled all other requirements and accomplished at least two years of fairly intensive language study as freshmen and sophomores should be allowed to spend their junior year abroad because only students this serious and determined will benefit from it. Otherwise, it seems unjustifiable to break up a four-year program carefully designed, balanced, and pruned to provide a true liberal education. The values of such a program derive only from planning and persistent application. Travel, though a valuable experience, is not educational in the same way. It should be considered a reward for disciplined study, not a substitute. Or it should be considered a supplement to the language program, providing a summer’s intensive conversational practice.
Unless the “global centers” so much promoted today can satisfy these same needs and requirements, they should be considered more in the category of summer excursion than as serving the purposes of a more integrated curriculum.
My discussion so far has been within the context of the established curriculum in American colleges. If there were time, I should have liked to consider the possibility that our conception of liberal education itself may be enlarged and enriched by knowledge of other teaching traditions. For instance, in China, Japan, and Korea it was always considered a mark of the educated man, the humane man, that he was capable of composing poetry on the significant occasions of life and of rendering it in calligraphy that was a true expression of his character and personality. The reading of poetry is still a part of our college education, but how many of us have expressed ourselves in it since leaving fifth or sixth grade? To some G.I.’s in the Pacific, for a defeated Japanese general to spend his last moments writing a final poem seemed a somewhat silly ritual. But in this respect, did not the general show his superiority over his conquerors? We shall mourn the passing of poet-generals like Lord Wavell and General Yamagata as war becomes more and more of a specialized business of destruction and as we lose the creative touch that ennobled even this most inhumane of human occupations. In the rush and din of modernization, such humane traditions are fast disappearing even in the East. As we move into the world community, to save and preserve them becomes our responsibility. This will require not merely a sense of appreciation but an effort at creation.
I have given an illustration of only one among many forms of training—physical, artistic, and spiritual, as well as intellectual—that in the East have been thought both to liberate and civilize the individual. A few of them are peculiarly “Oriental,” but some of them, like poetry, are not. A continuing encounter with Eastern forms of learning may help us to rediscover and possibly revive some of our own classical arts and spiritual traditions. Whether anything can be done to restore them in the liberal education of the future is a question. The advancing pressures and demands of modern life have long since put them to flight, and the resulting wasteland may not attract their return. On the other hand, we are aware of a profound unrest among our students, a resistance to these pressures for uniformity and conformity, and a spirit of revolt against the “establishment” that can undermine the finest curriculum and the most expert teaching. We face the paradox that the “deeper spirit” of our times is a deeply troubled spirit rather than one serenely flowing beneath the agitated surface. Compulsory chapel and assembly are gone, only to be replaced by the compulsion to seek a meaning for life somewhere off campus. An unnamed restlessness impels students to march or ride instead of sit, read, and think. The situation may be better in some places, worse in others, but no one can deny the strong, worldwide undercurrent. And in these circumstances, our established curriculum cannot achieve fully even its own purposes.
Salvador de Madariaga says of Europe that its destiny
was never more clearly defined than in our day. The twofold message which she incarnates is fast being forgotten. Both the freedom of the mind for which Socrates died and the divine spark within the humblest man for which Christ died are in danger today. The Factory State is fast developing, reducing man to the level of a computer. Quantity is driving quality to the wall. And if Europe does not unite to save quality and the individual, both will perish.16
When we come to realize it, however, the same concern is expressed in only slightly different terms by spokesmen for every major tradition today. Madariaga’s problem is not just Europe’s but the world’s. That is why a solution can be found only in the context of a world community that respects the dignity and destiny of each civilization.
That is why, too, our study of our neighbors in this community must approach them on a human level rather than on a mechanical level. The reason our foreign policy has lacked dynamism and our foreign aid has been abortive is that they have dealt with people largely in a mechanical way, with no regard for the human spirit living and working in them. Though we think of ourselves as always wishing to help others and always ready to make sacrifices for them, our goodwill and generosity do not touch the hearts of others as long as it is expressed only in dollars and cents, howitzers and helicopters. Some deeper bond, some more vital basis, must be found for the community we hope to form with them. And this can be done only if we are reeducated for the task. But it will not be done until the officials responsible in government, the foundations, and the schools are ready to support work in the humanities—Eastern and Western—on something like the scale of the physical and social sciences.
There is urgency to this now. We have squandered our opportunities and now find the times unreceptive to our noblest aims. Though technologically the world is coming together, in other respects the barriers to genuine communication are rising. In Europe as well as in Asia and Africa, the trend toward nationalism, sectarianism, and communalism militates against the international community. We can anticipate that our vision of a world community may appear anachronistic in the days immediately ahead—a mere echo of the time when we fought “to make the world safe for democracy.” We must expect to be haunted by our failures in the past. And still, we must see beyond all this.
The West need not repudiate itself in order to redeem its position in the world. It needs to know itself better, as well as others. It needs to emulate the pioneering work of its scholars and thinkers, who helped prepare us for this day, while it also heeds the voices of other peoples unheard till now. The great force of Western expansionism has spent itself, but we should not forget that with the Wellesleys into India went Sir William Jones, who led the revival of Sanskrit studies; that from the East India Company’s trade in India and China came not only unprecedented profits but the first social sciences spanning East and West; that missionaries dedicated to the propagation of their own faith, like James Legge, Timothy Richard, Seraphim Couvreur, and Karl Reichelt, were devoted enough to truth and the peoples among whom they worked to labor for a better understanding of Confucian and Buddhist teachings.
We suffer justly and inevitably for the sins of imperialism and colonialism, even though the specific charges against us are often distorted because their aim is retaliation or revenge, not justice. But we are false to ourselves if we forswear our inheritance not because it is untainted but because we cannot wash our hands of it without forsaking the obligations it imposes. That obligation is to go out into the world, bringing forward all that is good from the past, as the basis for a new understanding, a new world community in which all peoples will contribute to the building. Earlier generations may have misconceived the task or misjudged the degree of self-denial that leadership of such a world order would entail. Great ideals often invite great self-deception. But the challenge of building such a world order is not one that we can decline any more than they could. The world will be ordered now, for better or worse. It will be for better if the education we now plan is education for a world community, education that has learned lessons from the past—that is, everyone’s past, which we share by virtue of our common present and future. That will be the kind of liberal learning Confucius talked about: “Even when walking in a party of no more than three, I can always be learning from those I am with. There will be good qualities that I can select for imitation and bad ones that will teach me what requires correction in myself.”17
