Mount Holyoke College - Llamarada Yearbook (South Hadley, MA)

Page 13 text:

A little impatient with ourselves, perhaps now is the time that we turn to the other important diversions— important anyway to the mainstream of living. We try to balance ourselves out with causes, with accruement of acquaintances. We carry a picket or tutor a child. We discuss a world crisis one day in the living room with a girl whose name we didn't know until that day. Time. Too much time. Time. Too little time. It is as we get older, perhaps, that we learn how to use it, how to bend it to our will to make it serve us. And then there is the final time— not final in an absolute sense (Oh God, we privately demand, do not let there be a final time), but final in the sense that we have terminated what we already are feeling has been too transient a term here— there is that time when we have come to know the central question. And it is no longer “What am I?” but “What am I to be?” 9

Page 15 text:

The term liberal arts invites misunderstanding because of the elu- sive. many-faceted word liberal. In the context of higher education liberal education is not a vague, over-all affair, a bland general dose intended to prevent intellectual vitamin deficiency in all and sundry, and especially suitable for those who have no serious purpose in mind or no mind capable of serious purpose. Neither in this sense is it the opposite of conservative for in many ways a liberal arts education is a profoundly conservative experience which initiates a recipient into the meaning of his culture, and other cultures—as a preparation for his contribution to that culture to the extent of his powers. The best way out is to point out (hat the better term is “liberating. to signify that liberal education is a process designed to go far toward freeing us from ignorance and prejudice to which we are all heir. If we arc all born in chains, how can “going to college” make us free? Is there a scientific formula, a perfect curriculum which will in four years transform us into learned, creative adults? If there arc all the noisy and incessant debate about the proper value of liberal education would cease and all good colleges would follow the grand design. In actuality liberal arts colleges of high quality differ from each other in curriculum and requirements and every college has in the course of its own history changed its mind about the essentials of intellectual salvation. Mount Holyoke is not teaching the same subjects or enforcing the same requirement which it had in the days of its founding by Mary Lyon more than 125 years ago. Mount Holyoke College changed and is changing in many ways from what it was in its beginnings, and continues to be a college in the liberal arts tradition. What docs not change is the liberal approach to learning. The subjects which arc taught and which you will study here must be subjects of inherent importance dealt with for their own sake rather than as tools for a vocation. If you ask plaintively. Hut what can I do with art or history or physics? , you're inviting and will get the liberal answer— What can you do without them? How. without breadth of intellectual experience, are you to live as a civili ed human being? In a liberal community of learning you should comprehend the sort of questions which characterize the vari- ous divisions of learning and see various methods of seeking an- swers. There is no use of saying I'm not a scientist, or I don't like history, or why do I have to read novels? There are not three sepa- rate worlds of learning, those of scientist, artist, and student of society between which no communication can take place—all of them are aspects of the human condition and you are human beings and none of them is or can be alien to you. As interdependent as each of these arbitrary categories of learning are, so too are they independent—by virtue, especially, of the partic- ular way in which each is taught. But method is not the only aspect of teaching; a feeling of being au courant in one’s field is necessary to the professor in order that he may inculcate his students in verve, with self-confidence, with conviction. Docs he possess enough free- dom to study the occurences related to his field which arc happening in the world today? Does he have the time to investigate the ramifi- cations of a current problem which are as indigenous to the human condition as to his own discipline? Whether he docs or not should be of as intense concern to the student as to the professor: for how liberating the liberal arts program is for him has a direct relation- ship to how liberating it will be for us. II