Advantages of an Integrated Liberal Arts Program

Speech delivered at The American Academy for Liberal Education Annual Meeting

November 13, 1999

Peter Kalkavage, Tutor

St. John's College, Annapolis   

"For the man who is capable of an overview is dialectical while the one who isn’t, is not." Republic 7.537C7

My goal is to place before you the advantages of an all-required, integrated liberal arts curriculum. Such is the liberal arts program at St. John’s College, where every student undertakes the following: four years of seminar, in which seminal works of the Western world are read and discussed, four years of mathematics, four years of language study (two of ancient Greek, two of French), three years of laboratory science, and two years of music. In mathematics and laboratory no less than in language and seminar, students engage in the careful study of original texts. Throughout the program, the mode in which this study takes place is conversation. The teachers — tutors, as we are called — are not professional knowers who teach by lecture. We are instead the tutores or guardians of the students’ self-sustained act of learning. Like our students, we are expected, regardless of our background, to work our way through the various parts of the curriculum. We teach largely by asking questions and by enacting what it means to be a paradigm student.

Before I proceed to say more about our curriculum and the advantages of a completely integrated approach to liberal education, I must emphasize what I take to be the single most important fact about St. John’s College. Our College is above all a community of learning — a true collegium. Learning at St. John’s is not confined to the classroom, oral exams or other formally scheduled meetings but pervades all aspects of college life. Talk about books and ideas goes on all the time everywhere among students — at the gym, on the quad, in the coffee-shop and dining hall, at parties. And while students are expected to engage in their own individual efforts at learning, they are also expected to use their classes for learning with and by means of other students. They are encouraged to be one another’s colleagues rather than competitors. None of this is possible without the constant expectation that students practice the virtues of civility, responsibleness, spontaneity and in general the proper uses of freedom. I shall have more to say about this communal nature of learning as my essay goes on.

Now the term "interdisciplinary" does not really apply to St. John’s. The reason is that this term presupposes an initial separateness of isolated disciplines that are somehow brought into union with one another. The St. John’s program takes its cue not from such isolated disciplines but from the traditional liberal arts — the trivial arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, and the quadrivial arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. These arts, we believe, have an organic rather than an external relation to each other. The distinction between the trivium and the quadrivium reflects a certain complementarity in human nature and human rationality. At our most fundamental level, we are beings defined by our capacity for speech on the one hand and for counting and measuring on the other. To develop these, our most fundamental human powers, in a way that is both rigorous and reflective, is what it means to be, as the Greeks so provocatively put it, mousikoi — musical or educated.

I hasten to point out that, in its devotion to interconnectedness and to the complementarity suggested by the trivium and quadrivium, our program of study must exclude some things from its domain. We believe, however, that for our distinctive way of reading books and pursuing liberal education, this is an acceptable sacrifice.

In his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle tells us that not all activities are capable of the same degree and kind of precision. It was a point on which Pascal too, that cunning stylist-believer-mathematician, was most sensitive. To study the liberal arts as a coherent whole of different yet intersecting disciplines — to study, for example, mathematics along with music and poetry — is to gain first-hand experience in the all-too-easily forgotten truth to which Aristotle points. A completely integrated program of the liberal arts compels teachers and students to explore various forms of precision and to compare them with one another. It inspires questions such as these: What is the difference between a mathematical demonstration and a piece of brilliant rhetoric? What is the difference between the just-rightness of a word in a Shakespeare sonnet and the just-rightness of a step in one of Euclid’s proofs?

This question of precision and kinds of precision takes on one of its most powerful forms in the moral and political realm. I am speaking of that intellectual virtue Aristotle calls phronesis or practical intelligence. This is our capacity for perceiving the morally "just right." Aristotle uses the language of mathematics to describe it; he calls it "the mean." I would suggest that perhaps mathematics is of greater use in moral and political discourse than we tend to think, this in spite of the fact that mathematical precision is one thing and moral precision another. Perhaps Socrates in the Gorgias was right when he told Callicles that the reason he Callicles was championing the life of self-indulgence was that he neglected geometry — in other words, that he was ignorant of that beauty that comes from a clear and demonstrable knowledge of shapeliness and proportion.

Seminar at St. John’s is considered the heart of the program. On Monday and Thursday evenings, students meet with two tutors, who alternate asking opening questions on successive nights. In seminar students read and discuss a wide range of books that include great works of philosophy, literature and history. Here too — here especially — students confront the different kinds of precision found in Plato, Homer and Thucydides. In the course of their discussion of such authors, they also develop that peculiar search for the precision of serious conversation. Such precision is the hardest of all to identify and achieve. A great deal of imprecision, falsehood and sheer lostness must not only be tolerated in seminar but even cherished as a fruitful and necessary means to the insight gained from free inquiry.

As I noted earlier, our all-required curriculum ministers to our rationality in its twofold aspect. I must limit my examples of the concrete effects of this attempt to a few instances. In the freshman year, students at St. John’s study ancient Greek at the same time that they are working their way through Euclid’s Elements. It is fairly common for mathematics classes to explore the implications of Euclid’s Greek. When mathematics and language are studied simultaneously, it is natural, indeed unavoidable, that questions about the one lead to questions about the other. The two sides of our rationality — the fact that we speak and the fact that we count and measure — are, as it were, compelled to face each other. Indeed, the word logos, which means both rational speech and ratio, embodies the ultimate union of these two aspects. The sort of thing I am describing happens regularly throughout all four years of the students’ career. Students are thereby enriched. They learn not only from the books they are reading in their individual classes at any given time but also — sometimes in ways that are not immediately obvious to them — from the program itself, that is, from the temporal order in which books are read and from the correspondences that emerge among books read roughly at the same time. An integrated program of study in this way encourages students, in a systematic way, to form the habit of looking for connections between apparently remote disciplines.

The study of music in a liberal arts program has a special power in this regard. If studied as a liberal rather than as a fine art, music gets students to look beyond surface distinctions in order to seek out deep, underlying harmoniai or bonds between things apparently remote. Is there a connection, for example, between music and mathematics, or music and physics? What did Einstein mean when he called Niels Bohr’s paper on the hydrogen spectrum "the highest musicality in the realm of thought"? What did Socrates mean when he said that philosophy was the greatest music?

Students study music theory in their sophomore year, the year in which they also read the Bible in seminar. The serious study of music can be a tremendous ally in grappling with the Bible. By analyzing and discussing religious music — in particular Bach’s St. Matthew Passion — students can explore the possible link between our receptivity to music and our receptivity to faith. Music helps to explore the passions. In the story of David — king, musician and adulterer — we see how the passions have an awesome power both to bind us to our God and to transgress His law. The connections to which I am referring can arise in a precise and sustainable way only when a curriculum attempts to coordinate its various parts and strive for wholeness. In this way the juxtaposition of things apparently remote is made to feel natural rather than forced by an arbitrarily chosen theme.

Another advantage to an all-required, completely integrated curriculum is that all students in a given year study roughly the same things at the same time. This means that they can continue the inquiry begun in their own classes with students from other classes in the same year. Freshmen in one seminar, for example, can (and do) continue their conversation about the Republic with students in other freshman seminars. Discussions can be compared. This keeps alive the community of learning I mentioned earlier. There is also this advantage, although students at other liberal arts colleges might understandably regard it as a deprivation. I am referring to the fact that, since all classes at St. John’s are required (except for what we call preceptorials in the junior and senior year), students are relieved of the burden of having to invent their own program of study. They can devote themselves directly to the program and to the books that have been chosen for them without the distracting "What should I do next?" More often than not there are pleasant consequences of this practice. Students who, left to their own choice, would never have embarked on the study of mathematics, find out that they love it and are actually pretty good at it.

In summary, here, to my mind, are the advantages of an all-required, fully integrated program of study like the one at St. John’s College. First, the simultaneous study of disciplines as diverse as mathematics and language offers students first-hand experience in various forms of precision. Second, the careful combination of trivial and quadrivial arts addresses in daily practice the two most fundamental facts of our rational humanity: the fact that we speak and the fact that we count and measure. Third, students are continually invited to deepen and extend their understanding of books and ideas in one discipline by comparing them with books and ideas in another. Fourth, an integrated program conduces to a true community of learning by giving all members of that community a fixed point of reference and a common intellectual history. This takes the form of a highly organized if necessarily incomplete array of disciplines and great works of the Western world. Fifth, this same fixity of program allows students in a given year to learn through conversation with all other students in that same year.

I end with what I consider to be the greatest advantage of a fully integrated program of study. Both the Republic and the Federalist Papers focus our attention on a persistent political problem: Who will guard the guardians? In education this question becomes: Who will teach the teachers? At St. John’s College the existence of a single coherent program, coupled with the fact that all teachers, regardless of background, must teach widely in that program, provides a powerful incentive for the continued learning of the faculty. In its fixity and interconnectedness, the program points the way to our continued education in the liberal arts. It suggests paths not yet taken and new beginnings. Indeed, this is the main reason why prospective tutors apply to the College — to continue and in some cases re-found their own education.

The St. John’s program in this sense is the teacher of the teachers. One effect of this teaching is to furnish a check on complacency. By virtue of its breadth and technical demands, the program prevents us from becoming comfortable, from resting on the laurels of what we already know or think we know. It is demanding, and we are reminded daily in our classes and our conversations with one another of our limits — as teachers, as students and as thinkers. We are reminded too of the extreme importance of collegiality as an aid to learning. Earlier I mentioned that students are to one another not competitors but colleagues. This also holds true for the faculty. We ask each other for help constantly — believe me, we need to! And the more experienced tutors serve as guides and mentors for the less experienced. Many of us find ourselves playing the role of Dante the befuddled pilgrim one minute and Virgil the mature guide the next.

We tutors at St. John’s College are not merely the benevolent mechanics and overseers of other people’s conversations any more than we are professional knowers. Like our students, we are called upon by the program to be open to the daily possibility of being corrected, deepened and transformed — one might even say, periodically converted — by our commitment to liberal education.