LiberalArtsOnline Vol. 1, No. 7
August 2001
by Frank Reynolds
Emeritus Professor of the History of Religions
University of Chicago Divinity School
I believe that the primary purpose of teaching Buddhism in the undergraduate context-something to which I am deeply committed-is to contribute to the liberal education of students. This claim seems rather obvious to me, but it presupposes an understanding of liberal education that may be different than the traditional models upon which our contemporary colleges and universities are based.
What follows is a presentation of three different ways of understanding liberal education in the humanities and social sciences, including a newly emerging perspective that takes our postmodern intellectual and social situation seriously into account.
The first kind of approach to liberal education is the Renaissance-oriented humanistic ideal of engaging a culturally prescribed canon of texts drawn from the so-called classical tradition of the West. Still widely supported by contemporary scholars, I recognize recent attempts to update this classics-centered approach by including within the canon of privileged texts items written by women, members of minority groups, and representatives of non-western traditions. Even this version of the approach suffers, however, because no one is able to provide convincing intellectual criteria for making the innumerable choices that must be made to construct a canon that genuinely reflects the diversity of human experience.
The second influential ideal of liberal education is what I label the modernist approach, which asserts the preeminence and hegemony of an Enlightenment-generated understanding of Reason (with a capital R). The pedagogical corollary of the modernist understanding of Reason was the notion that liberal education should be constituted by an initiation into the various positivist sciences that were specifically developed in order to pursue this reputedly objective form of knowledge. These positivist sciences included, among others, historical sciences, social and cultural sciences, and psychological sciences. This approach, too, ultimately fails because it cannot account for a variety of late modern and postmodern critiques of the supposed one empirically accessible world in which all human beings live-the source of the modernist's objective knowledge.
Given the demise of these two major notions of liberal education that we have inherited, those of us who continue to believe that some coherent and convincing approach to liberal education is an intellectual and social necessity face a very serious challenge.
And so I propose a view of liberal education that attempts to account for our postmodern intellectual and social situation, while still providing a responsible underpinning for our efforts to offer a liberal education.
The most basic characteristics of the view of liberal education that I want to affirm are the following:
--This view of liberal education presumes that human beings (including ourselves, the students we teach, and the people we study) create, discover, think within, and live within a variety of different, and often competing, worlds, all of which are historically situated and engaged.
--It affirms that a liberal education in the postmodern era should involve the exploration of these very different humanly articulated worlds (Here I quite intentionally leave open the question of whether such worlds are constructed or discovered). These worlds should include some that are assumed to be familiar, and others that are quite unfamiliar. They should also include some that are life worlds, some that are aesthetic worlds generated by arts and music, and some that are projected in texts of various sorts.
--An appropriately up-to-date liberal education must also include the cultivation of well-disciplined interpretive skills and strategies through which these humanly articulated worlds and their interactions with one another can be rationally and imaginatively engaged.
The pedagogical implications of this kind of view for teaching Buddhism-and other such subjects-are legion. I would argue that those of us who seek to offer a liberal education in the postmodern college and university must teach to promote sympathetic understanding, critical analysis, and personal evaluation, skills and strategies that will help our students to be creative participants in the kind of serious and rational public dialogue that is absolutely essential for the future health of a democratic society.
This essay is adapted from "Teaching Buddhism in the Postmodern University: Understanding, Critique, Evaluation," in _Teaching Theology and Religion_, 4: 1, February 2001, pp. 9-14.
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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