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WHAT IT MEANS TO ME TO TEACH
IN A LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE:
Remarks on the Liberal Arts at Parents' Day
Dr. Terry Smith
Actually, I'm one of you folks. I have a son who's a senior here, so I'm a Wesleyan
parent too, and I could have been sitting out there in the audience with all of you. But
then I found I had to work today.
All three of my children have attended Wesleyan, the first in the fall of 1985, and, if
I'm lucky, my youngest will graduate this spring; I know something about this college from
a parent's perspective. And I'm very proud of what Wesleyan College has been able to do in
the way of educating my children. My oldest child finished a B.A. at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, apparently without learning anything at all, and two years
later, when his life seemed becalmed, we ordered him to return to school here. Our second
child had a similar experience at Appalachian State University. I'm sure these are both
good schools, but in both my children's cases, the education they received at Wesleyan has
proven much more valuable to them than what they got at the state universities, and as a
parent I'll always be grateful to my colleagues here and to the college itself for that.
As a professor, I like the fact that Wesleyan is small and the fact that it is a
liberal arts college. Let me say a few words about each of these qualities. Small is
beautiful; hard as that is to remember in this age of mega-this and mega-that. My children
didn't begin their educations until they found themselves in the small classes that
Wesleyan provides, found that they could actually speak to their teachers, and even find
them outside the classroom. Education occurs among people, when it occurs at all, and a
small, communal situation such as Wesleyan provides maximizes that possibility. I'm an
English teacher, and I especially enjoy listening to what my students say about the
literature I teach because my understanding of the work is broadened and deepened by that
listening.
I like teaching at a liberal arts college because I think the liberal arts are basic to
all learning, and it's learning that basically interests me as a teacher. The word
"liberal" has taken something of a beating recently because of its political
associations, but at root it comes from a Latin word meaning "befitting the
free." What must we have to be free? What the liberal arts free us from is the prison
of ignorance, but there is something more going on here than the simple acquisition of
facts. We can know all the facts there are to know and still be ignorant if we don't know
how to interpret them. The facts and knowing ways to interpret them is what frees
us. We can all make a list of the liberal arts: the fine arts and humanities, the social
sciences, the natural sciences. Describing what in them frees us is maybe not so easy, but
it is easy to describe them as arts themselves: the arts of communication, of reasoning,
of making ethical judgments, of understanding difference. These are skills required of all
of us and the small, liberal arts college maximizes the possibility of our attaining them.
That's why I prefer teaching here and have preferred to have my children learning here.
And I hope you do too.
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