To Direct or Not to Direct -
Is Not a Question of Genius!

by Kim Andersen

Kim (kimander@wsu.edu) came to Washington State University by way of Denmark; he teaches
Danish and Scandinavian literature at WSU, including honors courses.

At the Western Regional Honors Conference in Flagstaff, Arizona (April 14-16,1993), the
conference organizers proposed the following title and quotation as the theme for an up
coming conference: “Specialization is for Insects: The Liberal Arts Education."

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog,
command a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall,
set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,
solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer,
cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
- Robert A. Heinlein (Time Enough For Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long)

Obviously, the stage is set for a discussion of content and direction in honors education.
A very similar aim, albeit much more affluently worded, is mirrored by Ron Link -
the past president of NCHC - in “The Genius of Honors” (The National Honors
Report, Vol. XIV No. 4, Winter 1994). The following represents some thoughts on the
matter of insectile existence.

I
Reading the quotation you immediately get the sneaking suspicion that specialization
isn’t supposed to be good. Somehow insectile existence carries low priority among higher
educators. On the other hand, the quote presents the vision of a human being who is
more than just well-rounded, whose multi-faceted educational composition seems to be
the guarantee for human tolerance. Contrary to insectile specialization, there is hardly an
existential expression that isn’t covered by this individual. There are traditional maternal skills,
balanced by traditional male warfare skills, several practical skills, artistic skills, bureaucratic
skills, emphatic skills, social skills, intellectual skills, all coming together in the final ability: to
die the most honorable death.

I see King Arthur riding off into the sunset...as I, ostrichwise, head for a bush to
cover up my inadequacies. I might be able to handle the manure-pitching; perhaps I could
even learn how to change a diaper--but you guys will have to butcher the hogs -- that’s
where I draw the line. If I need to build a house, I’ll definitely seek professional help. I’m quite
partial to giving orders and acting alone - although for paycheck purposes I recognize the
need for taking orders and cooperating. I have tremendous faith in my Danish open-faced
sandwiches - although I certainly fear good American judgment on smoked eels, etc. etc. In
other words: the facile complexity of existential expression embedded in the human splendor
of the quote is an absurd repulsion disintegrating the engagement possibilities of my, so
specialized, limited, temporal self....

But, surely, I see where the vision must have been nurtured, Arizona, since the idea embodies
a refined frontier spirit. Facing the perils on the frontier of modem life, you have to be able to
handle all sorts of things yourself. In terms of honors education, the indication is that we
should prepare students for such multitudes of tasks (and let me tell you about the manure
pitching we could certainly handle at Washington State University!) to create well-rounded
human beings ready to embark on their general and tolerant path in society. Thus, the single
mindedness of specialization is dumped on the altar of a generalized existential ability to bridge
the gap between what is interior, emotional and intellectual - and what is exterior, social, and
practical. Yet the suspicion is this: do we create well-rounded human beings by laying our eggs
in different baskets, or do we encourage the bourgeois Philistines whose main concern would
be to see some sort of chicken (and more eggs) hatch in each? Is there, on the other hand, a
strange logic that can be reached through specialization - in which the earnest, solemn
immersion into one thing produces a respect for study itself - awe for what you don’t know, and
can never know, for what you can only in blissful resignation observe from a distance. What can
specialization be in terms of honors?

The concern is not only for education - but for education as a vehicle for tolerance.
Tolerance - in relation to a constantly changing world out there, with its constantly
changing needs.

II
A mode of tolerance is Ron Link’s guiding principle as he outlines his philosophy for
honors: ” . ..honors fosters a view of education that is dynamic. It is an ever-changing process
that constantly requires us to think in other ways about recurrent concerns and constantly
reinvent ourselves to meet new challenges” (NHR, p. 2).

Angstful perspiration congregates on my forehead by the mere thought of all these
dynamics. “Ever-changing process,” “constant requirements,” “thinking in other ways,”
“recurrent concerns,” and worst of all, “the constant reinventing of myself - new
challenges” - no wonder kids do drugs if they have to comply with such a kaleidoscopic,
fluctuating basis for their educational salvation. But, sink me, the tolerance gets worse:

Rather than despair at this lack of uniformity, we should rejoice in our diversity,
for it fosters growth both individually and institutionally. Our model should not be the
outmoded factory assembly-line paradigm or even the misguided multiversity model
We are not in the business of producing interchangeable parts, nor are we trying to
be all things to all people. (Ibid., 3)

By now I’m really confused. It seems to me that this negative line of definition is indeed the
business of trying to please everybody - and it certainly contradicts the before mentioned
“constant reinventing of ourselves.”

“Instead, our goal is to encourage a great variety of excellence so that a change in the
intellectual climate does not endanger the whole species” (Ibid., 3).

A strange feature of timid conservatism in the midst of all the “encouragement of variety.”
Are we cautiously planning the present in defensive expectation of some future hostile
“intellectual climate”? If so, why doesn’t he tell me what we can expect? I
wanna know. I wanna brace myself. I may have to reinvent myself.

. ..[H]onors programs will flourish and meet their goals best when they fit their
environments....For what is essential is not that this or that feature is present, but the
ethos of the program. It is the desire to provide an education that offers its students
the best chance of being able to function in an intelligent, creative, and socially
responsible manner. (Ibid., 3)

“Ethos” is “the fundamental character or spirit of a culture” (Webster’s Encyclopedic Un-
abridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1989). Now Ron has totally lost me.
The only way I can make sense of his vision is if “character or spirit’ is defined by absence
of character and spirit - as we normally understand these words as “unifying principle.”
Then it computes - then we’re back in “the security” of - “constant reinventing”-!?

Notice the important feature of “fitting their environment,” of “social responsibility.”
Recalling the need “to think in other ways about recurrent concerns” we see how the outside
world moves into honors, the two becomes one, there must be no difference. Honors
mediates the fragmented lack of essential consciousness.

. ..[W]hile other disciplines in academia pursue ever-increasing specialization
that produce a profusion of smaller and smaller units, honors seeks to reestablish
a unified vision.

. ..[H]onors seeks to find ways to m-integrate a splintered world view into one
that takes into account the principal parts without losing sight of the overall beauty.
What we seek is a resolution of opposites into a new unity - or as Blake puts it,
a marriage of Heaven and Hell. (Ibid., 4)

Do we recognize our reality? If the expressions “to reestablish a unified vision” and
“to re-integrate a splintered world view into one” do not mean that honors in effect
establishes itself in opposition to the surrounding fragmented environment, the ever-changing
world - which, however, at the same time, according to previous quotes, honors seeks to
emulate - I don’t know what it means!

Thus, beginning with “an ever-changing process” ending in “unity,” Ron has managed to
link an educational principle of inventive variety with its opposite, integrated unity - the
magical modifier being tolerance. Heaven and Hell. The road paved with tolerance. It is deep!
His vision ends with these words:

By recognizing that honors is not about specific curricula, class sizes, program
elements or test scores, but rather about a compelling vision of what education should be,
we can find unity where we feared there was only division and clarity of purpose where
we too often have felt only confusion. (Ibid., 4)

I need not comment. But I’ll do it anyway. It takes a genius to refute that “curricula, class
sizes, program elements and test scores” are precisely what the practical, daily running
of an honors program is about. Obviously, “clarity of purpose” is something that “constant
reinventing” takes away. We have seen that Ron’s sympathetic aim at tolerance leaves us
only with confusion.

Admittedly, an honors curricula must comprise various classes in different fields. After
all, it’s often about general education with an honors twist. However, rather than establishing
the false dichotomy, specialization-unity, defining the former as the “profusion of smaller and
smaller units” contrasted by an honors defined by the unity of some sort of generalized worldly
tolerance - the heart of the matter consists of questioning the fundamental philosophic attitude
from which you view the world and shape your educational policy. In other words: do you want
to let go and be defined by popular demands-or do you formulate a philosophy for what defines
the educated human being? As a mandate for honors? Why not challenge all the confusion stemming
from a desperate attempt to mediate what cannot be mediated?

That Heaven cannot be mediated with Hell. That the needs of the single individual will only
partially coincide with those of society. That honors is education, and precisely as such cannot
exclusively be defined as the real world, whereas attempts to construe it as such only fog up the
binoculars for viewing both.

III
Allan Bloom, with his book The Closing of the American Mind, caused unforgiving upheaval
in and beyond educational-intellectual circles in 1987. He was accused of wanting to reinstate
an exclusive canon of works, of culture, of classics, the reading of which, however, were to
constitute the critical sharpening of human reason. His book represented a defense of
education, American liberal education, as Bloom once knew it, as a haven of intellectual debate
keeping the secular confinement of the real world at bay - “four years of freedom” as he
puts it, for the student to have any hope of “a higher life” (p. 336).

His concern is to answer the question of what it is to be educated. He writes:

The university has to stand for something. The practical effect of unwillingness to think
positively about the contents of liberal education are, on the one hand, to ensure
that all the vulgarities of the world outside the university will flourish within it, and, on
the other, to impose a much harsher and more illiberal necessity on the student - the
one given by the imperial and imperious demands of the specialized disciplines
unfiltered by unifying thought. (Ibid., 337)

Am I cutting my own throat with this quote? No, the “specialized disciplines” referred to are,
of course, those comprised by our students’ majors, the seemingly unavoidable demand by
society. But in contrast to Ron Link’s vision of a universal “free-for-all,” Bloom insists on the
university as a special place with the phrases, “stand for something, ” thinking positively,”
“unified thought,” all indicating the aim of formulating a philosophy of education. Where
specialization isn’t just the self-evident presence of some major but signals the necessity for
education to establish itself in intellectual freedom in opposition to random social trends.
But it gets better:

The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a
democracy of the disciplines.... This democ-racy is really an anarchy, because there are
no recognized rules for citizenship and no legitimate title to rule. In short there is no
vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is....Out of
chaos emerges dispiritedness, because it is impossible to make a reasonable choice.
Better to give up on liberal education and get on with a specialty in which there is at least a
prescribed curriculum and a prospective career. On the way the student can pick up in
elective courses a little of whatever is thought to make one cultured. (Ibid., 337)

Bloom must have been talking to Ron. But again, contrary to Ron’s confused chaos, Bloom
wants direction, the daring pursuit of legitimacy in the form of a philosophical policy that sets a
standard for students to shape themselves against. But as it is - the leveling democracy of
reinventive chaos fosters the disillusion of fitting in - into a prescribed environment determined
by the outside world-thus losing “the intimation that great mysteries might be revealed,” “higher
motives of action...be discovered,” “a different and more human way of life..be constructed”
(Ibid., 337) - in short, the possibility of having horizons enlarged.

Bloom’s thinking is deeply rooted in confidence in “human nature” accessible in the great
works of literature and philosophy. These works are the timebound answers to conflicts that
compose the unavoidable reality for human beings. These answers may be dismantled through
the use of reason - which in turn is the acceptance of those conflicts that have formed
the objects of our deliberation throughout time. A beautiful circle. Condoning this relation the
university - honors education? - must assume a strong commitment to untangle the humanistic
and scientific web of historical information. What else do we have to guide our present
besides tradition? The future? That would call for speculation of a completely different kind.
Bloom defines the university:

But a great university presented another kind of atmosphere, announcing that there
are questions that ought to be addressed by everyone but are not asked in ordinary life
or expected to be answered there. It provided an atmosphere of free inquiry....(Ibid., 244)

In a practical sense the university should embody a landmark of edifying contradiction in
the midst of society’s “ordinary life.” It is about the preservation of “reason” which is only
maintained in conscious dialogue, questioning authority: “In an aristocracy the university
would probably have to go in a direction opposite to the one taken in a democracy in
order to liberate reason” (Ibid., 253).

In a multi-cultural world whose survival is intrinsically dependent upon the successful
defeat of intolerance by tolerance, Bloom’s fervent insistence on making claims of superiority
must naturally repulse those whose cultural background is defined by wisdom Bloom
does not mention or may not know about. Yet, in a world increasingly characterized by the
fragmentation Ron Link correctly identifies, resulting in mere career-seeking, Bloom’s
mandate of recognizing a logic transgressing the temporary fads - of illuminating our
existential conditions through the critical inquiry into the past - seems to hold a lot
of promise for the construction of honors education. Honors courses pursuing this
dimension could be the building stones of an honors program critically sharpening students’
acquisition of their own culture. Through a specialized study, its focus narrowly defined,
undergraduate students are challenged to recognize complexity. So much can be derived
from so little. An endeavor that undoubtedly builds tolerance. Ever so much more demand-
ing than the direct pursuit of congenial safety in general superficiality. By the very least, such
study provides an un-insectile challenge to honors consciousness.

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