Liberal Arts and Spiritual Education

John Allemang wrote in the Globe and Mail, on Saturday, September 4th, an article entitled “Can the liberal arts cure jihadists?”

The article spoke to my view on politics. I am not a political activist, nor particularly politically engaged. I feel that, considering our social, environmental, economical, and other challenges today, political intervention is treating the symptoms, not the cause. Although I don’t argue that there isn't an important place for political engagement, I’m much more interested in education.

I believe that, ultimately, the only solution to our challenges today is teaching values: compassion, empathy, tolerance, respect for those different from us, and the courage not to accept what our values tell us is unacceptable.  When values like these become prevalent, political change will follow.

We are equipped with the necessary neurological faculties (read about mirror neurons if you like) to care about one another, but these abilities need, like any other, to be exercised and trained.

I’ve liked to argue that conventional religion has failed in its role as the provider of spiritual education.  That's is a big statement, but can anyone claim that it’s really that hard to argue?  I think we need a replacement for religious institution.

John Allemang makes a similar argument.  He points out that many of those attempting or committing violent acts, “terrorists”, have had largely technical educations.  He argues that it is possible that as social values shift away from the liberal arts, we are losing that necessary training in empathy.  As in the article:

A good liberal-arts education takes these emotionally underdeveloped twentysomethings and compels them to think as if they were a character in Pride and Prejudice or Huckleberry Finn or Crime and Punishment, to mix with those unlike themselves in Dante's Inferno, Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War and Montaigne's Essays, to challenge their theories with unsettling particulars instead of sheltering in an authoritative generalization. It doesn't necessarily come with virtuous ethical content, but it at least promotes a variety of approaches that steer impressionable minds away from the seductive haven of the single universal truth.

So perhaps a liberal arts education is, in some part, the spiritual education we need?  Unfortunately, it may be a dying art.  In his article entitled "Office of the President" in the September, 2010 issue of The Walrus, Gordon Laird considers how modern universities are supporting fields with obvious and immediate economic benefits, to the neglect of the liberal arts and explains:

Gurston Dacks, professor emeritus of political science, sees the divide between arts and sciences as ultimately self-defeating, as many of our biggest challenges, from obesity to energy consumption, pertain not to science, per se, but to human behaviour, culture, and society. “You can get cleaner tar sands, but that’s not really going to address our energy demand problem,” he says. “All of these solutions lie on the humanities and the arts side of the campus.”

In conclusion, whether we speak of spiritual values or liberal arts, it seems clear that education is, at least, an essential part of the solution to many of the problems that our societies face today.  Unfortunately, our current values and economic perspectives make the importance of this education easy to miss.