DRAFT Table of Contents 1. THE BASIC THING: page 3 to 8 Some thoughts on cheeseburgers, The Big Shaggy, and the uses of a liberal education Pamela Johnston 2. THE TEXAS LUTHERAN EDUCATIONAL PUZZLE: page 9 to 14 Mission, Goals, and Educational Plans “Who cares?” Kristi Quiros and María D. Avalos 3. SOCRATES AND EDUCATION page 15-20 Germaine Paulo Walsh 4. CARPE DIEM! page 21 to 28 How One First Generation College Student Lived to Tell Her Story! Judith Dykes-Hoffmann 5. IN AND OUT OF PLATO’S CAVE: page 29 to 36 A Personal Tale Juan Rodríguez 6.EXPERIENCE THE WORLD: page 37 to 42 Our Campus is in Seguin, Texas but the World Can be Your Classroom Terry Price and Charla Bailey 7. DEEP AND WIDE: page 43 to 50 Discovering a Love for Learning and a Passion for Chemistry Santiago Toledo 8. FAITH ASKING QUESTIONS page 51 to 58 Phil Ruge-Jones 9. WRITING AND THE WELL-EXAMINED LIFE page 59 to 63 Annette Citzler 10. WHY WE MAKE YOU TAKE A MATH CLASS AT TLU page 64 to 70 Betseygail Rand 11. THE PROBLEM OF PROBLEM SOLVING page 71 to 84 John McClusky 12. TEACHING YOUR COGNITIVE MISER GENEROSITY: page 85 to 96 Critically Thinking about Our Own Thinking Tiffiny Sia 1 DRAFT 13. SERVICE FOR THE GREATER GOOD: page 97 to 112 From Good Intentions to Liberating Partnerships Tim Barr 14. ETHICS AS AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE page 113 to 120 H. D. Baer 15. HIGH-LEVEL ETHICS IN SPORT page 121 to 129 Jim Newberry 16. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? Page 130 to 136 An Exercise in Making Ethical Business Decisions Melanie Thompson 17. TOXIC KNOWLEDGE: page 137 to 139 How Much Do YOU Want to Know? Robert Jonas 18. THE BEST OF LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION page 140 to 144 Doug Boyer 19. WELLNESS FOR LIFE page 145 to 154 Casi Rabb Helbig 20. LIFELONG LEARNING: page 155 to 163 Will This Be on the Final? Martha Rinn 2 DRAFT THE BASIC THING: Some Thoughts on Cheeseburgers, The Big Shaggy, and the Uses of a Liberal Education Pamela Johnston When my son was very young, he used to ask me a baffling question: "What's the basic thing about X?" (For X, substitute anything you can think of: cheeseburgers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, ducks, going to a movie. I got all those questions and many, many more.) It's a more sophisticated question than you might think, though I didn't realize this at first—I told my son, without giving it much thought, “The basic thing about a cheeseburger is the burger.” “But without cheese,” he said, “that's just a plain hamburger.” I had to acknowledge that this was true. “Well then, I guess the basic thing about cheeseburgers must be the cheese, right?” And yet, he pointed out, a single slice of cheese does not a cheeseburger make. I don’t remember if we ever solved the mystery of a cheeseburger’s essence, but I do remember many conversations just like this one—conversations in which I was forced to think about the ways in which disparate pieces connect to create a unified whole. Quite often, I learned, that wholeness can’t be taken apart without sacrificing something important. As you prepared to start college this fall—talking with friends and family members about your schedule, going through an advising session on campus—you might have been asking yourself some questions about how the pieces of your college education will fit together into a logical whole. “Why do I need to take a biology class in order to be a history teacher?” you might have wondered. “How is that relevant to my major?” Those are valid concerns, of course, and I’ll try to address them as I tackle an even more complicated question: What’s the basic thing about a TLU education? The easy (and incomplete) answers to that question can be found in the marketing materials you may have seen online or picked up when you visited campus last year, while you were still in high school. From those materials, you may have learned that TLU offers smaller classes than a state university would; that you can expect more one-on-one time with your professors than you might experience on a larger campus; and that your education will be informed (but in no way limited) by a focus on faith and vocation. All of these things are true. But none of them, I would argue, is the basic thing about the experience of being a student at TLU. As you looked through the classes you’d need to take during your time in college, you may have noticed that your coursework is divided into five components. Two of these sound pretty similar: Foundations of Liberal Education and Dimensions of Liberal Education. But the Foundations category is very specific, and comprises only four classes—a math course, two English composition courses, and the course for which you’re now reading this essay. The Foundations classes are designed to teach you how to organize your thinking—on paper or in person—so that others will feel compelled to listen to and consider your thoughts, when you’re ready to express them. These are crucial skills to develop because, in the words of David 3 DRAFT Brooks, a columnist for The New York Times, “No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo” (A27). The Dimensions category, on the other hand, includes a wide variety of classes in a broad range of academic disciplines. So, although they sound almost identical, these two categories don’t look alike at all. And here’s another way in which they differ: most students take the courses in the Foundations category during their first year of college, but may still be taking courses in the Dimensions category when they’re seniors, depending on how they organize their class schedules. Many students (and, sometimes, their families) talk about the Dimensions courses as if they’re a nuisance; they cram those courses into the first two years, thinking of them as things to “get out of the way” before the serious work of pursuing a major can take place. But the courses in the Dimensions category may well be the most important part of your experience as a college student. For example: one of my favorite college courses, Survey of World Religions, had nothing to do with my English major. I took it to fulfill a Humanities requirement. But that course presented me with a variety of ways to approach questions I thought I’d already answered for myself—it made me question what I knew (or, rather, what I thought I knew.) That’s why I remember the class even now, 25 years later. The courses you’ll select as you fulfill the Dimensions category requirement will offer you a similar opportunity to think about various subjects in new ways, to dip your toes into the waters of various disciplines—to think, if only briefly, like a psychologist, or a biologist, or a historian. And the spirit of exploration reflected in this part of the curriculum is a crucial component of the experience you’ll have as a student at TLU. Every university has some version of a general education curriculum—an assortment of courses all students are required to take—so you might think it’s strange to claim that this is part of what makes TLU unique. Notice, though, that we don’t specify particular courses to satisfy the Dimensions requirements; any psychology course will fulfill part of the Social Sciences dimension, and any literature course will help satisfy the Humanities dimension. You can choose the course that sounds most appealing to you, whether that’s Abnormal Psychology or African Novels. Or, if you’re pretty sure neither of those classes would be your cup of tea, you can skip them altogether—there are many avenues by which to explore the social sciences and humanities. Criminal Justice, for example. Or Film Studies. Or Contemporary Moral Problems. The choice is yours. We also don’t refer to this part of your degree plan as providing a “general education.” That terminology suggests an education which might be good for any purpose—a nondescript, one- size-fits-all backdrop for something more specific, like a major. At TLU, however, the faculty members leading your classes have chosen to focus on delivering a “liberal education.” What’s the difference? In his essay “The Earthly Use of a Liberal Education,” A. Bartlett Giamatti writes “A liberal education has nothing to do with those political designer labels liberal and conservative . A liberal education is not one that seeks to implant the precepts of a specific religious or political 4 DRAFT orthodoxy. Nor is it an education intending to prepare for immediate immersion in a profession” (120). In other words, a liberal education does not encourage you to be (or become) a liberal, in the political sense of that word. In fact, a liberal education doesn’t seek to indoctrinate students into any particular way of thinking about any subject. Instead, a liberal education “rests on the supposition that our humanity is enriched by the pursuit of learning . it is dedicated to the proposition that growth in thought, in the power to think, increases the pleasure, breadth, and value of life” (Giamatti 121).