RDB6 "Liberal Education"

Hermit crabs are very interesting creatures. As they grow and become too big for their shells, they search for a new shell that will accommodate their new size. When they find that shell, they live there and continue to thrive and grow until it is time to repeat the process. We are just like the hermit crab in that we are constantly “growing” as ourselves and expanding our knowledge in a specific place until it is time for us to move on and pursue something more adventurous and new. As A. Bartlett Giametti says, “The journey of education is lifelong; it began in your family and in your place of worship and in your earlier schools and in the spaces of your soul that are yours alone…” and will continue through our lives, until the day we die (128). My family was my initial source of education and enlightenment.

My journey has lead me to my new “shell” of the University of Texas at Austin. Here, the opportunities at obtaining knowledge are infinite. Through the Plan II program, I feel like I am embarking on a path of an ideal liberal education, which will lead to unlimited possibilities in my future. According to The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University a liberal education is a “rare execution of education and culture (which) with (a) mixture of (the) senses” covers a wide array of studies and is “directed to (the) general intellectual enlargement and refinement” of the human persona (318b). While those who strictly study the sciences will be successful, those who are more well rounded and cultured will be more beneficial to society. Plan II is meant to train “the free man” and as Dean Parlin once said, to provide an “education for life, not living” (Woodruff 1). I believe that Plan II allows students to discover their passions, to explore areas of study that are foreign and unknown to them, and to grow in the sense of experiencing new ideas and situations. Through discovery learning students determine how to interact with their peers and relate with others thoughts and beliefs to form their own opinions and become their own distinctive self. I have always been a big fan of discovery learning. Here my friend and I explore the danger of video games.

I do not believe that everyone at the University is fortunate enough to experience this type of liberal education. In my larger Natural Sciences classes, I do not feel a connection with the teachers and learning. As I copy down endless pages of notes, I feel distant and as they want me to fail or quit in order to weed me out of the Pre-Med Program. In my Plan II classes, I feel like the teachers will do anything in their power to help me succeed. Their interesting views and questions spark an interest in learning and “feed (their students) curiosity” (Woodruff 1). A unique bond has already formed within our world literature class and I can see the sense of community growing each day.
Everyone in Bump 603A discussing our childhoods.

In this class, we have been challenged to search our souls and to bear them and to express ourselves through rhetoric, the Internet, and group discussion. Second Life has provided us with a chance to become our role models and to experience what it would be like to be them. Walter Jackson Bate states that “almost all knowledge of the inner nature and feelings of others must come through the imagination: “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.” Through Second Life, we have used our imaginations to put ourselves in another’s shoes, and ultimately have come to discover more about our role models and ourselves. I believe that that is the purpose of a liberal education, to learn so much about others and various areas of study that you stumble across yourself along the way. It allows one to “make connections, connections in and through ideas …with other minds, past, present, and future,” while still inspiring new ideas and attitudes within oneself (Giametti 128). It is a journey, “an acquired illumination, …a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment.. It implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent” and I am glad to be part of it (Newman 977). My education has already begun to shape me as a person and I cannot wait to see what I am to become.

Me being excited about Liberal Education and what lies ahead!