What Do We Miss?

In all our high level seminars, hours in the library and dusty tomes on our bookshelves, have we missed something?  Has our education here left something out?  Something, perhaps, more elusive than a GPA or a thesis?  Does Middlebury create smarter people or better people?

This is a somewhat melancholy road to go down. It is difficult to conceive that after all we have gone through at college whether it is emotional, physical or spiritual that somehow, something crucial was left out. It is far easier to believe that we are continually bettered by our work here. Still, I find it difficult to find that logic true. I struggle to conceive how my reading great authors or writing papers makes me a better person. Or do we simply rely on the age-old testament that being more knowledgeable makes you better?

In some cases this may be the case. How could we contribute to positive debate in the world around us if we did not have the tools for rhetoric and discussion? Knowledge in that sense gives us options. It gives us the freedom to engage in certain material, to influence, convince and discover – all things we already know. But knowledge alone does not teach us morality or leadership or compassion. On that topic our Middlebury education remains remarkably silent.

It seems those are what we need most at times and find ourselves sorely lacking. We may be straight-A students, but what good is that if we find ourselves ambivalent about the world around us?  What use, then, is a Middlebury degree except to satisfy our academic ambition?  It all seems rather selfish. Of course, I don’t blame Middlebury for this; it is just the convenient example. This question of teaching morality and leadership could apply to any educational institution. It is something we sorely lack but has forever been left to the realm of personal experience instead of academic.

Most of us inherit the morality of people most present in our lives: friends, family, the people who raised us. I did and it certainly was not perfect. Love your family, provide for yourself, do what you love and work hard. Not bad things, but there’s other more subtle things too, bits of personality less desirable. Fight the people who fight your brothers, stick to your own people, don’t talk about unpleasant things, never let the world see you sweat. The morality I picked up instead looks like a kind of personal code that does not quite cut it. How can I be given an education, be given knowledge that is rare and powerful, but no way to effectively use it?

It is the recurring trope of a liberal arts education that we become worldly and exposed to all matter of subject material. I can only assume this stretches beyond the bounds of mere academia. Yet we rarely act on it. Patience, moderation and confidence seem to be subjects we have trouble with, as any Friday night will tell you. Imagine all the issues on this campus that could be solved if we taught leadership and compassion in the same way we approached humanities and science. Would men still be aggressors on drunken evenings or would we be bound by a sense of moderation and character?  Would we need rash displays of activism to tell us about injustices in the world or on our doorstep?  Instead most of those moral lessons come from outside the positive structure of academic experience and from personal experience and, everyone’s favorite, the media.

I’m not sure how you teach morality well. I’m sure part of the reason morality is ignored is how slippery it is to define and enact. But there are some tried and true ways to go about it. One of the biggest is making community inescapable. In a place as small as our campus you would think this would be the default, yet there are bitter divides of class and ideology that set us apart and stress our individualism.  If we each held a responsibility to benefit the whole, perhaps lack of morality would be better understood as having negative effects on ourselves too. This also falls in line with being able to feel for others. Sympathy and pity rarely bring us to constructive places. Instead, community should bring profound empathy, difficult to articulate and even more so to enact.

So, dear reader, ask yourself what have you not learned in your education here? I sincerely believe being able to identify what you don’t know will do you far better than labeling all the things you do. Maybe then we can fill in the blanks and address the gaps where morality has been left out of our education.