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...but we see them as quite different in kind. Indeed, the questions of liberal education take hold of people only under certain conditions. They call for distinct curricular and pedagogical approaches suited to particular kind of learner. Beyond the scene of learning, these questions also challenge societies more generally to recognize the value of acknowledging, experiencing, and responding to them and to maintain forums for their discussion.
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Now I admit that this understanding of liberal education can sound pompous and old hat. For the last few decades, our societies have been challenging liberal educators in turn to explain why and how their practices remain pertinent to a swiftly changing, endlessly modernizing world. Many such educators have themselves joined the ranks of the doubting and contributed to sharpening and disseminating this criticism. Leaving aside the strains these changes have also put on K-12 and vocational and professional educations, could alteration in the social conditions of liberal education be presaging the latter's extinction? In our age of ever more sophisticated versions of critical, ideology-unmasking theory and ever more sensitive scruples about diversity--not to mention competing, popular, and innovative media--the Big Questions can seem like inert, sacred cows. If we are to take them seriously today, we need at the very least to dispel their lofty vagueness and suspect majesty and to elucidate the specific nature of their appeal. What distinguishes these questions from others? To whom are they appropriately addressed? How could liberal educators help such people respond adequately?
To take up these meta-questions, I propose to move away initially from the handy but rather uninformative metaphor of size. Who can really measure whether a question is large enough to count? Instead, I shall try to re-describe the nature of the questions of liberal education via a close reading of some words of Rainer Maria Rilke. It is my hope that a clearer appreciation of the existential nature of the questions will illuminate what should be distinctive about this education.
Living the questions
The passage comes from Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. These letters are addressed to Franz Xaver Kappus, a nineteen-year-old would-be writer who had struck up a correspondence with the poet. Rilke was himself only twenty-seven and striving toward a breakthrough in his own work. He was also struggling with marital difficulties that perhaps increased his receptivity to the inner torment and ambivalence that Kappus must have expressed. This...
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