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A Brief History
The Institute of Liberal Education (ILE)
has been created as an extension of another non-profit organization named the
Renaissance II Liberal Education Society (Ren II).
The Renaissance II Liberal Education Society was founded in 1984 with a mandate
that was essentially the same as the Institute of Liberal Education, i.e. to
improve contemporary education by revitalizing the theory and practice of a
liberal education. Since its establishment two decades ago, Renaissance II has
accomplished the following:
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it created (in 1995) and developed a
small, grade 6-9 middle school in British Columbia that has pursued the ideals
of a liberal education (Island
Pacific School)
-
it established (in 2001) the “Institute
of Liberal Education” as a staff development framework for the staff members
at Island Pacific School.
On June 30, 2004 Island Pacific School
became its own separate legal entity (it had always been operated under the
direction of Renaissance II), partially in an effort to “free up” Renaissance
II to be able to address its broader mission. In November of 2004, however,
the decision was made to create a separate Institute of Liberal Education with
the intention of making it the main vehicle through which the broad project of
revitalizing liberal education might be advanced.
The Institute of Liberal Education is therefore both old and new today. It is
old because it has been in existence for over 20 years and can boast some
significant accomplishments. It is brand new, however, in that it is now
refocusing itself toward its broader vision.
Although definitions of liberal
education are varied, a liberal education is perhaps best understood as
cultivating and encouraging two distinct, yet intimately related, types of
freedom. In the first instance a liberal education is the kind of education that
frees a person from the ignorance and superstition that can sometimes attend
unexamined thought and the conventions of one’s own times. In her book entitled
Cultivating Humanity, University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum identifies
the “Socratic-Stoic” line of liberal education as expressing this ideal:
The central task of education, argue the
Stoics following Socrates, is to confront the passivity of the pupil,
challenging the mind to take charge of its own thought. All too often, people’s
choices and statements are not their own. Words come out of their mouths, and
actions are performed by their bodies, but what those words and actions express
may be the voice of tradition or convention, the voice of the parent, of
friends, of fashion. This is so because these people have never stopped to ask
themselves what they really stand for, what they are willing to defend as
themselves and their own. They are like instruments on which fashion and habit
play their tunes, or like stage masks through which an actor’s voice speaks. The
Stoics hold, with Socrates, that this life is not worthy of the humanity in
them, the capacities for thought and moral choice they all possess. (Cultivating
Humanity, 28-29)
Second, a liberal education is the
kind of education that frees a student for something – in particular for the
full exercise of positive human capacities, or excellences. Retired Cambridge
professor Charles Bailey describes this latter dimension as follows:
What the liberally educated person is
released for is a kind of intellectual and moral autonomy, the capacity to
become a free chooser of what is to be believed and what is to be done, a free
chooser of beliefs and actions – in a word, a free moral agent, the kind of
entity a fully-fledged human being is supposed to be and which all too few
are! (Beyond the Present & Particular: A Theory of Liberal Education, 21)
These two kinds of freedom implicit in
liberal education (i.e. freedom from and freedom for) are interrelated and
overlapping in that they both would both endorse Pindar’s exhortation to
“become what you are” – that is, to express the very best of what it is to be
a human being by cultivating our distinct human excellences.
In addition, therefore, to being the kind of education that frees students
from the ignorance and superstition of their times (i.e. through exposure to
knowledge and the ability to reason), a liberal education is simultaneously
the kind of education that frees a person for the cultivation of the very best
of what it is to be a human being.
The central aim of the Institute is
to reintroduce the theory and practice of a liberal education into the
educational environment of contemporary grade schools. This will involve
re-examining the conceptual contours of the term “liberal education” with a view
to reconciling classical notions of truth and the good life with modern
commitments to pluralism and diversity. It will also involve the creation of new
programs and institutions that directly address the ideals of a liberal
education. Finally, the revitalization of the theory and practice of a liberal
education will involve and require some mechanism to evaluate whether or not
progress is being made.
Current Focus: Liberal Education in
Schools
The Institute’s main focus will be
the extent to which components of a liberal education might be successfully
introduced in grade school, i.e. at middle school and high school in particular.
Our work with middle school students at Island Pacific School suggests that a
kind of “primer coat” can perhaps be applied which may prepare and predispose
students to a fuller version of a liberal education later in their lives. Our
experiences have shown that two questions are of particular interest and
importance: whether there are things that can be done in grade schools that
demonstrably enhance intellectual competence and engagement; and whether there
are things that can be done in grade schools that actually predispose students
to seriously consider the question of how one ought to live. The main work of
the institute will be to find practical and constructive answers to both these
questions.
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