Liberal Education

Spring 2001
Volume 87, Number 2

Liberal Learning as Conversation

By John B. Bennett, university scholar and provost emeritus at Quinnipiac University

(Copyright held by the Association of American Colleges and Universities)

Many of our metaphors for teaching and learning are horrible. Some are mechanistic and liken
education to the stocking and pouring of knowledge as though it were simply different solids and
liquids. Others image student minds as clay and wax awaiting impressions, or as empty rooms to be
furnished. There are organic metaphors -- planting seeds, clearing brush, fertilizing soil, cultivating or
strengthening flabby minds, etc. Still other metaphors present education as a process of production
from raw materials to finished product, and liberal education as though it were a piece of quality control
-- an immunization against snarls and defects in the production line. There are better alternatives. The
late English philosopher Michael Oakeshott bequeathed us the marvelously rich and provocative
metaphor of education as "conversation."(1) We would do well to consider it -- critically, because it
needs a bit of repair -- and then incorporate it within a collegial ethic of hospitality.

Becoming human
Learning is not natural in the sense of automatic, Oakeshott notes. To become human, we must claim,
appropriate, and then dwell in the rich heritage of our culture and civilization -- a world of meanings, not
of things. Entering this world "is the only way of becoming a human being, and to inhabit it is to be a
human being" (1989, 45). Each individual must do this for himself or herself, though older generations
usually recognize a responsibility to initiate newcomers into the world they are to inhabit. As a result,
Oakeshott observes, society has set aside colleges and universities with their privileges of leisure and
open discussion as special places where the work of becoming human can take place.

In this work of becoming human, students learn to engage in conversation with their inheritance and its
many voices -- what Oakeshott calls its various modes of thought or distinct idioms of human self-
understanding. These are not collections of beliefs or perceptions. They are various languages of
understanding. These voices reflect the achievements of humanity, its insights in science, history,
literature, the arts, politics, economics, and philosophy, as well as in the more applied skills.

"A university is not a machine for achieving a particular purpose or producing a particular result; it is a
manner of human activity," Oakeshott tells us. It is both a conversation and a place where one learns
how to access the voices and to join in the conversation. In colleges and universities of integrity more
than one voice must be clearly heard, and the manner (not the mannerisms) of the voices is deliberately
taught. The proper conversation of the college or university involves a rich variety of intellectual,
imaginative, moral, and emotional voices -- each field of special study "a particular manner of thinking"
or a distinctive voice, having "some insight into its own presuppositions," and each being "easily
recognized as belonging to the single world of learning" (1989, 96, 126, 134, 126).
No one of these voices, certainly not that of science or other empirical idioms, is to have a preeminent
role in the conversation. None is privileged, and none should dominate. Each has something to add, but
each is only one voice. Human understanding comes in accepting this ongoing, unconcluded
conversational array of riches as presenting a variety of different ways of understanding self and world.
It provides an extraordinary mirror of human achievements in which to recognize oneself. The
conversation into which we are invited is "an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure."

Liberal learning is just such an intellectual adventure. An education in the importance of imagination,
liberal education initiates us "into the art of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices,
to distinguish their different models of utterance, to acquire the intellectual and moral habits
appropriate to this conversational relationship and thus to make our debut dans la vie humaine" (1989,
39). I suggest below that it is precisely these habits -- the ones acquired in liberal learning -- that help
other conversations, and indeed all of education, to become an intellectual adventure.

Many voices
Several important features of conversation recommend it as a root metaphor for higher education. For
instance, conversation calls attention to active learning -- each learner taking responsibility for his or her
own inquiry. Simply to overhear the conversation is not sufficient. Indeed, to continue the metaphor, we
know that each person must work to find and then use his or her own voice -- thereby becoming both
engaged in, and contributing to, the ongoing conversation. To find and use one's own voice is to bring
one's unique talents, perspective, and experience to the greater conversation. Conversations are self-
involving and in part self-referential. There is potential for inner impact, even for individual self-
transformation. There are no generic voices. And to be voiceless is like being faceless, stripped of what is
distinctively human.

Conversation also requires the other -- indeed, a multitude of important others. Conversation is not a
soliloquy. The multiculturalism of our time presents distinctive opportunities as well as challenges --
opportunities to broaden what is shared in common, but experienced differently, perhaps even
discordantly. Conversation undertaken hospitably can honor, thicken, and extend what is already shared
and known. It also gives us grounds for holding that what we experience in our community is not unlike
what others in other communities experience. Yet this kind of openness revokes the impossible
requirement that we all understand the same things. Precisely because of conversation with others we
can generalize without making universal claims.

The metaphor of conversation challenges other self-preoccupations and tendencies toward relativism
and even solipsism. Such self-centeredness can characterize the new college student as well as the
experienced college professor. It may even extend to conversational voices that seek to be privileged.
New students must be invited to see their college and university experience as an invitation to put
earlier, limited views, traditions, and habits of thought and conversation behind them. They must learn
to ask new and better questions, to listen closely, and to acquire the competencies and practice the
dispositions that will distinguish them as confident members of the broader human community. At the
same time, part of their confidence should be rooted in their awareness that they have gifts to offer
others.