Specialization, Generally Speaking
None of us is in the dark concerning the fact that we’ve all been infected by the philosophical virus called modernism. As one of the symptoms of this illness, we look for specialists or specialized answers to problems and find ourselves anticipating that all questions have answers we can find without help because we see ourselves as specially suited to uncover the answers. (At least we know which “chapter and verse” in our favorite Great Book to reference.) In fact, as we’ve been reared in our society, our first impulse is often to look down upon a generalist as unequal to any particular task and therefore unfit for success as we have learned to define it.
Does this tendency to seek out specialization show up anywhere within our classical Christian schools? Does it have wide application, rearing its ugly head in a variety of contexts, even where we fail to notice it? If it does, wouldn’t that seem to bear witness to the greater completeness of the generalist as compared to the specialist? After all, to always seek specialized answers is a generalized tendency, isn’t it?
What is the role of the generalist among the faculty of a classical Christian school? Should we all be generalists, capable of teaching all subject matter? If so, should we all be teaching the whole gamut? How should we decide who will teach what? How does our degree of specialization relate to our mastery of lessons? Must generalization imply a lesser degree of mastery?
April 20th, 2006 at 10:31 am
BAP
You bring up a conundrum that I have spent no small amount of time on after first reading Hicks several years ago. Hick’s vision, falling in line with that of the model of the “British” form system as I understand it, seems to require broad generalists who can lead a group of kids from end of the school to the other. I love the notion of this but am baffled as to how to locate, train, and then retain such a faculty in a world dominated by the specialist. Even those of us seeking to be worthy “generalists” find it rough without good examples of such to follow.
April 20th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
I think the initial response that most people, including myself, would have is that of course it is better to be specialized. The more I think about it the more I think perhaps the person with a broader more general field may have something to offer that the “specialized” person doesnt. That is the genralized person my be able to connect truths of one particular field of study and connect them to truths of another field of study.
Perhaps being a specialist with a genralized background would be good to?
April 25th, 2006 at 10:41 am
This may be a false dilemma. Specialization only matters significantly in areas of life that require highly technical skills. Humane studies are not among them, because the skills required to participate in a humane study are humane skills.
For some months now I’ve had the repeated impulse to respond to the ubiquitous tendency to view the liberal arts as the study of general subjects. That is not what the liberal arts are. They are the foundational studies that enable us to be highly effective, free people. A general knowledge of a lot of variably useful information is not a liberal education. Neither is a general knowledge of variably good literature.
A liberal education is a mastery of the seven liberal arts.
But this phrase too has been stolen by the Endarkenment.
April 25th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
I agree that the specialist-generalist distinction may be a false dilemma. Maybe what I meant in this posting should’ve been said differently to reflect that.
These comments cause me to retrace something I’ve suspected for a while, that what we are really perceiving as the specialist-generalist distinction may be simply the recognition that we are finite beings blessed with just enough transcendence to recognize our finitude and our place within the world. When we talk about “highly technical skills,” I think we may have in view the finite means by which we interact with the creation. When we talk about “humane skills,” we may only be referring to the corresponding transcendent means by which we understand our finite interactions within the context of the unique cosmic state of affairs. We are contingent beings with the capacity to serve as necessary causes for other contingent beings.
It troubles me also to see the tendency to view liberal education as simply a broad-based coure of study, but I also wonder whether or not even thinking of the seven liberal arts as “foundational studies” might fall under that same tendency, although to a much lesser extent. The reason is that, if liberal education is viewed as the imperfectly transcendent, organic process of humanization I mentioned above, then the foundational studies of the seven liberal arts cannot in themselves constitute a liberal education. A building and its foundation are not the same thing.
Perhaps a liberal education should also be understood to include the formation of some ideal within the person who comes to know himself as a human being in a world of other beings created by God. Such a person knows not only his relations to other created beings but also his relation to the Creator. Because this knowledge is of his createdness as well as of his Creator, it is truly poetic, consistent with the etymology of that word and serving to further inform the completed man.
If all of this is true, then we must be very careful to dig deeper into the nature of our educational enterprise. We need to know whether we have begun to play with an accumulation of curricula and other data or whether we have committed ourselves to something about which no data can be collected, except by those who are likewise committed to it.
This thought in itself is disturbing because it may imply something much like what Christ said concerning “him who has ears to hear.” This need not be a retreat to educational Gnosticism, although it may cause us to realize that our efforts in education do not necessarily yield the humane in all cases. Not all of our students will avoid the resignation to dehumanization that shows up in various forms, including pride in the “hording” of knowledge.