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A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
—Margaret Mead
A point Ed Freeman and Lisa Stewart made in the last issue of Change (“Teaching Business Ethics in the Age of Madoff,” November/December 2009) has stuck with me: that ethical behavior is not simply a function of character. It's also a matter of competence—or competencies, which comprise factual knowledge, what cognitive scientist David Perkins calls “mindware,” and general intellectual skills.
In the first category is general and disciplinary knowledge. In the “mindware” category are the intellectual skills that come with advanced study of a discipline, such as scientific procedures, rules of evidence, knowledge of statistical principles, logic, and so on. These two are what faculty generally think they are in the classroom to transmit.
Lists of general intellectual skills, less clearly anyone's responsibility, almost always include the core competencies identified in National Education Goal 6B(v): communication (including writing, speaking, listening, and working in groups with people unlike oneself), problem formulation and solving (including the kinds of messy problems that occur in real life), and critical thinking (including having a sophisticated and high truth standard).
But the intellectual goals of a liberal education as laid out by the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education and as described by Ernest Pascarella in his article here, go beyond the merely cognitive: They include moral character (“the extent to which students use higher-order…moral reasoning in resolving moral issues”), inclination to inquire and lifelong learning (“a student's tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activity”), intercultural effectiveness (“students' openness to cultural and racial diversity, as well as the extent to which they enjoy being challenged by different perspectives, values, and ideas”), and personal well-being (“self-acceptance, personal growth, purpose in life, positive relations with others, environmental mastery, and autonomy”).
What strikes me about this list is the sense of agency that pervades it—the sense that the good life (notice the repetition of the word enjoy) requires a belief in one's own personal power to make a difference. Parker Palmer, in a previous Change article (November/December, 2007), argued that a belief in that power is critical to people's ethical behavior in the workplace, where they all too often behave as if nothing they can do will change their organizations. Harry Boyte has also identified nurturing that sense of agency as our core job in developing the civic capacities of students (see Change, May/June, 2008); this is one of the things that clearly happens in Project Pericles classrooms, as described by Jan Liss in this issue.
In order to function effectively as citizens, college graduates need to believe that through “effortful cognitive activity” they can make a difference. And to some degree, a sense of agency depends upon a cultivated imagination as well. Any citizen's vote does not count in any election won by more than a single vote—only that person's behavior as part of a larger social whole. To see one's own power in that context requires an imaginative leap that study in the humanities and arts can cultivate.
But it seems that we help most students develop a sense of agency not primarily by reading and studying but by having them do things and watch the results: creating a Website that results in a flood of email challenging its conclusions, constructing a robot that successfully performs some task (or not), or working in the community and seeing some demonstrable improvement in people's lives. Many “good students”—those who resemble academics the most—may not need that kind of reinforcement. Two students in a lecture hall may be having very different experiences: one may be passively receiving knowledge, while another may be actively engaged with what he or she is seeing—comparing it to other knowledge, for instance, or thinking of its implications for behavior, or trying to fit it into prior mental models of the world. But most people, it seems, literally have to act to believe in their own clout.
In some arenas, I know that's true of me. I remember the first (and only) time I bloodied a man's nose in a taekwondo sparring match. I hadn't truly believed, to that point, that my fist had any power, and I looked at it afterward with wonder and delight, even though that bloody nose was the result of a badly controlled blow, and it was hardly a moment to be proud of.
Action requires both intention and agency, cognitive scientists tell us: For a blow to be well directed and have the desired impact, it has to be appropriately intended, as well as effectively planned for and skillfully executed. Mine was none of those things, and it was the job of my instructor to guide my intentions (one of the commitments a taekwondo student makes is “I shall build a better and peaceful world”) and teach me the requisite skill to enact them. But first I had to believe that my puny fist had power.
Dewey Cornell alerts us here to the tragic consequences of a fist that is not governed by appropriate intention. Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, lacked both that and self-regulation—the capacity for which is evidently a strong predictor of children's subsequent success in life. Freedom, Matthieu Richard tells us, is control over one's mind and life. And I would add that it is a necessary condition of an efficacious life, as well as the ultimate goal of a liberal education—which is by definition one befitting a free person. Cho was not a free man.
The stars may be aligning in such a way that nurturing a sense of civic agency in our students will be made easier. What we collectively do in the world speaks more loudly to students than what we say, and many institutions have been recently reminded how crucial it is that they enact their public service missions if they are to receive public support. Meanwhile, the donors whose gifts they rely on are increasingly giving, we are told, for programs with clear social purposes. Finally, as David Gergen says, there is reason for hope in the current college generation, which is more idealistic and service oriented than the ones preceding it.
We are the agents who can shape students' educational environment to nurture the development of their civic skills so that this generation and the ones after it will know how to reshape the larger environment in which we all live. Creating the world we want to live in is not a spectator sport. Marian Wright Edleman, quoting Martin Luther King, talks about schools' responsibility to send forth not just “thermometer” but “thermostat” citizens and workers—ones who don't just register the temperature but change it. That is our responsibility too—both to be and to generate thermostat leaders.
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