Why Reinvent It At All?

Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America.
Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Reviewed by Steven Weiland

Columbia University’s famed “Contemporary Civilization” course was introduced in 1919 but, as University of Chicago sociologist Donald Levine notes, it was revised almost from its inception. The same might be said of liberal education at other elite institutions where intellectually demanding faculty members appear never to be satisfied with any curriculum in place, always imagining a better synthesis of the ideas that animate the essential arts and sciences. Levine tells the story of Chicago’s curricular history in order to display, at the end, his own plan for “reinventing liberal education in our time.”

Powers of the Mind is in three parts. In the first, Levine reviews the ways in which the “revolutions” of modernity—such as the rise of specialization and individualism—have been reflected in the transformation of learning. He finds motives for reform of liberal education not only in the interests of scholars and teachers, but in society as well. Modernity, he argues, has “demanded” many adaptations in liberal education. But Chicago is distinctive, Levine believes, in having built ongoing conversations about its foundational curriculum into the fabric of its institutional life. 

In the second part of Powers of the Mind, Levine takes us into the university archives for an account of the many revisions of the Chicago undergraduate curriculum, which has always featured a substantial number of prescribed liberal or general education courses. These have often been configured as sequences or as representations of ambitious schemes for the organization of knowledge and learning. Some of the most distinguished scholars at the university led curriculum revision committees, and the reform discourse sometimes reflects this. But more often it is in the syntax of memos and reports, and while it is good to have an accessible record of the educationally significant struggles at Chicago, Levine’s narrative is overburdened with reproductions of obscure committee reports, other documents, and testimony about the fine-tuning of the organizational structure of general education. 

Even, however, with his dedication to the record, Levine gives us useful accounts of the contributions of key players, particularly Joseph Schwab, a vivid figure for Levine and everyone else who knew him as a teacher of the natural sciences and then a theorist of the curriculum. As an ally during the 1930s and 1940s of Chicago’s reform-minded president Robert Maynard Hutchins, Schwab demonstrated the role of science in liberal education, including its lessons for the humanities and social sciences. Levine calls Schwab an “idiosyncratic maverick.” But he adds that “in the national context his distinctiveness reflected his formation by and total devotion to the University; his achievements are unthinkable without a number of the features that distinguished Chicago during his half century of work there.” Long after Hutchins left Chicago in 1951, Schwab continued to be an influential figure, locally and nationally, in criticism of curriculum studies. The anthropologist Robert Redfield is another memorable reformer whose observation that education “is a conversation about the meaning of life, as each person sees some part of it, on behalf of everyone” is a favorite of Levine, as it should be of everyone dedicated to democratic teaching and learning. Schwab, Redfield, philosopher Richard McKeon, literary theorist Wayne Booth, and many others less well known outside of Hyde Park, make up what Levine describes as a “kindred assemblage constituted by diversity of opinion.” An informative chapter is devoted to the famous disagreement between John Dewey and Hutchins in the 1930s; both men favored liberal education but they could not agree on its relationship to everyday experience. However familiar Chicago’s contributions might be, Levine is convinced that in today’s circumstances “this is a story that must be told, again and again.” 

The third part of Powers of the Mind constitutes a kind of pedagogical autobiography of the author. An influential sociologist, Levine believes that mastering the history of liberal education and reinventing it for our time is an intellectual task “no less difficult and challenging than the most demanding forms of scholarly research.” And his scheme for renewal is certainly unique in at least one respect. It reflects his experience with Eastern forms of philosophy, religion, and especially the martial arts. Thus, the eight “powers” Levine names as the goals of the “reinvented” curriculum are divided between “those that correspond to inhaling—those capacities that take in objects—and those that correspond to exhaling—the processing and return to the world of expressions mediated through an evolving self.” Still, Levine’s complex scheme reflects the cognitive and social activities that have been common to liberal education for centuries. What is new in his book is their organization into a scheme that specifies particular methods of instruction for achieving the lofty and often remote-sounding goals of liberal learning. Levine is admirably concrete in this regard, reflecting perhaps his interest in the role of the body in learning. 

As is the case with most studies of liberal education (and of curricular reform, for that matter), Levine’s book largely ignores students. We are left to assume that Chicago’s intellectually vigorous students joined the faculty in whatever rebellion was signified by each curricular revision. Levine makes a strong case for testing as a resource for liberal education, but he appears not to know very much about the actual effects of Chicago’s many curricular changes, including those, in recent decades, in which he has participated. But Levine’s account of his own courses, and the sample syllabi he provides in an appendix, demonstrate his interest in how students might be served by advances in his scholarship—a sign of his dedication to reimagining his vocation as well as the curriculum. 

It is fair to ask why liberal education needs to be reinvented, although, of course, there are good reasons at any time to propose fresh ways to think about disciplines and problems still perceived as essential to educational legitimacy, even at institutions now dedicated to what they believe to be more appealing features of the curriculum. Levine writes about the design of courses but his subject is the academic enterprise itself. Opposite the brief closing chapter of Powers of the Mind is a quotation from Hugo Sonnenschein, Chicago’s president from 1993 to 2000: “The commodification and marketing of higher education are unmistakable today, and we can’t jolly dance along and not pay attention to them.” Sonnenschein does not otherwise appear in Powers of the Mind but is a convenient symbol for Levine of the resistance now needed in order to sustain a deep reflection on liberal education. 

Levine is happy to “dance along,” as Sonnenschein would have it, however much the expansion of higher education and its increasing vocationalism have marginalized what was, for much of the past century, the essential curriculum. Thus he says, revealing some of the status politics of American higher education, “Even if our educational system cannot produce a citizenry capable of informed deliberation about complex matters, it is essential that modern societies have the benefit of an intellectual elite educated well beyond their occupational specialties.” And what will it take to discover the best way to do that? Ferdinand Shevill, a historian at Chicago from its founding in 1892 until 1929, was called out of retirement to help implement a new plan for general education survey courses. Shevill was experienced enough to declare: “Our rallying cry and slogan must be: the humanities at the college level as a job for eternity.”

Steven Weiland is professor of educational administration and teacher education at Michigan State University.

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