Title: "The Play's the Thing": Theater Arts and Liberal Learning
Abstract: The recurrent disposition to view undergraduate learning as most valuable when it prepares students for specific careers by equipping them with the particular skill sets of their chosen occupations has led invariably to a number of unfortunate consequences. Foremost among them has been the distressing tendency to comprehend and design even music, theater, and dance activities exclusively as pre-professional training exercises. This over-reverence for technique often weakens the inherent powers of the arts to deepen self-knowledge, to develop the virtues most useful in the pursuit of truth, to build community, to enhance appreciation for the ways in which texts of all kinds function to make meaning and evoke feeling, and to introduce young people to the life of the mind. Honors programs can therefore perform a great educational service by restoring the arts, especially the theater arts, to their proper place within a collegial setting as instruments of liberal learning. The renowned Freshman Production at Valparaiso University's honors college, Christ College, both clarifies the meaning and demonstrates the truth of the claim that the arts are indeed liberal arts and that they are therefore essential to a liberal education. Though liberal learning is extremely difficult to define theoretically, especially in an honors setting, it is relatively easy to recognize in practice. It involves the cultivation of certain arts and skills of analysis, criticism, and interpretation. It frees students and teachers from unexamined tyrannies that hold dominion over their souls and minds, even as it frees them for love of the world through responsible and lifelong engagement with fundamental human questions. Liberal learning, therefore, includes both the improvement of the mind and the cultivation of those virtues that are indispensable to the pursuit of the truth of matters. Since liberal learning is a public, not a private, endeavor, most of these virtues are social, governing the manner in which human beings relate to one another. But how do we cultivate in ourselves and in our students virtues like trust, humility, courage, justice, civility, honesty, and friendship? Aristotle argued persuasively that we become courageous by courageous acts in the manner in which a courageous person would perform them. In short, we become virtuous in the same way in which we become virtuosos: practice, practice, practice. So if we wish to shape character, it will not be enough to hold up examples, to exhort, and to study works about virtue and character. If we are serious about liberal learning in its broadest sense, we must order our common life in such a way that we are all led to those practices of public life whose application will encourage students and faculty members alike to become more civil, honest, and trustworthy. Becoming virtuous is, therefore, from one point of view at least, a performing art. This understanding of the significance of the arts for a liberal education has become steadily more compelling to those of us at Valparaiso's honors college who have taught in the Freshman Program, a required course of study that includes a theater arts component. The Freshman Program is a two-semester sequence of interdisciplinary honors courses titled Texts and Contexts: Traditions of Human Thought. Throughout the course, students read selected great works of history, literature, drama, philosophy, and religion and consider closely the ideas that have shaped a range of traditions of the East and West. Ideas are explored in many ways--through critical reading and close analysis of texts; through careful research and focused expository and persuasive writing; through scholarly lectures, faculty-guided small group discussion among classmates, and formal public debate; and through creative dramatic and musical expression. This last means of exploration--creative dramatic and musical expression--is guided and molded during the fall semester in the weekly Freshman Program Drama Workshop. …
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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