By J. Matthew Melton
In The Life of Pi, lead character Pi Patel, a Hindu, expresses his doubts about Christianity thusly, “Christianity had a reputation for few gods, great violence, but some very good schools.” When I first read this comment, I chuckled at the shrewd outsider perspective and, as a Christian educator, found it affirming in an ironic kind of way.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Liberal Arts at a faith-based school. I’ve been thinking about it in the context of what Martin Buber called “The Narrow Ridge” in Between Man and Man: ‘‘I wanted by this [the Narrow Ridge] to express that I did not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolute, but on a narrow rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.”
We might take issue with the concept of leaving Buber’s “broad upland” so readily. As a faith-based institution, more specifically a Christian university of emphatically evangelical origin, one might presume that we embrace the idea of a broad upland of sure statements. Some of us carry directional signs in our disciplines for the promise of secure grazing pastures for hungry minds.
That being said, if we dust Buber’s concept off a little, we may find more affinity than a first glance offers, especially when we speak of “the certainty of meeting what remains undisclosed.” The Narrow Ridge for Christian educators may not be so much about resting on the broad steppes of “sure statements” as it is about coaxing scores of students every year away from the cozy comforts of prescribed thinking to the far more precarious ledges of inquiry and intellectual dialog.
Anyone who has taught at the college level is perfectly aware that luring students into the zone of questions has never been easy and, with the rise of rapid-fire interactive technologies, seems to grow more daunting by the day. The college professor, for all her dynamism, is not quite as personally interactive as the computer, the IPod or the cell phone. The professor does not have an on/off button, a mute button, a fast forward, rewind or pause. The college class is not like the popular SIMs game in which you can govern the actions of others. The student is forced to sit for vast wastelands of time and receive, at the mercy of Someone Else, whole dictionaries of terms and knowledge many weren’t sure they wanted in the first place. This represents a serious challenge on both sides of “the ridge.”
Along these lines a new/old debate is raging with regard to the role of information and communication technologies, specifically the pre-eminence of constant connectivity and active participation in games and cyber-networks of various stripes. Research (largely paid for and conducted by organizations with serious Internet interests) has been hailing the positive influence of the Net on relationships and learning. However, this kind of perspective is similar to the glowing promise attached to the dawn of the automobile and the advent of television. In the rush to embrace newer technologies, we have always been dazzled by the trove of terrific benefits–so dazzled that we turn a blind eye to the price exacted from us.
The automobile, without which most of us would be largely disenfranchised, has brought countless blessings into our lives. But there is a steep pay-off: more than 40,000 accidental deaths per year in the U.S., the expense of ownership and maintenance, environmental hazards, the disappearance of countless small towns due to the demand for Interstate Highways, the near crippling dependence on oil that creates all kinds of international political situations from our status in the Middle East to our relations with China, India, Venezuela and Mexico.
But who stops to think of China or Japan when they roll out of the driveway on the way to work every morning?
Do we need cars? One might argue that we don’t, in point of fact, need cars. But we have made ourselves need them and, from a practical standpoint, that may amount to the same thing as needing them. So that if someone came along with a survey and asked me to what extent my automobile has improved my life, my relationships, my socio-economic standing in the world, I would more than likely have a lot of ecstatic things to say.
The Internet has become the new automobile in many ways. In posting this blog, I am tacitly acknowledging the Net’s recently acquired status as Gateway of Communication. I confess that I did not have this capability before the Net. I am truly grateful to the Net for this opportunity.
But before we start lighting too many candles at the Net shrine, we should stop and talk about the pay-off. More specifically and intentionally, we need to evaluate the role of rapid, interactive communication technologies on the college campus. We need to talk about the expectations these technologies have created among our students. We need to examine what may or may not be happening to cognitive processes, patterns, or, at the very least, dispositions. As faculty–which by definition situates us in a prior generation–we need to ask ourselves where and when we should get on and off this bullet train.
Most importantly, we probably need to have this conversation with our students. If one of the expectations created by the new technologies is that face-to-face dialog is obsolete, should we let that expectation go unchallenged? If the new expectation is that students should be allowed to multi-task in the middle of class with their laptops and cell phones, perhaps this, too, warrants closer examination.
I don’t profess to have any answers at this stage. But perhaps we can co-opt the interactive cyber-tools we now possess to help us draw some conclusions that work for us. I hope you’ll join me in the effort.
(Lee Arts & Sciences Home)
