Rumplestiltskin was an English major, and perhaps his experience in that department is illuminating in the effort to explain the difficulties of defining a liberal education in terms of requirements.

The English Department envisioned literature as chemists envision the elements--with the help of a periodic Table. By dividing literature into six historical periods, the department allowed itself to handle the canon of "great" writers categorically, utilizing the tools of history and social science as an approach to art.

Why?

Just why the department then felt compelled to expose students to a specimen from each period is extremely difficult to say. Since they could hardly expect to expose him to all of the literature written in English in a mere four years, it was clear enough to him that they were aiming at directed selection. But why it was not likely that he should discover more in selections chosen by himself on the grounds of personal preference, this was hard to say.

And yet it could not be denied that having dabbled in every age he was better prepared to discuss English Literature with his friends and to discourse learnedly about the Western tradition. The only difficulty here was that once freed from the Harvard influence he never discussed anything of the sort, and the things which had meaning to him alone were buried in this mass of external tradition.

More important than these requirements, however, were the demands of individual courses. Courses seemed to be obsessed with putting knowledge into people's heads so that these people would then have "the necessary intellectual tools" for executing some undefined mental acrobatics.

Indeed, the objective too often seemed to be the acquisition of "good taste." President Pusey had spoken of the dangers of anti-intellectualism, but he had never spoken very succinctly about the value of the intellect. He had suggested that the development of a University Library was essential to creating the community which Cambridge ought to be, and that the development of an individual library was a sign of being educated. And without really denying these values, Rumplestiltskin was a little puzzled by what these things implied about living, since he could hardly see that they implied anything.

Very often, he noticed, this simply implied that he should have read and "understood" the right books, and understanding consisted exclusively of what he could articulate, which was usually what he least cared about.

The department also had certain peculiar theories about its own requirements. The people best capable of coping with the academic world were given the most attention, while those most completely nonplussed by the department were consigned to limbo as non-honors students.

And yet the same ambiguity cut the other way, for the students best able to cope with the regular requirements were also allowed to dispense with them and get course reductions, tutorial for credit, and other special dispensations, while those who found courses extremely difficult to adapt to were not allowed to dispense with them, but continued to plug away at the media to which they were unsuited.

University's Confidence

This situation Rumplestiltskin could only explain as an evidence of the University's amazing confidence in its own vision of what a man should become. Surely the University must be little less than fanatical if it would continue to demand that students follow a program and seek an attitude which it was patently impossible to give them. And surely they must think this ideal highly desirable if they felt it was desirable to convince the vast majority of students that they were less than they ought to be because they could not attain this ideal.

And yet the University seemed to have no such explicit assurance. Nobody was willing to say that requirements worked for the benefit of those subjected to them, and yet nobody was willing to abolish them. Everybody agreed in theory that all students had unique needs and that no system could possibly do these individuals justice. And yet with monotonous regularity the abolition of one unsatisfactory system was succeeded by the installation of another, which in turn was abolished when it too failed to achieve the undefined end, "the liberal education."

By the time he had graduated, Rumplestiltskin had learned only one thing about the University's effort to educate him: that neither he nor the University knew enough about him to proscribe a system for making him over into a new "educated" image. Indeed, he found, the most important thing that had happened to him at Harvard had nothing to do with the information he had acquired, or the courses he had taken, but rather simply that he had become four years older in good company.

Meaningless Education

It was not until several years later that he realized that good company could mean more than intelligence, sophistication and conviviality. It was when he began to look for this new radical kind of goodness, to look for virtue instead of virtuosity, that he first found how little his systematic education had actually meant in his search for a way of life.

Once discovered, this fact was quite painless, for the discovery came with a built-in awareness that the good life could not be taught, but only learned. The only complaint he could lodge against the University's peculiar efforts at filling his head according to formulae was that they claimed too much for the process.

But even here it was hard to find fault, for the notion that higher education would make men over into a new image was the unasked for bequest of a society incapable of accepting its own limitations and yet equally incapable of removing them in home, church, or school