- Freshman Address: The Questions that Matter
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3rhcHvU-zU
Members of the class of 2011, I am delighted to join Dean Salovey in welcoming you to Yale College. And I want to extend a warm welcome also to the parents, relatives, and friends who have accompanied you here. To parents especially, I want to say thank you for entrusting your very talented and promising children to us. We are delighted to have them with us, and we pledge to do our best to provide them with abundant opportunities to learn and thrive in the four years ahead.
Three weeks ago, as you were beginning to prepare yourselves for your journey to New Haven, I spent a very pleasant weekend reading a new book by one of our distinguished Sterling Professors, the former Dean of the Yale Law School, Anthony Kronman, who now teaches humanities courses in Yale College. I had one of those experiences that I hope you have time and again during your four years here. I was disappointed to finish reading the book. It was beautifully written, closely reasoned, and utterly transparent in its exposition and its logic. I was disappointed because I wanted the pleasure of my reading to go on and on, through the lovely summer afternoon and well into the evening.
Professor Kronman’s book, Education’s End,1 is at once an affirmation of the essential value of the humanities in undergraduate education and a critique of the humanities curriculum as it has evolved over the past forty years. Professor Kronman begins with a presumption that a college education should be about more than acquainting yourself with a body of knowledge and preparing yourself for a vocation. This presumption is widely shared. Many who have thought deeply about higher education – including legions of university presidents starting most eloquently with Yale’s Jeremiah Day in 1828 – go on to argue that a university education should develop in you what President Day called the “discipline of the mind” – the capacity to think clearly and independently, and thus equip you for any and all of life’s challenges.2
Professor Kronman takes a step beyond this classical formulation of the rationale for liberal education. He argues that undergraduate education should also encourage you to wrestle with the deepest questions concerning lived experience: What constitutes a good life? What kind of life do you want to lead? What values do you hope to live by? What kind of community or society do you want to live in? How should you reconcile the claims of family and community with your individual desires? In short, Professor Kronman asserts that an important component of your undergraduate experience should be seeking answers to the questions that matter: questions about what has meaning in life.
Professor Kronman then divides the history of American higher education into three periods, and he argues that the quest for meaning in life was central to the university curriculum during the first two, but no longer. In the first period, running from the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the Civil War, the curriculum was almost entirely prescribed. At its core were the great literary, philosophical and historical works of classical Greece and Rome, as well as classics of the Christian tradition – from the Bible to the churchmen of late Antiquity and the Middle Ages to Protestant theologians of the Reformation and beyond. In the minds of those who established Harvard and Yale and the succession of American colleges that were founded by their graduates, the classics were the ideal instruments, not only for developing the “discipline of the mind,” but also for educating gentlemen of discernment and piety. In this era, Kronman argues, the proposition that education was about how to live a virtuous life was never in doubt. Through their mastery of the great texts, the faculty, each of whom typically taught every subject in the curriculum, were believed to possess authoritative wisdom about how to live, and they believed it their duty to convey this wisdom to their students.
2010 上海世博會(2)
