Learning what it means to be human in a living world: Wendell Berry's vision for Higher Education

 Our system of education has one major: Upward Mobility. 

This is the bold claim that Wendell Berry makes in a commencement address he gave in 2009 (in the midst of the Great Recession) to Northern Kentucky University graduates. His address, entitled "Major in  Homecoming", underscores the devastating effects that this form of education has had on people and the land they live on: for upward mobility also implies downward mobility; and it has proven to generate social instability, ecological oblivion, and economic insecurity. 

Education, Berry laments,  has been reduced to job training and preparation for serving corporations whose only concerns are efficiency and the maximizing of profit. Pointing to the crushing reality that most of the graduates attending the commencement were coming to terms with in the midst of the Great Recession, Berry charges that the failure of the economy and its subservient institutions has become so obvious that it cannot now be denied. (It only took eleven years to see more evidence of this as we struggle through the economic devastation of Covid-19.)

He points to his own state, Kentucky, where it has only taken 200 years for European settlers to destroy or use up most of the natural resources and deface the beauty of the place. Much of what has been destroyed, he argues, will likely never be restored: topsoil, forests, watersheds, streams and other water sources, plants, climate, etc. 

"To have founded an enormously expensive system of education on the promises of, and in the service to, such an economy," Berry argues, "has been a mistake, calling for a long, arduous work of revision." (pg.33). Education will have to change, not least because it is well-educated people who are wrecking the planet and disintegrating communities. 

This raises the question, of course. What is education for? Those who have read even a little of Berry will not be surprised to learn that he underscores that an economy will only work in as much as it aligns with the ecosphere, or what he refers to in other places as the Economy; the living world that has been gifted to us and that we are dependent upon and limited to. For this reason, Berry argues that the goal of education it to better understand what it means to be human in a living world. In particular, he notes that we should be asking how the things we make, design, construct, and build relate to and connect to this living world that we are dependent upon. 

But there is more. Berry argues that education must be localized, that is that it must teach us to pay attention to the places that we inhabit, to adapt to the unique circumstances and gifts of the places in which we live. He calls this "majoring in homecoming". Such an education would also train us to have a posture of humility, "a virtue not encouraged or esteemed by the modern arts and sciences." (34). 

What Berry has in mind in the kind of education that forces specialization to break out of its silos and to begin to foster dialogues in which our ignorance of the places in which we live is put on the table, and in which we use our knowledge for the sake of adapting to and serving local concerns and needs. It is the kind of education that asks such things as, "What has happened here, where we live, study, and work? What should have happened here? What is here now? What are the assets of this place? What will these assets help us do? What can we do to mend the damages done to this place? And what are the limitations of this place?

Berry points out that this kind of education is not only beneficial for our Economy, but that it is also endlessly interesting, and produces undamaging pleasures. 

I teach a class in the Honors College at LeTourneau University called "Encountering New Communities". The course seeks to develop a theology of place and community that is built upon the biblical vision of shalom (peace) enabled through allegiance to Jesus and his call for us to engage in neighborly love. After we have explored the holistic, cosmic vision of reconciliation that the Scriptures teach us (see especially Colossians 1.19-20), we turn to think about the ways we can leverage our education in the service of the place in which we live, Longview, Texas. 

The class is predominantly made up of students who are majoring in technical professions, academic disciplines which have been profoundly shaped by the Enlightenment vision of humanity, and which train them to think of the living world as something that must be subdued to our wills and desires--especially with the aid of our "advancing" technological capabilities. Berry encourages us to swim against the strong current  that conditions us to think of ourselves as masters of creation, and which inevitably distorts our humanity and destroys communities. His essay also underscores why history, sociology, biology, ecology, philosophy, economics, theology, political science, and English are essential and non-negotiable for the kind of education that would properly train us to know what it means to be human and how to live in the places in which we study and work. For these specializations, if done rightly, enable us to ask the kind of questions that we need to attend to.

Humility. Limitations. Interdependence. Reconciliation. This is what a "liberal" arts education is for. It trains us to recognize that we are only truly free (liberal) when we love God and our neighbors.

* "Major in Homecoming" can be found in What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010; 31-36) by Wendell Berry