The news that math SAT scores have risen seems good.  But another education story is better.  Star Wars creator George Lucas has been running a education foundation for some years that supports innovative teaching methods and goals.  He says:

"Aristotle taught four or five people; he didn’t have huge classes. Or
you have the mentoring system – the cobbler teaching his assistants.
Whether it’s Aristotle or learning how to make shoes, you had a reason
to learn. Education didn’t happen in isolation. Maybe for the very
elite, you can learn for the sake of learning. But for millions of
students to learn, you need to know why you’re learning."

    Sitting here in my office, preparing a course that will have sixty students, I must admit that the idea of a class with four or five sounds really good.  More importantly, Lucas would do well to expand his classical references beyond the Greeks: Confucius has a lot to say about education.

     On the goal of education, Confucius is very much in keeping with the ideals of Western liberal arts curriculum (or, to be more chronologically correct, Western liberal arts education is very much in keeping with Confucius): he believes that by reading and thinking about and applying to everyday life the great works of the past (in his case these in include the Book of Songs, the Book of History, the I Ching and others), a person will develop a more humane moral conscience.  Lucas does not mention morality, but his concern for the reasons for learning opens up this possibility.

    Now, we can wonder if the moral effects of liberal arts education live up to the Confucian ideal.  From my vantage point, as a college teacher at a liberal arts school, there is reason to be pessimistic.  The overwhelming power of instrumentalist thinking about education, most specifically worries about how a particular subject or major might translate into a high paying job, dilutes student curiosity and openness to large chunks of a liberal arts curriculum.  The whole point, it seems to me, is not to think about the material outcome of our eduction, but, rather, the cultivation of the humane self that is bound up in the process of of learning. 

    When students come into my office to complain about a grade (which they do not do very often: my gray beard scares them off, I think), I point to a Chinese couplet on my wall:

Muo wen shou huo
Dan wen gong yun

Don’t ask about the harvest
Think about the cultivation

   Happily there are some students who still keep themselves open to learning in ways that may not appear immediately useful or profitable.  And that is what Confucius meant when he said:

Devote yourself to the Way, depend on Integrity, rely on Humanity, and wander in the arts. (68).

   Getting back to Lucas for a moment: the purpose, then, of a class of five students, or a course in shoe-making, is not just a matter of learning in itself (i.e. getting a high math SAT score), or learning for an instrumental end (i.e. making shoes) but it is also, and perhaps primarily, about learning to be humane.  Are we doing enough of that?