Pierre Laclede Honors College

The Alumni Annual Lecture

 

The Annual Alumni Lecture traditionally takes place in the spring semester. Below is the program from our last lecture. Please check back for details about next year's event.

 

Pierre Laclede Honors College Alumni Chapter
Annual Alumni Gathering
Thursday, April 24th, 6 PM, at the Museum Room, Provincial House
(rsvp to rmbliss@umsl.edu or 516-6870)
"The continuing usefulness-or otherwise-of a liberal education"

This has been the topic of the annual alumni lecture, where alums have largely listened to others (Dean Fred, Dennis Bohnenkamp, Terry Jones, Lyman Sargent, and Peter Fuss) expand on the subject. Now it's time for alumni to have a say!!

Please come to the museum room, grab a bite of excellent nosh to eat and a cup to sup, and join a real live Honors College seminar discussion on this subject. Around the seminar table will be your good selves and:
Pamela Ashmore, Associate Professor and acting chair of Anthropology
Tina Fanetti, PLHC graduate in Physics
Tom Knox, PLHC graduate in General Studies
Patricia Parker, Des Lee Professor of Zoological Studies, Dept. of Biology
Marianne Samayoa, PLHC graduate in History
Sam Snyder, PLHC graduate in History
Wendy Verhoff, PLHC graduate in History
Keith Womer, Dean & Professor of Management Science, College of Business

Please let us know if you can attend so that we can be sure to have enough food, drink, and comfortable chairs for our alums and friends. And please do come ready to talk as well as to listen; to entertain as well as to be amused. We are interested in your views, because we need to know what you think of what we do, or try to do, here at the Honors College.

Bob Bliss, Dean of the College
Dan Hollander, President of the Alumni Chapter.

RSVP to rmbliss@umsl.edu OR (314) 516-6870.

Some views on learning in general, and a liberal education in particular.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Aristotle.

Without a gentle contempt for education, no man's education is complete. G. K. Chesterton.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening my ax. Abraham Lincoln.

In most nations students enter a university to pursue a single subject, and that is all they study. The idea of a 'liberal education'-a higher education that is a cultivation of the whole human being for the functions of citizenship and life generally-has been taken up most fully in the United States. Martha Nussbaum.

Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. Paulo Freire.

The only education that prepares us for change is a liberal education. In periods of change, narrow specialization condemns us to inflexibility-precisely what we do not need. We need the flexible intellectual tools to be problem solvers, to be able to continue learning over time. David Kearns (when CEO of Xerox).

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. Flannery O'Connor.

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks. Charlotte Bronte.

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. Epictetus.

He was so learned he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on. Ben Franklin

General education is the curricular foundation of the American academy. It encourages students to acquire and use the intellectual tools, knowledge, and creative capabilities necessary to study the world as it is, as it has been understood, and as it might be imagined. It also furnishes them with skills which enable them to deepen that understanding and to communicate it to others. Through general education, the academy equips students for success in their specialized areas of study and for fulfilled lives as educated persons, as active citizens, and as effective contributors to their own prosperity and to the general welfare. Missouri Coordinating Board for Higher Education.

The paradox of education is precisely this-that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. James Baldwin

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad. Teddy Roosevelt.

Education is one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. Bertrand Russell.