Humanistic Education

Professor Roosevelt Montas of Columbia University gave a lecture that I attended last year in New York, about the Core Curriculum, which is the distinctive foundation of undergraduate education at Columbia College, my alma mater.

It turns out that institutions in Asia are looking at making their undergraduate education more humanistic and less mechanistic. It's ironic that as they are humanizing their model, we are frantically trying to emulate the model that they're abandoning, but that's another topic.

In 2009, the University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University held their 3+3+4 Symposium on Core Curriculum, at which Professor Montas delivered a Keynote Address. With some of the volunteer teaching I do, and with a history of undergraduate and graduate teaching, it really made me think about the value of humanistic education and its relation to our recent financial misadventures.

Here's a quote from Professor Montas, "...education, true education involves personal transformation...college must be a place of moral education in a deepest sense, education about how to be human, education that fosters habits of self-examination, critical skepticism and an openness to the new."

Looking at the financial meltdown apart from the arcane discussion about derivatives, value-at-risk models and financial regulation one comes back to some of the fundamentals qualities of education that were lacking among the small and large actors in the crisis. Where was the self-examination during the lengthy process of foisting off toxic products onto customers for whom they were not suited? Where was the critical skepticism when looking at misleading and incomplete disclosures or risk models with poor foundations? What if the efficient market tenets didn't hold and a massive bubble was building? Then, some new thinking would have been in order.

Trading floors, executive suites, and board rooms may have been rife with mechanistically trained number crunchers who were all indoctrinated with the EMH and the CAPM, but their moral educations were sorely lacking.

For my undergraduate vintage of the Core Curriculum, we had to read Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." I confess to not remembering a great deal about the novel, but I was very taken by this quote from the author, writing in 1938 as European elites built up to the inevitability of World War II. Virginia Woolf wrote that she felt compelled to "doubt and criticize and question the value of professional life--not its cash value;that is great;but its spiritual value, its moral, its intellectual value...If people are highly successful in their profession, they lose their senses."

She had it right then, and now.