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realization of learners, their consequent actions, and thereby help meet education’s
obligation to the community—or civic—good, as required by active liberty.
Regrettably, much of our attention at colleges and universities has been focused
on the structural dimensions of our institutions and our professional development. A
consequence of which has been perhaps an over-emphasis on the maintenance of
educational structures themselves, and the maintenance of our “trade.” While important,
such attention has limited our willingness to ask, “What are the basic objectives, the core
purposes, of learning? What do we promise to the learners who participate in, and
support, education?”
When institutions, and we, ask these critical questions, they, and we, have
recognized that education is a necessary condition not only for active liberty, but also for
the realization of a full and whole self—the intellectual, the emotional, and the social.
Reassertion of the core purposes of education might permit us to reconsider—even
change—the structures we have built and sustained. Institutions, and we, could ask how
and what we teach might be connected to students’ learning, their development, their
health, and to their responsibilities as part of civic society. This is not to ask us to move
beyond our contributions as educators. We are not suggesting that faculty become
counselors, therapists, or community action agents. Rather, we support faculty in their
exploration of what flows from their renewed understanding of their own commitment to
the purposes of learning and to the creation of contexts in which students can achieve
them.
Convention