In his short history of Oberlin's founding, Geoff Blodgett (how many of you knew him or took a class with him?) points to the "big three" innovative pillars on which the college was built: the admission of blacks, co-education, and "learning and labor." As we all know, it was the latter which disappeared, and he points out how quickly it went by the wayside. The practice, however, lives on at Berea College in Kentucky, which was founded by teachers who migrated south from Oberlin. The relationship between learning and labor, it strikes me, has been one of the tensions within the university (if not Oberlin College) for most of its history, and (as we'll talk later), it continues to be so: should we be about the life of the mind...or about training people for useful (gainful) employment? Do you learn by reading...or by doing. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in an Essay titled "The American Scholar," argued the importance of labor to learning. Writing 4 years after the founding of Oberlin, and speaking in the gendered terms of the 19th century, he observed:
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town, – in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day.
He was a strong believer that the scholar was one who combined thinking with doing, ideas with action:
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action... Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not. [...] I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructers in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products.
And now? Should Oberlin return to "Learning and Labor"? What's the current relation of action to thinking? What do you think?