“Education should set hearts aflame. Education should allow you to see the world as more vivacious, more alive and more interesting and intriguing than you could imagine it to be. Education should allow you, as a student, to animate the world.”

Michael S. Roth, history professor and 16th president of Wesleyan University, shared his mission in education with Parker students, parents, faculty, and other Chicagoland residents at a Nightviews lecture the evening of March 7.

Almost immediately after his introduction, Roth stepped off the stage, delivering most of his speech while traversing the first few rows and the aisles of the auditorium. He spoke with an animated smile and near-constant hand movements, providing anecdotes and cracking jokes while the audience chuckled.

For Roth, a liberal arts education is based around several key principles: liberation, animation, cooperation, and instigation. Throughout the course of his lecture, Roth walked audience members through each of these four ideas, aiming to leave them with a renewed sense of the value of open thinking in today’s society.

“For those of us that are here in a school context,” Principal Dan Frank said, “from grades JK-12, it is really important to be able to hear from a leading educator like Michael Roth about the broader relationship between education, humanities, and our democracy.”

The discussion around a liberal arts education is one that important to have at schools like Parker, according to Roth, due to the students’ proximity to the college experience “It’s important for high school students and their families to hear about what a contemporary liberal arts education is about,” Roth said.“Many people in high school are thinking about college and university, and I think it’s very important for them to understand that contemporary forms of liberal education are not just taking a smattering of courses in different subjects but really can amount to a kind of education that prepares people for life after college or life after university.”

Roth believes that the value in liberal arts education lies in its ability to teach students how to be free and independent thinkers, a notion present in Parker’s teaching philosophy as well. The definition of a liberal arts education, Roth says, is one that connects education and freedom.

“Most students don’t think about education as the path to freedom,” Roth said. “They look at it as a kind of burden in some ways or at least a preparation for something else that might be rewarding. What I try to emphasize is that this liberal education in an American context is one in which you experience a kind of freedom while you’re learning.”

The objective is related. “This gives you an appetite for freedom and meaningful work after your formal education is over. You now have questions and you want answers.”

The kind of thinkers a liberal education produces are the sort we need more of in society in this day and age, according to Roth. “Liberal education matters now more than ever because our economy prizes ingenuity, and the ability to change,” he said. “It will surely reward docility and obedience in the short term, but in the long term, we need educated people who will instigate intelligent critique of existing power structures.”

Furthermore, it produces thinkers that aim to spur change. “You now want more than the authorities provide you with,” Roth said. “An education should instigate you to reject authority. Education is only productive, meaningful, culturally, when education pushes people to create change and to reject authority.”

In his teaching and at his university, Roth aspires to do exactly that. “This is the opposite of what we expect from universities. We expect them to prepare students for the outside world in a way where they will be good workers for the existing industries. But that is not practical.”

Roth draws much inspiration from John Dewey, one of the most prominent leaders of the progressive education movement. “He was adamantly opposed to an education that just prepared people to be slotted into the existing structures of the economy at any one time because those structures will change.”

These principles still stand one hundred years later, as markets change even more rapidly and world views are challenged and debated more with each passing day.

“You don’t want to spend four years of college learning a skill that will, three or four years later, be obsolete,” Roth said. “You want to learn things that will allow you to instigate changes that will be meaningful and productive for you and your neighbors, not just to participate in someone else’s structure. And that is the objective of a liberal education.”