What to take out of a Liberal Arts, Jesuit Education

Although all twelve ideals of Jesuit education apply, in various degrees, to the education I have received at Loyola over the last three and a half years, I will dedicate this blog to the essential virtues of critical thinking and effective communication. In a way, I think that the other eleven ideals stem out of these.

The combination of common curriculum courses, which have included the disciplines of religious studies, philosophy, psychology, literature, international relations, and Spanish (amongst others), and my sociology major courses, have taught me to critically view the world through many different lenses and appreciate how all of these disciplines come together to form a whole. I have learned to question everything, and always look deeply into a given subject to begin to understand the structures at work that create social reality.

Paired with critical thinking are the communication skills I have acquired (or at least approved upon since high school...), as I believe the second component of learning is to be able to share what one learns with others, rather than hoarding all of this knowledge for oneself. My end of the semester presentations used to petrify me freshmen year,  but as of last year, this fear has largely passed.

When I write that the other Jesuit educational ideals flow out of critical thinking and effective communication, I mean that by learning to think critically,  I have been able to start moving past my "default setting," as the late American writer David Foster Wallace spoke about in his famous 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, the bubble that forms around us that makes us indifferent or unaware of what is happening around us. His speech was called, "This is Water," which got its name from a short parable he tells at the beginning, in which one older fish swims by two young fish one morning, and asks them how the water is. Both of the young fish look confused, and after the old fish swims away, one asks the other, "what the hell is water?" Wallace's point is that we can become so oblivious to what is most apparent  around us, and that the most valuable skill we learn in attending a liberal arts university is the ability to think critically about what happens around us, which to him means adjusting our innate self-centered way of viewing the world into a compassionate one. To paraphrase Wallace, we cannot control what happens around us, but we can, with great effort, control how we think about and construct meaning from these events.

As I have learned to think critically at Loyola, I have opened my eyes to the structural inequality in our world and the continuous cycle of poverty that is causes, particularly for minority populations, and I have an urge to deeply engage in this inequality on an international scale. So in short, the critical thinking skills I have learned at Loyola have taught me to always be aware of the "water" surrounding me, and not become desensitized and oblivious to the processes and events happening everyday around me. I hope to keep this open and compassionate worldview with me throughout the rest of my life after graduation, a life which is rapidly approaching...