Ben Berger:	I'm really happy to be here and my thanks to the Aydelotte Foundation and to Erin and Pam Shropshire for making this whole series happen. The Social Science Café, it's a neat idea. Science Café was a need before and I'm sure Humanities Café will be fabulous too.
	So, I want to talk a little about this, one of the two products that I'm working on now on citizen education, civic education at the higher ed level. But before I do that, I just want to talk a little bit about the work that Erin referenced already, simply to contextualize and to show you the larger arch of how the different things have been connected that I've been working on. 
	And so, this was the book here that I had worked on, Pension Deficit Democracy, and the subtitle is Paradox in Civic Engagement and it was really a lot on trying to clarify our thinking ... clarify our language really and clarify our thinking. Because there had been this gigantic cottage industry around civic engagement that had grown up over a 20 year period or so, our own Bob Putnam was one of the major figures, one of the biggest figures in driving that. But he really invented the term civic engagement and it was so popular, it struck a core with so many people that it took off and it soon became quite elastic. And people were using it to describe just about everything under the sun. 
	And that was a problem because people were not only making descriptions and diagnosis about democracy but also prescriptions about what makes democracy work better. And so, if we were all kind of talking past each other, there was an issue and a problem, so what I tried to do among other things, there were a lot of things goin on in that book, one of the things I was talking about was whether there was really a narrative of decline that was undeserved. And whether actually things had always been kind of bad for democracies and attention since way back to ancient Greece, but whether there were particularly bad things now for people who weren't paying attention. 
	So, who gets hurt the most when they don't pay attention? How can things be made better so those who are most likely to be hurt by political disengagement aren't hurt as much by that? But so what I tried to do was look at the term engagement itself, because that's become kind of a buzz word too and this actually is going to relate to what I want to talk about with civic engagement as well ... civic education as well. Actually, engagement over a 500 year period if you look at the OED and look at the usage over a super long period of time, its tended to connote a combination of attention and activity. A consciousness of purpose but also a follow through of an investment of energy as well. And that investment of energy, that's kind of action component is going to be important for the civic education piece as well.
	And really, when we worry about decreasing engagement, which we do at very high levels now. We worry about psychological engagement, academics, scholastic engagement, consumer engagement as well as the civic variety, we're really worrying about the elusiveness of these resources, attention and activity or energy, which are really vital for any collaboration and yet are difficult to sustain. The issue was though whether civic was not way to broad of a term to be characterized in what makes democracy work because we had some people saying that there for bowling leagues where what's necessary. Others said that no, it's patriotism, that's what civic engagement is, that's necessary. Others said, charity, still others said voting, some said art. It was so all over the place, I wanted to say basically with this book to the entire cottage industry, essentially the Mandy Patinkins line from the Princess Bride.
Speaker 2:	You keep using the word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Ben Berger:	And so, right? Civic, no. So what I suggested was that actually it's better thought of as the components part, political, social and moral engagement, which can go together, but they don't always. They don't have to. And it was useful I thought to break those down. I was really mainly writing about political engagement in that book. Our own Bob Putnam really wrote the Bible on social engagement, social capital with a couple of his different books. 
	One of the things that I'm working on now that I'm not gonna take about is the book that Erin mentioned on moral engagement and disengagement and how moral engagement, which is to say not just consciousness and attention to the right or certain moral principles, but also a purposive follow through. Doing the right thing also. How that might lead to the possibility of something, a concept like moral capital. I think that social capital is way over generalized, and moral capital is under theorized. It's very often people use the term social capital to describe things like trust, which is really a moral attitude when you get down to it. 
	And there are all kinds of examples of people who do utilize others resources to get done important things. Martin Luther King Jr. Comes to mind, Arch Bishop Ferdinand, people who are able to marshal great resources of other people without ever having met them, without being in their social network, it's very difficult to call it social capital, but really it's because of what those leaders are supposed to represent, which is a kind of moral engagement. Standing for the right principles and actually having the courage to follow through on them. 
	Of course, ordinary people are also able to marshal moral capital as well, and I think it's very possible too that sometimes our societal stores of moral capital may be leached up or dried up by occasional scandals, crisis or confidence games. That's one of the things I'm looking at that I'm interested in, but it's not this other thing. 
	The other thing ... what I'm gonna wanna talk about today then is three things. I just mentioned the sort of civic engagement project that I was doing, clarifying our discourse and looking at the question of, whether there had been a decline. And there's often a kind of, behind these narratives of decline, an idea that there was some sort of Golden Age, if not a perperfect Golden Age, something, 1950's for example, that when things were better, and we've gone down from there and I tried to say some things to temper that impulse. 
	Well, what I'm working on now aside from the moral engagement is, civic education, which has also got a clarifying aspect to it. Because very often, we're not very clear on what we actually mean by civic education or what it means for colleges to advance citizenship or to produce citizens. There are also narratives of decline in civic education. Now most literature on civic education is of the K through 12 level. But there is still a fairly robust field in higher-ed. I have been aided in my reading on this by a very exception undergraduate, Ben Robuck, who is sitting over there. And we've gone through quite a lot of literature, both on mission statements of colleges, on lots of literature being put out by scholars as well as former presidents as well as office holders, writing about apparently a crisis in civic education and wondering what colleges as well as K through 12 should do about it.
	In the very end, I'm gonna consider whether we might actually be entering something like a Golden Age, even if there hasn't been a Golden Age up until now. I want to tell you, I am not somebody who is well disposed towards sort of Golden Age narratives. So I am the person, and I think most of us are, the people who are like, "Well, look. It wasn't so great. It wasn't so bad either. And, you know, things right now they're not so great. They're not so bad too." And yet, it's just possible there may actually be some good news, both for the liberal arts and for civic education that I want to consider by the end.
	What really led me to this stuff was my great fortune of being selected to work with an exception organization, and that is, one second here, let's see, oh that's what I was just talking about. This is the organization. It's Project Pericles, this is Gene Lang's consortium of colleges that look at and are committed to citizen education, collaboration between campus and the local communities, and a few years ago I wrote a white paper along with Jan List, who is the Executive Director of Project Pericles, trying to look at, there was the other 20 ... so I'm the Pericle and Faculty Leader for this campus. This meant that I did some community based learning classes and I got to go to some meetings. There are 25 other ones at other campuses. We looked at what they've accomplished, what we've learned from that, what are successes have been, what the challenges have been, and I learned a lot about civic education at the higher ed level, and I wanted to write more about it.
	These are the member schools right there. Some, there was really quite a big range. Some are small liberal arts colleges like us, some are larger than us too. But, so what we were doing then in this, was looking at lots of syllabi, lots of ... including the challenges were very important, very often we don't note the challenges, we just want to talk about what the positives are, and we try to be honest about what the challenges were in there too.
	In doing a lot of recent research, I have become ... I've just seen a lot of woe is me tales about civics and citizenship education, and civic education, again at K through 12 and at the national level. So this was here, these narratives of decline. They're very easy and there are narratives of decline, I see historian friends here, there are narratives of decline throughout history. They're very easy to tell ourselves, even kids sometimes will tell narratives of decline. So this was a recent [inaudible 00:09:21], it's just 1 of like 50 that I could have put in there that talks about a decline of civic education and the liberal arts. Here, by the way, is a kid telling a narrative of decline.
Speaker 3:	Bart, my birthday's in two days. I'm gonna be eight years old. It's a big number, almost double-digits.
Speaker 4:	Well, enjoy it while you can. Everything changes when you hit the big 1-0. Your legs start to go. Candy doesn't taste as good anymore.
Ben Berger:	Alright, so it's really, I think the [inaudible 00:09:46] goes very deep in us, but this article is like a lot of other ones, and it's deeply flawed and mistaken, I think in its conceptualization of what citizenship and civics are, but at least it does one thing right. I'll talk about what the mistake is in a second, but the really good thing that it does do, which is not usually done, I think it does it inadvertently, really is, if you look at the headline there, alright, The Decline of Civic Education and Liberal Arts. It puts them together, it says they're both declining. That's the real problem is ... and they're declining separately, and we should worry about both of those.
	What it gets right inadvertently is, they are inextricably connected in ways that we don't often realize, that really the business of the liberal arts is, among other things, I mean because there's a lot of different businesses of the liberal arts, but it's education for citizenship. It's just that we need to conceptualize citizenship in a very broad way, such that it goes across the curriculum. 
	Alright, there are classes in all the divisions that really address different aspects of citizenship. Issues of morality and ethics, issues of identity, issues of culture, issues of power and exclusion, there's a very wide gamut, this does not do that. If you take a look at what they're complaining about down here, they're talking about college graduates are willfully ignorant about fundamental academic skills and the basics of citizenships. They don't know the length of members of Congress terms, they can't identify the General at the Battle of Yorktown, or the father of the US Constitution. Those are nice things to know. I want my kids to know them. That's not what's actually makes for affective citizenship. It's not what makes for affective advocacy, it's not even what makes for ethical concern or the ability to collaborate with others.
	Now, I think it's the case that we really do need to do a much better job at the K through 12 level. Things like, no child left behind and other, lots of other policies have crowded out civic education, except at those places that don't need it as much. The wealthiest places are the ones most likely to have electives like civic education. One thing that college students may be able to do, because really if people don't know some of these basics by the time they come to us, we're not going to be able to completely revolutionize their understanding. So many other things they're going to do when they come here. What's more, and this is I think probably obvious to you as I'm talking, a lot of our students aren't American citizens and aren't gonna be American citizens and the idea, the notion, the concede of actually using college as a way to drill in this sort of how to manual, about how to do certain things at this particular point in time in American citizenship is, I think, wrong headed. But it gets us thinking in the right direction because it puts civic education and the liberal arts together.
	One of the things that our students can do is to develop, so one of the really neat innovations in civics education is what's sometimes called civics 2.0 or action civics. At the K through 12 level mainly of getting students out of the classroom, getting them to work collaboratively on real political problems, getting them to meet with local leaders, getting them to actually be able to then not just pay attention but actually invest their energy as well. And our students are able to, with our ed department, and not just our students but students at lots of colleges, I think are able well equipped to help teach those things to K through 12 students and learn some of with themselves, come to the kind of mastery that you only get through teaching, and that's something that is appropriate for the college level.
	So, what I was then saying was here is that there is, the first one was that in civic education there's narratives of decline that aren't really warranted, although there are problems with lack of political engagement but there's not really a warranted declensionist narrative.
	And the same thing goes for civic education. There really wasn't a Golden Age. Sometimes you'll see people pointing to early 20th century, there's a lot of rhetoric in President's statements and in mission statements about at Harvard, Yale and Princeton how all this talked about the making of the citizens and the making of a Harvard man. Not only is the model of citizen not what we probably want to [inaudible 00:13:46], it was also a very elite core of people that were really learning to be leaders among each other. They were often all male as well, but as well, there's a big gulf between what the lip service was and what actually went on in the curriculum. We're actually poised to do a lot more to keep students active and to help them learn some of a broad, broad definition of citizenship that happened in some of the so called high periods.
	Well then the question is, I'm going through a bunch of stuff now so I'm not gonna go deeply into a lot of it. There are turf battles. Alright, well what can higher ed do? If it's not the case that we're just going to be teaching civics as they used to do down in the K through 12 level, how to do this and that with your local representative, what can we do? 
	What I want to do with this is to take a look at two different polarizing figures and those are Martha Nussbaum and Stanley Fish. And they are really writing very opposing, competing narratives about what it is that college and higher ed should or shouldn't do. Nussbaum recently wrote this book called, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. She's connected democracy and citizenship and the humanities. And then Stanley Fish who in a much curmudgeonly fashion writes, Save the World on Your Own Time, and the book says just what it sounds like it says.
	So let me first take a look at Nussbaum's work, which is very rich, it's in keeping with a bunch of other things that she's done, but it's also a polemic. It's a polemic that's perceiving the humanities in under fire, both at the college level, but also K through 12 and making a case for why they're actually essential. 
	So, here are a couple of things she wants to point to. In part of her book she writes that, we, schools, were distracted by the pursuit of wealth and so we increasingly ask our schools to turn out useful profit-makers rather than thoughtful citizens. And this choice of verbs is really important her. It's to turn out, as if there's a churning out of production model. She very sensitively gets that some aspirations, especially in tough economic times to do this, the problem is that because she is writing a polemic and she's writing from a defensive stand, she is trying to show that actually you want to turn out profit makers, well we can turn out something else. We can turn out citizens. She writes about John Dewey that he lived and taught in a thriving democracy, and the production of active, curious, critical, and neutrally respective democratic citizens was his central, and it's not on accident. On about 20 different occasions she uses words like this. Colleges can't convey the type of learning that produces global citizens unless they have a liberal arts structure. 
	And this is a real flaw to me, it's a problem. I think it's a problem to think about higher ed as producing any particular thing, including scholars. Not all of our students go on to do that, including business people. And Fish gets that, he actually makes a point he's not just ... he doesn't just have Nussbaum in his sites, but he writes that learning how to perform in the game of argument, that's no guarantee of the quality or the morality of the arguments you go and make. You can make bad arguments, bad decisions, bad actions if you're Phi Beta Kappa as well if you're a member of a street gang. And he doesn't consult this, but there is evidence on it. 
	There's a philosopher who's written about whether ethicist are more moral, more ethical than others. I don't mean to offend the ethicists here, but he finds that they're not. They're not more ethical, and in some cases they're actually worse, they're less good at keeping to the demanding standards. And the same thing goes, political scientists aren't radically. He also looks at whether political scientists vote more and whether they're aptly better citizens. There's all kinds of ways in which people who dedicate their lives to a study of a thing, don't then become exemplars of that thing. So why should we expect our students to have that kind of transformation? We're not going to prepare them and produce them for everything. 
Speaker 5:	Harvard did not prepare me for this.
Ben Berger:	Harvard didn't prepare and neither did Swarthmore. We don't prepare you for everything is the point of that little clip in there. So, I think he does have a point against Nussbaum in that the problem with Fish is, he takes it way, way over the edge. Alright, so he says, and he has some points even in here. "Teachers should teach materials and skills, they shouldn't do a lot of other things. They shouldn't try to produce active citizens." 
	[inaudible 00:18:10] virtue and that sort of thing. Now they might some of those outcomes. They might actually produce the outcome the opposite too, you can't tell what's going to happen with the student in your class. But it's contingent, it's not what's aimed at. And so here's the heart of the matter, the justification because he's getting that people are scared, they're running scared, they're running defensive. And so we're trying to say, well how can we justify this thing? Well, we've produced this, we've produced business leaders or we've produced scholars, or we've produced citizens. So is that really gonna happen to any of these things? His answer on this is no, no, no, and no. 
	And the problem he's worried about is that we're going to give ammo to those who are against higher ed if it turns out that we actually fail in these lofty claims. So he says, "Beware of doing something for an external reward, do it for its own reward."
	Now, Fish just goes way to far with this. There ... even he references Play-doh, but Play-doh gives us the possibility of there being a good, which is good for its own sake. Woah, that was unintended, wow. I meant to do that, I really wanted to, good for its own sake. And also, good for what it produces too, justice is that kind of good. And then maybe the case that liberal education can also be good for its own sake while also being able to produce positive things. 
	The issue is that just because it doesn't produce something, doesn't mean that these results are completely contingent, couldn't have been guessed at. There are strong correlations of people going to liberal arts colleges, people going to higher ed and then going on and being more active citizens. There are even correlations between them doing other kinds of things like being business leaders too. Really comes down to something that Nussbaum could say against Fish but she doesn't in this book. She says in earlier work of hers. Nussbaum is really wonderful expository of capabilities theory, often with [inaudible 00:20:03], she doesn't write about capabilities here, she writes about producing products. But here's what she could've said because she says it in other writings of hers.
	The capabilities approach holds that the key question to ask when you look at different societies. Don't look at GDP, that sort of thing. Look at what is each person able, really substantly able to do and to be.
	Capabilities aren't just abilities that are inside of us, it's also the freedom or opportunity that's produced by my abilities, but also the whole environment. So it's not just that you can say, hey, you can be president. You know, eat your vegetables. No, it actually has to be institutions that allow for meaningful engagement. However then, it's focused on freedom and so once you have these capabilities that college is able to give you, for example, then you may or may not exercise them. The choice is yours. That is of course what higher education does. It does that with citizenship, it does that with scholarship. Not all of our students go on to be scholars, probably a good thing, right? And it does it with business also. There's even some evidence recently that came out about median annual earnings and this chart here basically goes against the idea that all liberal arts, especially humanities people even with masters degree, are going to fit only for working in the fast food store or working at a comic store.
Speaker 6:	Freaking kid, I do not need this. I got a masters degree in folklore mythology.
Ben Berger:	Mythology got cut off a little bit. So you see here, this is the humanities and social science actually outpace pre professional and professional degrees by the time people get to peak earning years. The only reason I ... and of course there are engineering and science, which can be part of the liberal arts too that are much higher. I don't put this up there to say, "Hey, look we produce good wage earners." That's not my concern. The point is, we don't. We don't produce them, we develop capabilities and the same thing goes for what we do with citizenship.
	Alright, it's not because of what we teach them in economics, again, no offense to economists or accounting, but they're doing better here than pre-professional majors, it's because of the capabilities that we implicate. So I think it's a much better way of thinking about it and then Nussbaum had available to her. I'm really reading with Nussbaum against Nussbaum in this particular case. 
	So, alright, a few more things I want to get at that was just the same basic graph. So this is where we've been thus far, that was the first thing I talked about, this is civic education in clarifying the discourse, really trying to get at over-promising what Nussbaum is doing in her polemic versus under-promising, which Fish radically does. And getting at that by this juxtaposition of products versus capabilities.
	I now want to look at just briefly at this question of, well, is it possible we could be entering at the higher ed level in something like a new Golden Age? And the things you will have to do, and I'll just gesture at them now without actually going into that too deeply, is redefining civic education or defining it in the first place in a relatively clear way. Stressing the importance of citizenship broadly conceptualize residing across the liberal arts curriculum and mapping civic education and this is one technical innovation that is very exciting. We've started to do it here. Other schools have started to do it too. We don't just do it for civic education, we do it for ... we're starting to think about [inaudible 00:23:11] been thinking about curricular mapping for the curriculum at large too.
	So that's what I wanted to just get at briefly in the next maybe sort of five to seven minutes or so.
	So, I wrote this piece this past year for a symposium in Political Science Journal on whether teaching and research have to be opposed and my argument is that they don't. And I called it playing on Dewey's classic work experience and education, I called it experience and civic education. And one of the purposes of this, I was also looking at different Pericle's schools and what some of their professors had done in terms of publication and what some of our professors had done. People like Reeves and Lynn Schofield to combine teaching and research. But one of the things I pulled out, this just makes it big here, bigger, is me saying, don't try to go and teach civics. Alright, there are people who actually think that's what sort of political science aught to be doing. Don't do that, that's not where our comparative advantage lies. Really, we're thinking about civic referring to maybe national citizenship but also a range of other citizenships, a range of human relationships and identities and rights. Very, very broad. 
	Now of course you're going to have to encounter in your social science and natural science and humanities classes, a vigorous engagement with critical reasoning, ethical principles, pluralism, understanding political systems, knowing something about scientific methods so you can have debates about things like global warming. That's a liberal arts education. And so really what I was saying there then is that, wait a second here ... oh this is a book by the way by Bob Graham and a professor. It's called America: An Owner's Manual and it's really saying, actually yes. What political science should do is teach civics. It's just teach people what Michael Oakeshott called a text. We should teach them a finite body of knowledge, which may be expired in five years, it may be obsolete then. But it's going [inaudible 00:25:03] as opposed to what Oakeshott wanted us to teach at the higher ed level, this British philosopher Michael Oakeshott, which is languages. 
	All of our disciplines are languages, they are lenses through which you can view the world. That's what the business of teaching capabilities is about, not texts, finite bodies of knowledge, that again may ... like refrigerated repair or something like that, that could be expired within a few years.
	So in this I wrote here that we want to conceptualize civic education rightly. And really, it resides across the curriculum, across all the different [inaudible 00:25:33] fields. And so right now, I just want to look at three different classes that do that that came out of my work with Project Pericles. This was a class taught by T.J. Eaton. 
	So the book I'm working on has got three middle chapters in addition to all the theory and history stuff that's in there. Three middle chapters on natural science and stem stuff, social science and humanities and how civic education can work with each of those levels with real examples. T.J. Eaton at Allegany teaches an environmental science class that's just absolutely unbelievable. He uses aquaponics in it and so the students grow vegetables using aquaponics. They feed fish with those, they then sell the fish at local markets and then they use the profits to go reinvest back in. It's a sustainable system and they educate local school children about this as well. It's very cool and it involves a lot of scientific learning, it's more like a capstone.
	Alright, the thing is, is that not everyone can do ... I didn't come here to then say everybody's got to do a class like this because we have so many things that are weighing on our time. We don't all need to. We need to have some resources dedicated to supporting them and then they may be able to be capstone's for lots of our other classes that do bits and pieces of citizenship and civic education across the curriculum. This was a New England an arts class that was taught by Inez McDermott, who was an art historian, and [inaudible 00:26:50] who was a writer. And it was on the New Hampshire town meeting, so there was a political aspect to it also. But really too, they were not only going to meetings and writing about the meetings too, but going and surveying art in the New England area, local township art and architecture of different town halls and writing about that too. And that too was a kind of capstone class. 
	And for one more capstone there is Heath Reeves' Politics of Punishment class. Again, something that brings in sociology, politics, philosophy, economics and there are a bunch of classes here that do that. Nina Johnson teaches those kind of gateway and capstone things too. The issue ... all I want to do to flag here is these are very time intensive classes. They are fabulous, they do help with the action component and we don't all have to do them. 
	And this is where the curricular mapping thing comes in. It's the last thing I will talk about. Citizenship across the curriculum is demonstrated by mapping civic education. So Project Pericles got some funding from the Teagle Foundation and sponsor, they wanted each of the different Periclean Institutions to try to map their curriculum by according to just three criteria, it was an inchoate effort. Not Jennifer McGee did a fabulous job with this and coded all kinds of courses according to whether they began to look at issues of social responsible, whether they introduced students all separately to the ability to look with different lenses across different systems and also whether they had an action component to them.
	I'm just gonna put up a couple of things here, that's the ability to recognize issues of social concerns, it's very broad, lots of classes do that. It's one of the components of citizenship. That's the ability to relate academic materials to practical applications, and that's the motivation capacity, the action component.
	I just want to show a couple of pages from this, you don't need to see all these things, I just chose these because that's chemistry, alright. That's economics. Now these are hitting primarily on the one, the first one the ability to look at issues of social concerns from multiple perspectives. It's not so much always the practical application, but lots of classes had these kind of components that relay broadly to a broad conception of citizenship and communities. This with English literature, full of classes that have ... English departments got literature classes that touch on violence, identity, globalization, so there are a number of things in there a well. This was some more English classes in there, these are all the ones that are being hit there.
	Then though, in religion, there are other classes like this too. Humanities is rich with classes like this. The sciences are as well, but we don't want to make all the different classes that have to have necessarily practical application. Some of us love living in the bubble, and that's fine. We have people living in the bubble of Swarthmore, and there's people who want to be doing bubble navigation on the outside and applying stuff. It's fine, right? What we need to be is purposive. Help the students to be intentional about their choice collecture, their choice of classes. And make a much, much, much bigger map, which has maybe 10, 12 categories, action components, many different things that we together would have to come together and talk about, well, what do we think citizenship does touch open? It's discursive. 
	Every school would be somewhat different in this regard. And then come up with not only a way to code these things, but also then a way to have something like an algorithm, a mapping program for students to sit down and say, "Alright, also these classes kind of fit well together. There's a literature class on globalization. There is Ishikaya's class on globalization in political science and IPE. There's something on global religions and now, there's a capstone class that involves some kind of an action." And it come together in that way. It's a way of parsing our resources and using them more effectively. 
	And it's not just us. But the reason I say us is, and what's exciting to me is, that this is all about the liberal arts. It doesn't necessitate us being a pre-professional school. It does necessitate all being political scientists or economists. It means we do what we do, but just in a purposive way and help students to navigate their way through this.
	So, I just have one or two I think last things to pull together. Let's see here. So this is where I am right now. Civic education now, redefining civic ed, which I'm in the process of trying to do. Citizenship across the liberal arts curriculum. Mapping civic education. Those things all together I think can help to get us to a place where we don't need to over-promise and what we recognize also that life doesn't end with the end of four years. 
	People go ... one of the reasons for why there are strong correlations between college graduates and then people who are more active in the world is, it opens up gateways for them. Of course it does. It's not just a fair thing where then resources societally are all distributed fairly and we all get to go to Swarthmore and use those resources. What we'd like them to do is use them responsibly, but life comes along afterwards. My father's a lawyer and he would always say to me, "You can take a con law class in college, that's great. It's going to be really interesting. You go to law school, they're going to totally reteach you constitutional law. And then if you become a lawyer, they're going to reteach you again entirely." That's fine. That's absolutely fine. It doesn't end at the end of college. Life experience is really important as long as you understand that, we're going to be all right.
Speaker 7:	Alright leaches, I want you to see what a good rider looks like. His name is Abraham Simpson, and he's got something you couldn't get at your fancy schools, life experience.
Speaker 8:	Actually, you know, I wrote my thesis on life experience and-
Speaker 7:	Quiet!
Ben Berger:	So as long as we don't fall into the trap of thinking we can teach everything and produce everyone, we will be okay. And so even though I'm really somebody who has very tempered narratives generally speaking, I do feel optimistic now. I think that my usual is with Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanac, to say the Golden Age never was the present age. It's usually whenever you were 12 or something like that. I once read a horror movie review in the USAA Today of all places, but it stuck with me it said, the scariest movie ever is whatever you saw when you were 12 years old. That's the Golden Age. But, in light of what I'm just saying right now, and in light of our ability to actually do the liberal arts really well, in a purposive intentional way, I'm actually very optimistic. I think we're able to take out the question mark and say a new Golden Age, so I'll open it up to any questions you might have.