Not long ago we had the privilege of spending time wandering through the campus of Trinity College Dublin. The aura of this beautiful 400-year-old campus conjured up a powerful sense of the history and value of the contemplative life and scholarly pursuits. It also brought to the surface simmering fears about potential unintended consequences of the current push for dramatic increases in the number of college graduates in the United States.
We need a better-educated, more highly-skilled labor force. We need to remove barriers to educational opportunities and to success for students from low-income families and for adults whose job opportunities are too limited. But these goals should not make us forget about the importance of intellectual engagement and of liberal education. For some people, getting quickly through programs that provide solid labor market credentials is by far the best strategy. But too often discussions of this goal seem to imply that longer, more in-depth, more abstract courses of study are a waste of time, represent pure extravagant consumption, or are an anachronism.
Understanding of the history of ideas, of the role of creativity in the progress of civilization, and of the contribution of intellectuals to improving life for all is deeply hidden in current public discourse. If you doubt that anti-intellectualism is a worry, think of the arguments about teaching evolution, suggestions by a Congressman that harnessing wind power for our energy needs will end up using up the wind, or widespread sentiment that political leaders should not be over-educated.
We don’t mean to be naïve. Modern universities are deeply embedded in today’s money culture: too often subject to the whims of powerful donors, too determined to commercialize their professors’ ideas, too focused on guarding access to the most lucrative and prestigious professions. Yet for all their worldliness, these universities remain crucial sites for the preservation of great critical traditions in social and humanistic thought; places where the love of learning is celebrated.
Broadening access to education and creating more viable paths to productive work lives does not mean one size fits all. It does not mean we can take all of the resources now devoted to elite academic institutions and humanistic study and devote them to mass production of credentials and narrowly utilitarian research. Our society is wealthy enough and smart enough to meet our new goals without abandoning the life of the mind that has been so central throughout history.
3 Responses to The Life of Learning
11159786 - January 5, 2011 at 7:32 am
Bravo!
betterschools - January 5, 2011 at 10:31 am
“For some people, getting quickly through programs that provide solid labor market credentials is by far the best strategy. But too often discussions of this goal seem to imply that longer, more in-depth, more abstract courses of study are a waste of time, represent pure extravagant consumption, or are an anachronism.”
The informed debate does not center on this false dichotomy. The issues are transparency and truth in advertising. In the US, the institutions to which you allude are in the midst of a decades long decline in fulfilling these values.
“If you doubt that anti-intellectualism is a worry, think of the arguments about teaching evolution, suggestions by a Congressman that harnessing wind power for our energy needs will end up using up the wind, or widespread sentiment that political leaders should not be over-educated.”
Agreed. However, if the blogs in the Chronicle are a valid indicator, the professoriate, a body that used to prize informed objectivity above all else, has itself become anti-intellectual. Where I would expect reasoned analysis, I see personal attack and vacuous snide remarks. I may be wrong in these generalizations. Perhaps a sociologist/analytic philosopher reading this will find merit in the idea of taxonomizing the logic expressed in these posts over a six month period. In my opinion, in addition to a disposition toward dysfunctional conservatism, we are have an underdeveloped temperament to engage in objective self-appraisal and we don’t take criticism well.
Yes, our halls contain valuable intellectual traditions that deserve protection and nourishment, but the current caretakers leave much to be desired, and appear to be more responsible for squandering these resources than the external forces to which we so easily attribute causality.
quidditas - January 5, 2011 at 10:44 am
“For some people, getting quickly through programs that provide solid labor market credentials is by far the best strategy. But too often discussions of this goal seem to imply that longer, more in-depth, more abstract courses of study are a waste of time, represent pure extravagant consumption, or are an anachronism.”
I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. There may be a part of the public that finds humanistic inquiry pointless–including lots of university students and their parents– but the real purpose for the focus on *short term* vocational education is to distract public attention from the real issue of relevance, which is job creation in the face of deindustrialization and global labor arbitrage, along with the shorter term effects of a deep recession brought about by crisis in a criminal financial sector.
In other words, it is about requiring education in lieu of employment for a population that previously would have been employed in manufacturing and in growing (as opposed to stagnant, and possibly shrinking) retail and service sectors.
It has nothing directly to do with you at all, except to the extent that as more and more of the population gets left behind economically, it will seek scapegoats and that could turn out to be you.
In fact, it likely will be you as the financial sector and the corporate executive class has been very good at projecting blame for our political economy onto everyone except themselves, including those state governments that are only in fiscal crisis now due to criminality in the financial sector that the Obama Administration and both national political parties seems bent on obscuring.
“If you doubt that anti-intellectualism is a worry”
It does worry me, as your poor analysis demonstrates the problem. Clearly an appreciation for the humanities is not enough.