The term "education" doesn't mean what most modern people think it does
It's not to prepare you for a career, or to make you obsessed with your demographic status
In the mid-1970s, the small liberal-arts college I attended instituted a mandatory course called Cultures and Traditions for sophomores. At the convocation at which it was announced, there were a number of students who stood up to vehemently question its value to their particular educational paths.
The intervening near-fifty years make it hard to quantify percentages, but I recall most of those objecting being pre-med guys and people with business-career aspirations. I myself was an English major, and I tended to hang out with humanities folks, and I don’t recall them being among those who so spoke.
I thought it was a fine idea. I was certainly personally looking forward to it, given that I’d attended this school to deepen my engagement with literature, philosophy, and history. (My regret about how it went for me is that I wish I hadn’t shown up for so many class sessions stoned, coked up or hung over. More broadly, I wish I’d taken some economics courses, given the outstanding faculty this school boasted in that field.)
Of course, the whole what-do-Aristotle-Descartes-and-Shakespeare-have-to-do-with-preparing-me-for-my-career mentality has come to permeate pretty much all of higher education in America. Two forces in the education world have driven that development.
One is the increasingly technocratic nature of the world of work. Those with ambitions to scale the heights of the best-paying occupational fields do indeed have to devote the preponderance of their time to mastering the rigors of a circumscribed instructional scope.
The other is the well-documented rot of the humanities. Majors ending in the word “studies” have supplanted those that expose students to what was once considered essential for understanding what it means to be fully human. Identity politics has come to dictate curricula to the extent that one can get an English degree from Yale without ever taking a Shakespeare course. And, to prepare high school students for traversing onto this barren landscape, there is a push, already codified into law in California, to require them to take an ethnic-studies course in order to graduate.
An encouraging development among these grim turns of affairs is a renewed interest in classical education. That such a movement was deemed necessary as a countervailing force to modern notions of education is a shameful commentary on the present moment.
As classical-education champion Jeremy Wayne Tate has put it:
Jeremy Wayne Tate
@JeremyTate41
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The term “classical education” was never used before the 20th century.
All education in the West was classical education.
Jeremy Wayne Tate
@JeremyTate41
The move from classical to modern Ed was part of the industrial revolution when everything went from craftsmanship to mass production. To classically educate children is craftsmanship and would not work in factory style schools.
(Tate also makes the point that the current vehemence with which critical race theory is opposed is too narrowly focused, that the problem is much broader, deeper and pernicious than that manifestation.)
Those dedicated to reintroducing our “civilization” to the original Western conception of a proper education face an uphill battle. Ours is such a fractured culture that to pose the question - say, in a survey sent to a broad cross section of the public - “What is important for all human beings to know upon reaching adulthood?” is not going to yield any detectable pluralities of agreement. And, as classical-ed proponents know, one hoping to see terms like “nobility,” “recognition of the transcendent” or “what wisdom is” show up in responses is going to be sorely disappointed.
A definition of a liberal-arts education that I came across years ago that has stuck to my ribs comes, in fact, from the man who was my Shakespeare professor at that college. (During that semester, after routinely giving me a steady stream of Ds on my papers, he wrote a note on one of them saying, “How about stopping by my office soon to see what we can do about improving this situation?” He basically taught me how to craft a coherent expression of my thoughts and made possible my writing career.) He said a liberal arts education enables one “to live humanely in a difficult world.”
It’s pretty clear that the world is not going to get any less difficult, and modern people, obsessed as they are with how they feel, might consider that engaging that world with a sense of wholeness and depth might make whatever they’re doing for a living be a little more comfortable, and, dare I say, meaningful.
I’m not expecting an abrupt shift in the direction of American education, but I am heartened to know that there is a growing interest in what, until relatively recently, we thought was necessary for taking our special place at the top stratum of the animal kingdom.