Thomas Hibbs has pretty much hit it right on the head
I strongly recommend the recent article by the philosopher Thomas Hibbs on the abomination of desolation that is American higher education. By the way, I have also recommended (to those who can stomach it) Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons, which gives this state of education its due better than any analytical exposition (see reviews here and here). The fact that everyone, and nearly all our best and brightest, go to such institutions of learning should create in us a sense of dread and fear for the future, to say the least. Yes, things are that bad. The fact that the deception runs so deep, and so many have bought in and been so thoroughly deceived, makes me say that I cannot imagine it getting any worse. Here's an excerpt from Hibbs:These questions bring us round to Duke and Tom Wolfe's satire, which seizes on the problematic status of the soul in the contemporary university. Mr. Wolfe's title character Charlotte Simmons brings with her to Dupont a conception of soul she inherits from her devoutly Christian mother, who uses the word soul without any hint of irony or doubt. By contrast, one of Charlotte's professors, a Nobel winner for his work in neuroscience, uses the term "soul" advisedly. The self, he asserts, is "nothing more than a 'transient composite of materials from the environment.' " In an interesting convergence between the sciences and the humanities, the dissolution of the self into a series of intersecting impersonal forces is also a prominent feature of an influential postmodern philosophy.Having come back from one of the last places on earth that a young person can hope to escape the culture of death at for a time and retrieve some truly liberal learning, acclimation to America has been difficult, and I have found myself more and more occupying a radical position.Mr. Wolfe's book suggests a subtle link between the demotion of the soul to a ghost in a machine and the exhaustion of young adult life in a series of activities--work, study, drinking, sex--lacking any overarching sense of mission. If that's right, then the problems facing the modern university in its attempt to recover its liberal arts mission go much deeper and may be more intractable than any of its contemporary critics have thus far acknowledged....
There is no easy, short-term corrective for what ails higher education. But, for parents of bright students with aspirations for more than mere social or career advancement, there is a short-term answer, a paradoxical one given what we have argued thus far. Be better consumers, tougher negotiators and don't follow the herd of parents who mindlessly rattle off a list of acceptable schools.
Here is another surely-radical opinion:
Kids, if you care for your souls and desire to find a different way than that which you have glimpsed out in the world today; if you find in yourself some strange hunger for beauty and meaning, although if you have grown up as I did in this culture these things are but enigmatic figures, opaque promises; if you have any wish to recover authenticity, life in its natural way; then, kids,
do not go to college.
Expect the derision of all for such a radical step that they will say will certainly prevent any economic achievement in your life on your part (the proof that this is their summum bonum).
Instead, before you shackle yourself beneath the gods of usury, choose to learn a trade and work with your hands, live with the poor or handicapped, find a tutor and some like-minded students, in a beautiful place, read Scripture and the Great Books in your leisure, otherwise play music and sing, dance and paint, be festive as you at last will be able to be, and celebrate the Divine Liturgy every day. (And if you find a place like this and it calls itself a "college" or "university", if such a place exists, don't worry, they are equivocating, for they certainly then cannot have anything in common with what a college or university is taken to mean today, and feel secure in going to that place.)
Despite the fact that I teach English at a college-prep high school, I am completely serious.
posted by Matthew at 8:27 PM
10 Comments:
Matthew, as you know I am nominally a student at the University of Florida, one of the campuses Tom Wolfe visited as part of his research for I am Charlotte Simmons. Wolfe’s depiction matches everything I have seen in my encounters with mainstream university culture. (For example, for the first time in many weeks I went to a bar near campus this afternoon to have a beer with some friends. I figured the bar would not be too disgusting or crowded during that time of day. It wasn’t crowded, however, we were “treated” to a show of two girls fondling and making out with each other until we paid for our beers and left. I do not mean to imply that they were lesbians as this has somehow become standard and accepted behavior for young heterosexual women. And a relatively common sight in this town.) That Wolfe’s novel is spot on is further evidenced by the palpable, though often muted, rage the book elicited from so many of its critics. How dare he satirize the prestigious American university system, the finest in the world, which enables so many young people to actually “make something of themselves”? Our great crucibles of research, curing cancer and sending people to Mars. Our fantastic havens for women and repressed minorities.
I actually listened to I am Charlotte Simmons unabridged on compact disc during a drive across the country. I think it was 24 discs or something ridiculous like that. Hearing it made it somehow even harder to stomach than simply reading it. Although, when you see that brand of crassness everywhere it isn’t too hard to stomach, I suppose.
I agree wholeheartedly with your advice to young people: do not go to college. Returning to school to get my MBA degree was a really dumb decision on my part. At the same time, I am humbled by the amazing things God has done with me since I have been here. Like you, I find myself becoming increasingly radicalized, and if I had had any inkling a year and a half or so ago when I began this process how drastically my opinions and convictions would change, I probably would have been quite frightened. But I find that coöperating with God is somewhat like chess in that when you finally accept and come to terms with certain things then events and changes begin to unfold suddenly and rapidly. Daniel Larison (www.larison.org) said something recently about Rod Dreher that sort of relates to this:
“Twelve years ago I was a stupid, know-nothing kid who read the WSJ and Economist religiously and thought American hegemony, Netanyahu's hard-line politics and bombing Serbs were great ideas, and then I learned a few things and woke up. It is possible for people to change their minds radically if they encounter the right arguments.”
Although the context is different, I would say I’ve encountered many of the right arguments recently. Consequently, I’ve become used to making about-faces in many areas of my life. And in becoming aware of the truth, I tend to keep moving in an increasingly radical direction. Because it seems that in our society there is often a stark choice between mild to blatant coöperation with evil or the adoption of a radical and counter-cultural position. With no safe ground in between. So I suddenly find myself an extremist--in my dietary habits, in my chosen means of transportation, in my frugality, in my political outlook, in the way I practice my religion.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I also seem to influence others to move in a similarly radical direction. For a while, I was trying to moderate my opinions and be a little less loud because I was worried about the possibility of being wrong and potentially screwing up peoples’ lives. For example, I have a friend who is/was an undergraduate student at UF. We were both interested in farming and ended up spending a lot of time together traveling to nearby organic farms to do volunteer work. One day he told me that he was considering dropping out of college and I was initially taken aback because I thought I’d had a deleterious influence on him by running off at the mouth too much about the problems with public schools and the university system. Although we do have sort of a radicalizing effect on each other, I really can’t take any credit for this as it was completely his own idea. I don't know if he has completely dropped out of UF, but he is now training to become a welder and I think he is planning on fully dropping out. I think it's a brave and wise decision and I’m tremendously proud of him for it.
As for me, I am fortunate in that my program demands so little of me--if you at least skim the course PowerPoint slides prior to exams you are essentially guaranteed to make at least a B--, I’m able to spend my time engaged in activities similar to what you describe at the end of your post: reading, praying, attending daily Mass, hanging out at the Catholic Worker house, learning how to sight-sing, learning Latin, and subverting whatever needs to be subverted.
Ironically, the one thing I have learned at B-school is that I do not need the things I once thought I needed: money, prestige, nice car, beautiful girl, flats boat, hi-fi audio, wardrobe by Ben Silver. I would like to say that I crucified my desire for these things, but what really happened is I started looking at people who had the kind of career I was interested in and who had the types of things I wanted, and it finally dawned on me that, you know, there must be more to this life than just things. And when that happened most of those desires seemed to vanish overnight. (Not that I don’t have desires that still need to be dealt with.) I suppose I am dense for not figuring this out when I was hanging out with millionaires and trust-fund babies. But I am sort of slow on the uptake like that.
I would like to email you regarding this post, but can find no address ...
Caleb Stegall
Editor, The New Pantagruel
caleb@newpantagruel.com
Hey, shoot me at matthewjfish@yahoo.com
From Wendell Berry's essay "The Joys of Sales Resistance":
Actually, as we know, the new commercial education is fun for everybody. All you have to do in order to have or to provide such an education is to pay your money (in advance) and master a few simple truths:
I. Educated people are more valuable than other people because education is a value-adding industry.
II. Educated people are better than other people because education improves people and makes them good.
III. The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money.
IV. The place where education is to be used is called "your career."
V. Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, or counted does not exist.
VI. The so-called humanities probably do not exist. But if they do, they are useless. But whether they exist or not or are useful or not, they can sometimes be made to support a career.
VII. Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.
VIII. The sign of exceptionally smart people is that they speak a language that is intelligible only to other people in their "field" or only to themselves. This is very impressive and is known as "professionalism."
IX. The smartest and most educated people are the scientists, for they have already found solutions to all our problems and will soon find solutions to all the problems resulting from their solutions to all the problems we used to have.
X. The mark of a good teacher is that he or she spends most of his or her time doing research and writes many books and articles.
XI. The mark of a good researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.
XII. A great university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than teachers.
XIII. Computers make people even better and smarter than they were made by previous thingamabobs Or if some people prove incorrigibly wicked or stupid or both, computers will at least speed them up.
XIV. The main thing is, don't let education get in the way of being nice to children. Children are our Future. Spend plenty of money on them but don't stay home with them and get in their way. Don't give them work to do; they are smart and can think up things to do on their own. Don't teach them any of that awful, stultifying, repressive, old-fashioned morality. Provide plenty of TV, microwave dinners, day care, computers, computer games, cars. For all this, they will love and respect us and be glad to grow up and pay our debts.
XV. A good school is a big school.
XVI. Disarm the children before you let them in.
The interwar American essayist Albert Jay Nock (Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Theory of Education in the United States, &c.) was fond of saying that the only sure way to reform society is to present it with one improved unit. Education, wealth, technology, power and the like are of fundamental value only to the extent they aid in your becoming a better, more fully realized human being. If after your MBA and your Porsche, you're still the kind of person who barks at her spouse over trifles, cuts people off in traffic, gives her kids more toys than time because she's "too busy" with her career, and looks down her nose by vice of her economic class at those who work with their hands as merely "the help", then whatever your "patrician" investment up the social scale, you're still a "plebeian" of the soul bested by a several dozen true aristocrats I can think of off the top o' me 'ead.
Though college is no place to get an education - the foundation of which latter is laid or not at home from ages birth-18 - it has an instrumental value to those called to a profession or specialty requiring advanced training. But this universalist-egalitarian dogma that a college "education" is *the* necessary indispensable ticket to the good life for *everyone* regardless of endowment or mien is among the most vicious derangements of our predominant reductionist scientistic/industrialist ethos responsible for the cheapening of the academic currency and the fact that the default sensibility in our culture in every sphere is one of perpetual adolescence.
I am pleased to see that in my judgment that I ought to have followed through on my teenaged inclination a quarter-century ago not to attend college, I am in good kindred company herein. As it turned out, I gained quite an indispensable education during my high school and college years - and, on occasion, in the classroom, too.
One last thing: your ideas, far from being "radical", are actually quite traditionalist; one needn't fall for the technocrats' semantic trick of stigmatizing dissent as "radical" - it's actually the regnant functionaries of umlimited scientism/industrialism, in the private sphere and in the public, who are the dangerous, scorched-earth radicals, and who, by their limited intelligence and imagination and unlimited vanity have done more to destroy the finest strands of western culture from within than all our exotic enemies combined. In other words, play offense rather than defense - and don't play by the rules as dictated by the opposition. A little jiu-jitsu, a little verbal tongue-fu, and pretty soon you're seeing that the bigger they are, the harder they fall: "Power weakens as it grows." "Love laughs at locksmiths."
....or go to FUS, Christendom, or Thomas Aquinas..did I leave any out?
Or, as Dennis Prager suggested, go to community college. It's cheaper, it's healthier for your soul, and no one really cares which college you went to anyway.
By the way, Matt...if you're going to bring up Tom Wolfe, I must do my duty and point out that you, an excellent writer, need to write more! Get something published!
Matt
I've come to the same conclusion for my children. I am teaching them to be active creators instead of passive consumers.
College is still on the radar, but what college and why they go, hopefully, will not be conventional.
john, what i have seen of UD is pretty good, except for the iconclastic "chapel of the Incarnation" (?!). it took me several years to decide to go back to school, but i am so very glad i did. just as someone has to minister to the rich, and some good folk have to be active in politics, someone has to be standing for the truth in academia. you play the system until you are respected enough to have a voice. the fact that stanley fish teaches his insane deconstructionism from oxford university, more or less unopposed, drives me crazy. it seems the only people out there are the ones preaching to the choir. it seems to me, so often, that Catholics (& other Christians) do in fact hide our light under the bushel: we create little closed communities, bubbles where we can be safe from the world. but we cannot do that. so: find a good school (they do still exist). pursue truth. and then fight, fight like crazy. be in the world but not of it. and we are not called to win, but just to fight.
GJ
I totally agree. My kids are public school. If they go they should have an intention in mind. I just went because I thought that I could get a better job. There was not greater purpose beyond that so the whole experience is insipid. However, like our host says don't go to college, in a deep sense he is right. I think might really mean , don't JUST go to college.
If my kids want to work in the crafts or the arts, I still expect them to hold court on our shared cultural heritage. Please tell me what UD is? I am guessing University of Dallas?
Post a Comment
<< Home