Back when I was in college, in the early to mid-1980s, the rot was already starting to set in. Being a student in the College of Natural Sciences shielded me from it somewhat, as we were still, then, applying the scientific method and learning, absorbing, and analyzing facts in our class and laboratory work. I spent an entire year on an independent research project evaluating the behavior of white-tailed deer in two areas, one open to hunting and the other not, and it turned out my initial hypothesis was completely wrong, so I dug into the question further. My academic advisor's reaction? "Good. You're doing science."
More importantly, I was learning how to think logically about the world around me. Even then, though, on occasion you'd hear some self-absorbed midwit prattle about the need to "find him/herself." I never really understood that. I've always known who and where I was. Maybe I'm unusual, but I was certainly unusual in having a father who insisted on my reading Aristotle at age 14, so there's that. And he didn't just stop there; I remember very clearly the day he handed me a copy of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and told me, "Read this. Then we'll talk about it."
That's how education once was, though; it was not about asking students how they feel, but rather, forcing them not to feel, but to think; to teach them how to think, and how to learn from history and the larger world in a systemic, logical manner. But that's not how education seems to work now.
No, now the problem is worse. Universities and colleges are catering to this kind of self-absorption, and it's anathema to the notion of actual education, which requires one to look outward, not inward. A recent piece at the New English Review's blog, The Iconoclast, penned by Patrick Keeney, makes some great points on the matter.
Carlos Carvalho, president of the University of Austin, recently told his incoming students, “The whole world will keep telling you to find yourself. We’re hoping for something better: that you forget yourself and discover the durable joy of being absorbed in something greater than you.”
In that single sentence, Carvalho captured something essential about liberal education.
The modern university has increasingly placed the sovereign self at the centre of its teaching. Students are encouraged to regard their feelings, identities, understandings, and “lived experience” as the primary measures of intellectual and moral significance. The traditional questions, “What is true?” or “What do you think about this?” quietly give way to the therapeutic one: “How does this make you feel?”
Carvalho described the result with admirable economy. Universities, he said, have been offering students “a self-affirming mirror when what you need is a window.” He has identified a fundamental dispute over the purpose of higher education. Is it meant to console students? To confirm and validate their identities and beliefs about the world? Or is it meant to lead them beyond themselves into a world of new understandings, knowledge, achievement, and moral possibility that they neither created nor control?
This is key.
The sole purpose of education, at all levels, is to produce young adults with marketable skills. But, one might argue, perception and awareness of the world around them is, to a degree, the underpinning of such skills. A willingness to learn, to look outside one's own self and circle; to challenge one's ideas. To look at facts, not ideology. To analyze these with logic, not emotion. To understand why. To think, not to feel. To understand truth, not just identity. To know what is fact and what is malleable. And, perhaps most of all, to look outward, not inward.
Without this, the odds of a young person being valuable in the workforce are diminished, and any young skull full of mush who thinks that this kind of inculcation in self-absorption doesn't come out in job interviews, well, you've got another think coming; in my corporate career I hired and fired a lot of people and interviewed many more applicants, and I can tell you from personal experience, this the kind of thing that comes out in about the first six seconds of an interview.
Self-absorption precludes education. All of the various Ethnic Underwater Dog-Polishing Studies courses and even degree programs are designed, deliberately, to encourage self-absorption, to seek validation, not truth; to think, not feel. They are not grounding these young skulls full of mush into the greater world, the long foreground, this history that got them to where they are; not just the history of names, places and dates, but the history of thought.
I'm trying to get this into my own grandchildren, because their schools aren't. Most recently, I gave my 16-year-old grandson a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. "Read this," I told him, "Then we'll talk about it." He's reading it.
This, above all, may be the key point of Patrick Keeney's essay: "One does not enter such a conversation by insisting that one’s voice be heard first. One begins by listening to what has already been said."
That is precisely so. This is where our modern university system is, too often, failing its students. That's why the government gravy train to academia, in the form of endless subsidies, loans and grants, that feeds this nonsense, has to stop. Courses and degrees that produce no value, that produce only poorly informed, poorly grounded, self-absorbed and intellectually hopeless youth, that fail to produce young adults with marketable skills- well, those are untenable without these subsidies, direct and indirect. That's the solution.
