I would not be misunderstood. I am not objecting in principle to the fact that a college education comes with a price—that is, with a price tag. I close the classroom door when I lecture because, as the old joke goes, “they’re lining up in the halls out there, and I don’t do this for free.” But I am objecting to the fact that whereas education does come with a price and a price tag, it no longer comes with a cost.
It does not come with a cost because colleges and universities are essentially diploma retailers obsequiously bent on making the shopping experience of their customers enjoyable and painless. Discounts are everywhere. Items are clearly marked. The choices are many, the objects glittery. Can I get you some coffee? Hot chocolate? Be sure to visit our café on the third floor. Please take the moving stairs. One of our associates will be glad to assist you.
Consider the distribution requirements that have replaced core texts and core courses, and behold with what dispatch the university flatters commodity consciousness. See with what precision institutions imitate desperate retailers when these same institutions trot out their pre-professional programs and permit the students in them to avoid any meaningful contact with philosophy, theology, history, literature, political theory, or languages, whether ancient or modern. See how cheaply science holds itself in requiring no knowledge of its own history, in cultivating no suspicion of its own methods, and in sponsoring no inquiry into its fundamental assumptions. Behold the options in this sleek package: business, business administration, accounting, or economics—take your pick. No need to bother with land use, resource management, ethics, or thermodynamics. Business-as-usual will have no hecklers.
For education presently conceived and presently practiced has but one goal: the mass production of idiots.
I’m speaking—I hope—in fairly precise terms here.
An “idiot,” from the Greek idios (“private,” “own,” “peculiar”), is someone who is peculiar because he is closed in on himself or separated or cut off. In short, he is a specialist. If he knows anything, he knows one thing.
It may be difficult to salvage liberal education in the universities once the political economy begins to gasp its last breaths.
No comments:
Post a Comment