The current “graduation season”–from my grandson, Shepard Cadwell’s 4-year-old kindergarten “graduation” in Denver, Colorado, to a nation of high schools, colleges, universities and professional schools–reminds me of two different articles that have recently come my way.
The first was an op-ed piece in the Post and Courier (May 21) by University of Maryland economist, Peter Morici. He’s the little guy with the flat top haircut, bow tie and glasses who sells office management systems on television.
His article is a broadside against most institutions of higher education. As it were, “biting the hand that feeds him.” Unless, of course, he’s making more money these days as a television “pitch man” than as a college professor. Which is not unlikely.
Morici claims that typical undergraduate education these days is–tragically?–broken, outdated, irrelevant and hardly “value-added” relative to the most revealing of social and cultural realities: in particular, the economic circumstances of our time.
According to Morici, a college education has become cost-prohibitive for most students, a bad economic investment when factored against the subsequent debt load and current job market for newly minted college graduates.
Traditional colleges and universities are, he says, top-heavy in high-priced administrators and just as poorly managed–at least, by Morici’s standards, successful business criteria. Senior professors are rewarded for doing research rather than their investment in undergraduate teaching. And the time-honored, broadly construed liberal arts and sciences curriculum, especially the humanities, is deficit in preparing students for something so essential as, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, obtaining and sustaining sufficient employment.
As, according to the cartoon published above the professor’s essay, in which a speaker is pictured posturing before a college graduation assembly, only to confess: “I tried to think of something inspirational to say, but then I remembered that the best case scenario for most of you is an unpaid internship and decades of student loan debt . . . so let’s party!”
The economist is right, of course, if it’s true (?): that “man(kind) does live by bread alone.”
Except that’s hardly the mantra of those who would claim to be morally and/or spiritually principled in some form or other. Not to mention, the thoroughly secular notion which underpins our shared “great experiment” in self-government called the United States of America.
Unlike some, I’ve never been given to arguing that–if one rarely reads a book–“education” is a “right.” In fact, several years ago the National Library Association published research claiming that only “30 per cent of college graduates are functionally literate” (December 26, 2005).
I, instead, have always considered “education” a “privilege”–at least the “education” I’ve been afforded. Except that in a self-governing democratic society, the presumption is that “education” is a “necessity.”
What then does it mean to be “educated”? Does it have even more to do with “how,” rather than necessarily “what” to think? With “how” ever as much as “what” to “learn”? Does being “educated” have at least something to do with having a sense of “culture and.history” and a “perspective” such is meant to provide? Does being “educated” involve acquiring at least some aesthetic appreciation and sensitivity? Much less, the developing of a reputable approach to “moral reasoning”?
And what about an adequate capacity to “express” oneself verbally (speaking and writing) in reasonable, clear, coherent, even cogent ways? Is that a function of being “educated”? Despite the assault on such a basic skill so inherent to being human, a veritable “war” being waged these days in the name of technology, e.g. “texting” and “tweeting.”
Some graduate students I teach–too many, I’m afraid–commonly claim: “I have good ideas (even accurate information); I just can’t express them/it?” Is that so? Does one know anything that s/he can’t express (i.e. give shape and/or form to)? Is “expressing” after all a way of “learning”? Or as the poet, Mary Ruefle, puts it: “I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say . . . but I know now I continue to write because I have not heard what I have been listening to.”
Professor Morici is arguing that colleges today should be devoted to “training” rather than “educating.” Is his case “reductionistic”? I think so. But then, if one isn’t careful, economic stress can lead to such excess–or is it distortion?–if we let it.
In contrast, another article a friend recently forwarded to me via email was written by Notre Dame philosophy professor, Gary Gutting.
Gutting reflects on his many years in the classroom to suggest that the “content” of what he–or any other teacher–provides or exposes students to is secondary to their being somehow “inspired” to become life-long learners.
Unless the “content” of any subject matter is something one continues to be engaged with–beyond the initial “learning”–such “content,” reasons Gutting, tends to merely fade away, if not becoming ultimately lost.
For example, how many theorems do I remember from my sophomore in high school geometry class compared to my applying assorted rules of grammar and punctuation when writing an English sentence? The latter being something I’ve done almost every day across most of my lifetime.
Professor Gutting claims that “teaching” is “inspiring.” It has more to do with the “process” than necessarily the “content” of learning.
This assessment reminds me of an analogy I heard (or read?) the philosopher, Sam Keen, say some years ago. “The task of ‘educating’ is less like filling a bucket,” Keen observed, “than it is like facilitating what is meant to flow through a cylinder.” This image is even truer today, when most important information is now available on the internet by way of a mere touch on a computer keyboard. Still, the question remains: how does one make use of so much information (such a “full bucket”)?
Such that what Gary Gutting is advocating may have more to do with obtaining and sustaining gainful employment than Peter Morici seems to realize.
