I couldn't agree more, on both ends and means. I'm a former lawyer who now teaches high school history. I have a feeling that typical undergrad students reading your piece, if they could get through it, wouldn't really know what you're talking about, so impoverished is their idea of what an education is for. You're speaking to the development of intellectual virtues, and it's depressing that universities, of all places, are so maladroit in instilling them that they might as well be anti-intellectual, or, as Bromwich has put it, "non-intellectual," like every stupid damn thing else.
I got my law degree from the University of Chicago around the turn of this century amid a sort of golden age there of intellectual stimulation. (Cass Sunstein, who taught there at the time, has been recently talking up this golden age, which he centers around the '80s and '90s, on his Substack.) I won't go on about that particular time and place. Suffice it to say that I became a big fan of law school pedagogy, and I find it well-suited to undergrad study and even, to an extent, high school study as well.
The law school model is what they call the Socratic method. When I went, it was like The Paper Chase, but the professors weren't mean old assholes who leaned into humiliation.
Students' homework was the reading; the class consisted of the professor asking questions and calling on students (cold calling!) to address them in a way meant to reveal and meaningfully address the problems presented in the text, moving progressively from basic questions to deeper ones. The best professors were the ones who were able to confine themselves almost entirely to questions. You were incentivized to read lest you be forced to bullshit or sheepishly admit that you hadn't prepared. Every class ended up involving intellectual pushback and resistance to tidy closure. Except you emerged, if engaged, actually knowing what you were talking about.
Every class grade was based entirely on an in-class essay-style exam, graded blind, meant to show that you had indeed traversed most of the terrain. No gaming it. I never learned so much so well.
I recently had an exchange via Substack comment with a student or recent graduate or someone like that who failed to see the point of her philosophy class -- Aristotle, ugh -- and was in a big hurry to do hands-on projects directed toward changing the world. She took her values as a given. My point was that her education was where you develop your values in the first place, lest they be cartoonishly simpleminded. I don't think she got it. She did not like the sound of law school.
The alternative to liberal education is anti-liberal education, teaching students that Western power is proof of guilt while insinuating that inequality and abuse are unique to it rather than universal human patterns. It ignores that other societies have similar, even if not identical, weaknesses, but judges the West alone as uniquely evil. That is part of why liberal education itself is so often sneered at today.
While this is true it fails to note that the illiberal voters are usually those with only a high school education. Civics must be taught at the high school level.
There is much to agree with here, but the critique applies primarily to research universities and elite liberal arts colleges. There are many institutions where teaching still takes pride of place. I teach at a small, Christian liberal arts college where faculty devote by far the greatest amount of our time to teaching, not research, and where the general education curriculum takes up more than a year of students' coursework. There are lots of non-elite colleges like mine. We have a lot to offer students, but we get swept up in a critique that doesn't really describe what we do. Of course, institutions like mine don't have huge endowments like the Harvards of the world, so ironically the places most threatened with extinction are the ones to whom the justified criticisms of higher ed least apply.
I agree with so much of what is written in here. Part of the issue continues to be that even now, only something like 40% of Americans have college degrees, so we need to figure out a way to cover a lot of these topics at the high school level, and do it in a way that is engaging and interesting for the students, rather than just another class they need to get through and that barely registers. It would be nice if really strong general education programs like this could be available in a somewhat consistent form across all universities, even at the community college level, and not just at elite universities like Harvard. We need to get everyone involved in reading and understanding these topics and having discussions and conversations with each other about them. But because of the cost, in terms of both money and time, so much now is focused on just getting the specific education and training that you need to get XYZ job once you graduate, it becomes hard to convince folks that this is worthwhile. Essays like this will help.
The author argues that a two-year general education core is a spiritual liberation, but it functions more like a job protection for humanities professors (small discussion seminars with no research - bliss). While he admires the Oxbridge-style character building of the old elite, he ignores that the UK accepted a different reality long ago. When higher education expanded in the 19th century, the British built red brick universities in cities like Manchester to provide focused three-year vocational degrees.
The British model trusts high schools to provide general knowledge (including civics) and treats university students as people ready to begin their professional training. The author wants the opposite. He wants to turn American colleges into expensive remedial finishing schools. By mandating that every engineer or scientist spends half their tuition on his specific brand of wisdom, he is securing the bottom line for a humanities faculty that can no longer attract students on merit. This is not a revival of the Greek Academy. It is a mandatory tax on the professional (working) class.
Couldn’t agree more. First, save the classics from being taken over by narrow-minded Defenders of Western Civilization. Open them up to all. Students exposed to genuine conversation around great books—without a political agenda—are energized, excited, engaged. Second, what you said about research is an emperor-has-no-clothes statement. Stop with the endless demand for new scholarship. In the sciences, yes, to a point. In the humanities, no one needs another new take on King Lear designed to be different from all other takes to justify getting published. Read the play with a diverse group interested in genuine engagement. Will you come up with something no one has ever thought before? No. But it will be new to you, and mean something. Third, train and hire teachers. People who love it and are good at it.
The terrible teaching goes hand in glove with the irreproducible research.
With that said, it is the job of the student to learn how to learn. They are only there for 4 to 8 years but the need to learn never stops, or at least it should not.
I expected my professs to show me what was important, and hopefully why.
Learning the materials and making the connections between the classes was my job. Everyone learns differently.
What you have pointed out is that there was a big gap in my university curriculum. I don't see how your additions could be managed without increasing my time there, which is an affordability issue.
You might find Ong's "Orality and Literacy" interesting if you haven't read it.
Perhaps a start would be to introduce students to our national mythology, which of course (I think) is rooted in the classics, and have students discuss how much is true and how much is not so true and then what our national mythology says about us. Beyond that all college graduates should be able to write a complete sentence, a coherent paragraph and a cogent report/essay and understand basic statistics and the scientific method.
Just show n spread sheet where " other societies" have invaded, decimated, settled a certain population with judeoxristian pursuation . One of which went completely gestapo & reenacted genocide with full social political WMD support from the main purveyor of violence!Let us hear from Jaques Englestein on this!!!
Point is " education" cannot be one to produce WFC fighters , dumb soldiers to fight for a dumb admin as we see today- education has to develop people who can relate to other people, can lead by consensus, can comprehend the entire essence of Science…can present ideas to inspire and thus be elected to Constitutionally required Institutions, cannot be to produce more uncivil people that flock to places like Heritage foundation, KKK, neo- confederates, people flocking to lie then cannot figure out the truth..federalist society which produces primitive notion of American justice .. education cannot produce more narrow minded citizen as implied by EVERY writer here at Pursuasion ( which makes me think it is perhaps not my place!.. stop paying!)...
If you do not want later generations to learn what the uncivilized dominant population did in the past, IS FOR THOSE like Steve Muller to self deport to places where their old habits are still valued.. if none exist, stay afloat in international waters.. until no more!…
Practically every society has its own record of conquest, hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and self-justifying myths; the question is whether education teaches students to compare those patterns honestly or turns one civilization into the unique embodiment of evil.
For sure. But Indian history outpaces all excepting the violence of the kkk type: 1/3 of the population by religion is untouchable”. WTF! But the Constitution levels the field. Although that subcontinent had “ empire” from East to shores of Mediterranean in the 2-3rd BC, there was nothing like the European brutality lastig 1000+yrs.
It is all taught in excruciating details in all EU countries.
This is a magnificent, thoughtful, and elegantly argued essay.
I couldn't agree more, on both ends and means. I'm a former lawyer who now teaches high school history. I have a feeling that typical undergrad students reading your piece, if they could get through it, wouldn't really know what you're talking about, so impoverished is their idea of what an education is for. You're speaking to the development of intellectual virtues, and it's depressing that universities, of all places, are so maladroit in instilling them that they might as well be anti-intellectual, or, as Bromwich has put it, "non-intellectual," like every stupid damn thing else.
I got my law degree from the University of Chicago around the turn of this century amid a sort of golden age there of intellectual stimulation. (Cass Sunstein, who taught there at the time, has been recently talking up this golden age, which he centers around the '80s and '90s, on his Substack.) I won't go on about that particular time and place. Suffice it to say that I became a big fan of law school pedagogy, and I find it well-suited to undergrad study and even, to an extent, high school study as well.
The law school model is what they call the Socratic method. When I went, it was like The Paper Chase, but the professors weren't mean old assholes who leaned into humiliation.
Students' homework was the reading; the class consisted of the professor asking questions and calling on students (cold calling!) to address them in a way meant to reveal and meaningfully address the problems presented in the text, moving progressively from basic questions to deeper ones. The best professors were the ones who were able to confine themselves almost entirely to questions. You were incentivized to read lest you be forced to bullshit or sheepishly admit that you hadn't prepared. Every class ended up involving intellectual pushback and resistance to tidy closure. Except you emerged, if engaged, actually knowing what you were talking about.
Every class grade was based entirely on an in-class essay-style exam, graded blind, meant to show that you had indeed traversed most of the terrain. No gaming it. I never learned so much so well.
I recently had an exchange via Substack comment with a student or recent graduate or someone like that who failed to see the point of her philosophy class -- Aristotle, ugh -- and was in a big hurry to do hands-on projects directed toward changing the world. She took her values as a given. My point was that her education was where you develop your values in the first place, lest they be cartoonishly simpleminded. I don't think she got it. She did not like the sound of law school.
The alternative to liberal education is anti-liberal education, teaching students that Western power is proof of guilt while insinuating that inequality and abuse are unique to it rather than universal human patterns. It ignores that other societies have similar, even if not identical, weaknesses, but judges the West alone as uniquely evil. That is part of why liberal education itself is so often sneered at today.
While this is true it fails to note that the illiberal voters are usually those with only a high school education. Civics must be taught at the high school level.
There is much to agree with here, but the critique applies primarily to research universities and elite liberal arts colleges. There are many institutions where teaching still takes pride of place. I teach at a small, Christian liberal arts college where faculty devote by far the greatest amount of our time to teaching, not research, and where the general education curriculum takes up more than a year of students' coursework. There are lots of non-elite colleges like mine. We have a lot to offer students, but we get swept up in a critique that doesn't really describe what we do. Of course, institutions like mine don't have huge endowments like the Harvards of the world, so ironically the places most threatened with extinction are the ones to whom the justified criticisms of higher ed least apply.
I agree with so much of what is written in here. Part of the issue continues to be that even now, only something like 40% of Americans have college degrees, so we need to figure out a way to cover a lot of these topics at the high school level, and do it in a way that is engaging and interesting for the students, rather than just another class they need to get through and that barely registers. It would be nice if really strong general education programs like this could be available in a somewhat consistent form across all universities, even at the community college level, and not just at elite universities like Harvard. We need to get everyone involved in reading and understanding these topics and having discussions and conversations with each other about them. But because of the cost, in terms of both money and time, so much now is focused on just getting the specific education and training that you need to get XYZ job once you graduate, it becomes hard to convince folks that this is worthwhile. Essays like this will help.
The author argues that a two-year general education core is a spiritual liberation, but it functions more like a job protection for humanities professors (small discussion seminars with no research - bliss). While he admires the Oxbridge-style character building of the old elite, he ignores that the UK accepted a different reality long ago. When higher education expanded in the 19th century, the British built red brick universities in cities like Manchester to provide focused three-year vocational degrees.
The British model trusts high schools to provide general knowledge (including civics) and treats university students as people ready to begin their professional training. The author wants the opposite. He wants to turn American colleges into expensive remedial finishing schools. By mandating that every engineer or scientist spends half their tuition on his specific brand of wisdom, he is securing the bottom line for a humanities faculty that can no longer attract students on merit. This is not a revival of the Greek Academy. It is a mandatory tax on the professional (working) class.
Couldn’t agree more. First, save the classics from being taken over by narrow-minded Defenders of Western Civilization. Open them up to all. Students exposed to genuine conversation around great books—without a political agenda—are energized, excited, engaged. Second, what you said about research is an emperor-has-no-clothes statement. Stop with the endless demand for new scholarship. In the sciences, yes, to a point. In the humanities, no one needs another new take on King Lear designed to be different from all other takes to justify getting published. Read the play with a diverse group interested in genuine engagement. Will you come up with something no one has ever thought before? No. But it will be new to you, and mean something. Third, train and hire teachers. People who love it and are good at it.
The terrible teaching goes hand in glove with the irreproducible research.
With that said, it is the job of the student to learn how to learn. They are only there for 4 to 8 years but the need to learn never stops, or at least it should not.
I expected my professs to show me what was important, and hopefully why.
Learning the materials and making the connections between the classes was my job. Everyone learns differently.
What you have pointed out is that there was a big gap in my university curriculum. I don't see how your additions could be managed without increasing my time there, which is an affordability issue.
You might find Ong's "Orality and Literacy" interesting if you haven't read it.
Very interesting ideas. To some degree its going back to earlier visions of the university.
Perhaps a start would be to introduce students to our national mythology, which of course (I think) is rooted in the classics, and have students discuss how much is true and how much is not so true and then what our national mythology says about us. Beyond that all college graduates should be able to write a complete sentence, a coherent paragraph and a cogent report/essay and understand basic statistics and the scientific method.
Here, here! Or is it, hear, hear. Maybe it's hear, here. Anyway, bravo.
Just show n spread sheet where " other societies" have invaded, decimated, settled a certain population with judeoxristian pursuation . One of which went completely gestapo & reenacted genocide with full social political WMD support from the main purveyor of violence!Let us hear from Jaques Englestein on this!!!
Point is " education" cannot be one to produce WFC fighters , dumb soldiers to fight for a dumb admin as we see today- education has to develop people who can relate to other people, can lead by consensus, can comprehend the entire essence of Science…can present ideas to inspire and thus be elected to Constitutionally required Institutions, cannot be to produce more uncivil people that flock to places like Heritage foundation, KKK, neo- confederates, people flocking to lie then cannot figure out the truth..federalist society which produces primitive notion of American justice .. education cannot produce more narrow minded citizen as implied by EVERY writer here at Pursuasion ( which makes me think it is perhaps not my place!.. stop paying!)...
If you do not want later generations to learn what the uncivilized dominant population did in the past, IS FOR THOSE like Steve Muller to self deport to places where their old habits are still valued.. if none exist, stay afloat in international waters.. until no more!…
Practically every society has its own record of conquest, hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and self-justifying myths; the question is whether education teaches students to compare those patterns honestly or turns one civilization into the unique embodiment of evil.
For sure. But Indian history outpaces all excepting the violence of the kkk type: 1/3 of the population by religion is untouchable”. WTF! But the Constitution levels the field. Although that subcontinent had “ empire” from East to shores of Mediterranean in the 2-3rd BC, there was nothing like the European brutality lastig 1000+yrs.
It is all taught in excruciating details in all EU countries.