Austin Hall Library

What it Means to be an Educated Human Being

After a great Father's Day luncheon, I spent the afternoon with Richard M. Gamble's The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What it Means to be an Educated Human Being, and I recommend it for anyone interested in the intellectual life and the right ordering of the human soul.

Gamble, a Professor of History and Political Science at Hillsdale College, is the editor of this anthology of readings about the goals, conditions, and ultimate value of true education. The entries are short, insightful, and written by many of the greatest thinkers on education for thousands of years (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Hugh of St. Victor, John Henry Newman, T.S. Eliot, et al.). If one is interested in the subject matter, but doesn't have a classical education and countless hours to read original sources, this book is an excellent aid to deeper thinking about true education.

The Wickedness of Modern Education--It Makes Students Fit for the Modern World

In the somewhat hard to find novel by Evelyn Waugh, Scott King's Modern Europe, the "slightly bald and slightly corpulent" senior classics master of a fictional English public school (Granchester), engages in a poignant dialogue with the headmaster.

"You know," [the headmaster] said, "we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term!"

"I thought that would be about the number."

"As you know I'm an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the 'complete man' any more. They want to qualify their boys for jobs in the modern world. You can hardly blame them, can you?"

"Oh yes," said Scott-King. "I can and do."

"I always say you are a much more important man here than I am. One couldn't conceive of Granchester without Scott-King. But has it ever occurred to you that a time may come when there will be no more classical boys at all?"

"Oh yes. Often."

"What I was going to suggest was--I wonder if you will consider taking some other subject as well as the classics? History, for example, preferably economic history?"

"No, headmaster."

"But, you know, there may be something of a crisis ahead."

"Yes, headmaster."

"Then what do you intend to do?"

"If you approve, headmaster, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world."

"It's a short-sighted view, Scott-King."

"There, headmaster, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take."

Modern Commercial Education

Despite protestations to the contrary, modern education is not an improvement over the education of the past. There is more of it for more people, but integrity demands an admission that its quality has been watered down.

I had occasion this weekend to recall Wendell Berry's essay, "The Joys of Sales Resistance," in which he expresses his customary clear thinking on the subject of "the new commercial education" that "is fun for everybody." For those familiar with modern education and the presuppositions that have come to support it, although somewhat humorous, a number of Berry's comments hit very close to home. He wrote, "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:"

• Educated people are more valuable than other people because education is a value-adding industry.
• Educated people are better than other people because education improves people and makes them good.
• The purpose of education is to make people able to earn more and more money.
• The place where education is to be used is called "your career."
• Anything that cannot be weighed, measured, or counted does not exist.
• 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.
• Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.
• 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."
• 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.
• 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.
• The mark of a good researcher is the same as that of a good teacher.
• A great university has many computers, a lot of government and corporation research contracts, a winning team, and more administrators than teachers.
• 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.
• 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.
• A good school is a big school.
• Disarm the children before you let them in.

Is There Danger in The Colbert Report?

While admitting to occasionally enjoying the witticisms of Stephen Colbert, I must admit that this article makes some good points. The following quote captures the conclusion of the article, but the insight that many students these days get their news from television comedy shows is particularly troubling.

"In this current state education resembles what the ancient Greeks would clearly call tragedy: a downward progression, or fall from a once elevated, more exalted position."