RECALLING EDUCATION:
C H A P T E R    1

The Purpose of Higher Education

"In the present aspect of the world, liberty is conceived as license, whereas genuine liberty is only the mastering of one's self.... License of desires leads only to enslavement." —Dostoevsky

No nation on earth has ever placed before its people a richer cornucopia of delights with fewer restrictions on choice than does contemporary America. But while Americans are justifiably proud of the freedom this gives them, freedom is not reducible to the many options this abundance makes possible. A person is not free, for example, simply because he sees before himself a bewildering variety of goods and has money in his pocket; that person is truly free only if he can order that variety and make it less bewildering. In one sense, freedom increases as the number of choices increases: this is what Irving Babbitt once called "the freedom of the lunatic," since, presumably, the lunatic is one who has been overwhelmed by a wide variety of choices. But freedom also involves informed choice, and information together with heightened powers of discrimination actually reduce the number of choices to the few that are worthy of serious consideration. This sort of freedom is called "positive freedom," or "autonomy," to the extent that such choices are our own and are not foisted upon us by someone else. It contrasts with "negative freedom," or freedom viewed simply as the number of choices available at any moment.

In order to better understand the difference between these two kinds of human freedom, consider a simple illustration. Suppose you go to a used-car lot to buy a car. Suppose, further, that you know little or nothing about cars. There are more than a hundred cars on the lot, so on the face of it you have considerable freedom. Not only can you select from among those one hundred cars, but you can also leave and go to other lots where there are more cars. My claim here is that, in this case, the freedom you have to choose the car you want is important, but limited: the fact that you are ignorant about cars restricts your freedom to choose the right car, or the car that will most suit your needs. You may get lucky (chances are at least one in a hundred), but it is more likely that you will get a car for all the wrong reasons—it looks great, your friend has one like it, or the salesman sells you the car that will garner him the largest commission. In any event, your ignorance in this case clearly limits your freedom. Increased knowledge about cars, about persuasive advertising, about the pressures that operate on salesmen forcing them to resort to trickery, together with an ability to think on your feet and recognize bloat and rhetoric for what it is, will increase your freedom and the probability that you will choose the right car. The freedom to choose one out of the hundred (or more) cars is negative freedom; the freedom to choose the right car, based on your ability to use your mind, is positive freedom (albeit, in this pedestrian example, a rather mundane use of that freedom). Ironically, negative freedom is a function of many choices; positive freedom may reduce all choices to one or very few.

As can be seen from this simple illustration, positive freedom, unlike negative freedom, is not given at birth. It must be achieved through effort, increased understanding, and the ability to use one's intellectual powers. If this is so in such a simple case as the purchase of an automobile, how much more so must it be when it comes to vital choices? Making the right choice requires more than merely the absence of restraints; it requires knowledge and the ability to think. And while negative freedom is protected in our society by a variety of institutions, positive freedom is the responsibility of schools and academies alone.

Unfortunately, our secondary schools have long shown little interest in positive freedom, thanks in large measure to John Dewey's bankrupt ideas of "growth" and "exploration," ideas that have captivated primary and secondary school education for the past sixty years. It has, therefore, devolved to the colleges and universities to help young people in our society become self?determined, to gain control of their own minds and make informed choices. For a variety of reasons, however, the academy has largely ignored this responsibility.

In this chapter, I will consider reasons why this has occurred. To do this, I shall need to begin with a consideration of the nature of higher education and then turn to some of the factors that have come between institutions of higher education and their purpose. In the end, I shall recommend several specific steps to restore a sense of purpose to the academy.

"Education," from the Latin, literally means "to draw forth." We find this enlightening, however, only if we know what it is that is being drawn forth. As traditionally conceived, education draws forth the distinctly human potential that lies within every person. This means that while educators should not ignore the particular individuals they deal with, they should concern themselves primarily with what people have in common and what makes humans unique as a species.

According to Aristotle, to say that educators should try to draw forth our "common human potential" is to say that educators are to be concerned with virtue (arete); in humans this requires, once character has been formed, that reason be developed in order to make self?directed activity possible. That is to say, human potential is realized to the extent that the formulation of and adherence to a person's own reasonable plans or objectives arise out of good character.

Aristotle's concern with reason is not a narrow concern, as is commonly charged: we are speaking of the whole person when we speak of his "rational animal," and "reason" is not merely "intelligence" or "learning" any more than education is mere schooling. Scott Buchanan noted this when he said, "Our emotions are under the reason and so are other things like perception.... [I]f you are educating anybody, the channel, the medium through which you do this, will be rational."1 The result, if it is achieved successfully, will be autonomy, or what Brand Blanshard once called "reasonableness." He described it as follows:

By reasonableness I do not mean intelligence, though that may be a great help. Attila, Torquemada, and Stalin were highly intelligent men, but they were not reasonable men. Nor is a reasonable man necessarily a learned man, for learning may be present without even ordinary common sense. No; the reasonableness of which I am speaking is a settled disposition to guide one's belief and conduct by the evidence. It is a bent of the will to order one's thought by the relevant facts, to order one's practice in the light of the values involved, to make reflective judgment the compass of one's belief and action.

The goal of achieving reasonableness has traditionally been bound up with the liberal arts. Aristotle coined the term "art," which involves "knowledge of universals" applied by "practical reason" to concrete problems of the polis, or civic community. Western tradition, for the most part, has followed this usage.

The original seven liberal arts formulated during the Middle Ages comprised the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, combined with the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. These seven arts have proliferated, and now the liberal arts include all those subjects within the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences that free the mind from enslavement to inclination, habit, and passion through the application of principles and deeper understanding. This is the current interpretation of what Aristotle meant when he characterized the liberal arts as "knowledge of universals" applied by "practical reason."

We should recall that, despite their practical application, the liberal arts are not "techniques." They do not focus on "know-how," as does so much of what is currently taught in our colleges and universities. The liberal arts liberate the human mind by enabling it to make informed choices and, through a knowledge of theory and principles, to understand why such choices must be made.

To the extent that a reasonable person is autonomous, he will be able to resist hucksterism, coercion, and intimidation; recognize exaggeration and prevarication; determine what is fact and what is not; and distinguish between an opinion that is supported by evidence and argument and one that merely feels comfortable. Note once again that autonomy is an acquired trait, not something we are born with.

It is important to distinguish the concept of autonomy defended here from the highly individualistic, even narcissistic, misconception advanced in the last fifty years by pop psychologists and their intellectual fathers, Abraham Maslow, Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Rollo May, and (especially) Carl Rogers. The traditional concept of autonomy traces its roots back through Kant and Rousseau to the theistic concept of positive freedom, which centers around the notion of doing the right thing. The popular view, as advanced by those Paul Vitz calls "selfist theorists," is thoroughly relativistic and rules out all normative dimensions of human experience. From this perspective, to be autonomous is to "do your own thing," and if your thing happens to be lynching your black neighbor, so be it. (As Vitz has noted in this regard, "...[B]oth black and white racism are perfectly consistent with self?theory.") This popular conception of autonomy rests on the faulty notion that humans are basically good and that evil comes from somewhere else—usually the family or society in general. The weight of current psychological theory, fortunately, calls this view into question; Donald Campbell, for one, goes so far as to say that there is "social functionality and psychological validity to the concepts of sin and temptation and of original sin due to human carnal, animal nature." It is more accurate to say that humans are neither good nor bad; we are an odd mix of both, which is something we should have learned from reading Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Freud.

But what passes for educational theory these days is a thin soup containing a few crumbs collected from under the tables of these popularizers. Thus do we hear a great deal about "encouraging self?esteem," "promoting self?actualization," and "realizing one's own true potential," with no regard whatever for the question of what one's potential might happen to be or whether one is deserving of high self?esteem. As Vitz has pointed out, there seems to be little or no relation between high self?esteem and true human accomplishment, and children, once again, are neither inherently good nor bad; they are both.

Nevertheless, the pop psychologists' sort of theoretical soup is swallowed with great delight in most schools of education and is especially pervasive at the primary and secondary levels, where teachers are admonished not to be "judgmental," and activities such as "values clarification" are all the rage. Thus, it is important to make clear that the autonomy that belongs at the center of classical educational theory bears little or no resemblance to that which is bandied about by popularizers and bogus educational "theorists."

A democratic society must presume that its citizens are capable of reasonable actions. By way of developing that capacity, therefore, it becomes the responsibility of certain institutions in a democratic society to prepare young minds for citizenship—that is, reasonable action in the political sphere. This is where the goal of higher education and the requirements of a free society overlap. Confusion of purpose within the academy affects all members of a free society, and the liberal arts must therefore be defended against those who would reduce education to child care or vocational training (or both) and the academies to waystations that provide the latest soporifics to a community in constant agitation. But it would seem this is precisely what has occurred. Why is this? What has gone wrong?

To answer these questions, we need to separate those factors that operate within the walls of the academy from those that operate from without. Regarding the latter, we need only mention briefly that the single, clear role of the academy in our society has become confused as a result, in part at least, of the increasing ineffectiveness of the family and churches as viable social institutions. As a consequence of this degeneration, our schools are now expected to solve every problem, to be all things to all people, and this exacts promises from the schools that they cannot possibly hope to deliver.

But even if the family and our churches were healthy, confusion abounds within the walls of academe on the part of those who should be clearest about what it is they do, and it is to this internal confusion that we shall now turn. There appear to be three major causes of the confusion of purpose within higher education: (1) over?administration; (2) over-specialization; and (3) diminished concern with education per se.

Members of college and university faculties have probably always complained about the number of administrators, and they probably always will. In recent times, however, the situation has taken an alarming turn. Institutions of higher learning in America are currently overrun with people whose role is not central to the purpose of education but who, nonetheless, seek to legitimize their positions within the academy by carving out territory and fortifying it with a barricade of jargon. This includes droves of minor administrators and so?called "nonteaching faculty" in areas such as athletics, student affairs, housing, counseling, employment services, drug rehabilitation, affirmative action, minority recruiting, and "learning resources" (read: "remedial learning"). This is the direct result of the social demands placed upon the academy because of the collapse of other viable social institutions. What we need to note here is simply that the strain placed on scarce resources and the limited energies of those who take their task seriously must necessarily weaken and fractionalize the central purpose of education.

Recent data regarding this phenomenon are astonishing. In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a report by the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission indicated that between 1975 and 1985 the increase in full?time faculty in this country was 5.9 percent. During that same period, the increase in the number of administrators was 17.9 percent and the increase in the number of "other professionals," presumably support personnel and non-teaching faculty, was 61.1 percent.

Someone once said that the reason the railroads are in trouble in this country is because they have forgotten that their business is to move passengers rather than trains. The situation is quite similar among institutions of higher learning: running the institution, including introducing new programs and hiring functionaries whose roles are obscure, has become an end in itself. This phenomenon is little more than the most recent consequence of what Jacques Ellul dubbed "the technological imperative," or the inversion of the proper relationship between means and ends. Put simply, the technological imperative dictates that the means to given ends become ends themselves—and attention to ends, why it is that something is being done, disappears. The key word in a technological society is "efficiency." Ellul made the point rather vividly in 1954:

Technical progress today is no longer conditioned by anything other than its own calculus of efficiency. The search is no longer personal, experimental, workmanlike; it is abstract, mathematical, and industrial. This does not mean that the individual no longer participates. On the contrary, progress is made only after innumerable individual experiments. But the individual participates only to the degree that he is subordinate to the search for efficiency, to the degree that he resists all the currents today considered secondary, such as aesthetics, ethics, fantasy. Insofar as the individual represents this abstract tendency, he is permitted to participate in technical creation, which is increasingly independent of him and increasingly linked to its own mathematical law.

At the time Ellul was writing his book, the technological imperative was already operating in the realm of education, as rapidly evolving "teachers' colleges" increasingly offered curricula focused almost exclusively on considerations of method, with no concern for goals. The current problem is not new; it is simply getting worse.

Over-specialization, the second factor mentioned above, is also not new, and it is also getting worse. A phenomenon born and nurtured within the academy itself, over-specialization has made it increasingly difficult for members of college and university faculties to share any sense of common purpose. As a result, it is virtually impossible to get faculty volunteers to teach basic "general education" courses, or to deal in a systematic way with questions of how to order and integrate the curriculum. The sad fact is that members of college and university faculties are not prepared to discuss these issues as professionals. Often they cannot. The resulting fragmentation of knowledge further widens the gap between the ideal of liberal education and what currently passes for education within the academy.

The problems associated with over-specialization may go back as far as late in the nineteenth century, when Harvard College introduced the elective curriculum. The elective curriculum itself, however, was the product of over-specialization, the inevitable outcome of the granting of Ph.D.'s in narrow fields that produced specialists whose main objective was to turn out more specialists. Michael Polanyi noted the problem in the sciences in 1957 when he wrote:

The organization of scientific progress is determined, in the first place, by the fact that modern science is so vast that any single person can properly understand only a small fraction of it. The Royal Society has eight sub?committees for the election of Fellows, each of which has a separate field of research allotted to it. One of these fields, for example, is mathematics; but individual mathematicians are further specialized and are competent to deal only with a small part of mathematics. It is a rare mathematician—we are told—who fully understands more than half a dozen out of fifty papers presented to a mathematical congress.... Adding to this evidence my own experience in chemistry and physics, it seems to me that the situation may be similar for all the major scientific provinces, so that any single scientist may be competent to judge at first hand only about one hundredth of the total current output of science.

If we consider that this comment was made more than forty years ago, we can compound the problem in the sciences and then apply it, pari passu, to the social sciences and humanities, though the problem is less pronounced outside the natural sciences, where at least lip service is paid to interdisciplinary pursuits. One need only look closely at any department of philosophy or English at a major university, however, to see the same sort of narrow specialization that concerned Polanyi.

From this vantage point, we need not look far to see why a great many faculty members are unable to find common ground on which to discuss the critical issue of "general education" with their colleagues. Time has led to the promotion of specialized disciplines, the expansion of major requirements, and an ongoing battle to increase the numbers of major students within departments. None of these concerns has anything to do with education per se, and yet they are of central importance to many who set the academic tone. Allan Bloom was surely right when he pointed out the irony that the "great universities which can split the atom, find cures for the most dreaded diseases, conduct surveys of whole populations, and produce dictionaries of lost languages...cannot generate a modest program of general education for undergraduate students. This is a parable for our times."

The tendency to focus attention on academic disciplines is closely related to the last item on our list of concerns, and may stem from the same deeper causes. It is the diminishing concern among members of college and university faculties over matters that do not affect them directly. What is of concern are such things as job security, protecting territory, and promoting "diversity."

The fact that members of university faculties are on average older than they were in the past is a matter of historical accident. However, taken together with the consideration that many institutions of higher education are involved in a struggle to survive, and that jobs are difficult to find (and hold on to), the fact that there are more older faculty members now than ever before—and that these people have a lock on tenure positions—partly explains the current worries over job security among younger, untenured faculty, many of whom work as adjuncts, struggling to find a toehold in higher education. These worries, in turn, partly explain the lack of energy and attention to the things that should matter most to students. Some years ago, Gabriel Marcel warned us that "as soon as a preoccupation with security begins to dominate human life, the scope of human life itself tends to be diminished. Life, as it were, tends to shrink back on itself, to wither." The tendency of interests to become narrow and of long?range concerns to shorten, of "life shrinking back on itself," surfaces everywhere in the academy as efforts to protect territory, or areas of special interest and concern to faculty members themselves, become paramount concerns. Evidence of this is not hard to come by.

One of the more interesting examples occurs in a recent Carnegie Foundation study of the preparedness of students entering college. The study showed that members of diverse academic areas agreed that students generally were "seriously unprepared" for college. This assessment was confirmed by faculty members in virtually every academic department—except those in education departments, which is to say those departments that are turning out the teachers of these students. Three-quarters of the college professors surveyed indicated that students with whom they have "close contact" are seriously unprepared in basic skills. The number of professors agreeing with this claim was as high as 80 percent (in mathematics), while only 50 percent of professors in education agreed. This is clear evidence of a group with a jaundiced perspective protecting its territory, and it raises profound questions about the willingness of these people to even consider issues of first importance to their students.

To make matters worse, the academy has recently given birth to cadres of true believers whose goal is to promote "cultural diversity" in the name of social justice. These people are convinced that the liberal arts tradition, as they understand it, is reeking with the stench of sexism, racism, and class privilege. Not only do they refuse to defend that tradition, they attack it at every turn. I shall have more to say about this movement in subsequent chapters.

In the face of this agitation and preoccupation with matters of secondary importance, the liberal arts struggle to find a place at the table. If there were other viable suggestions about what to place at the core of higher education, the problem would not be as serious as it is. But none seems forthcoming, and none will as long as the issue of purpose is never raised.

Clearly, the gap between the ideal of liberal education in a democratic society and the reality we see today grows ever wider. The question is what, if anything, can be done about it? I shall suggest a number of steps at this point that would help to remedy the situation. In the final chapter, I shall elaborate and add several more. In making these suggestions, I shall invoke a rather simple principle: the academy must once again focus attention on the ideal of liberal education as the attainment of positive human freedom.

With this in mind, and recalling the three major causes of our current malaise—over-specialization, over-administration, and diminished concern with the goals and purpose of education—we can begin by noting that the number and function of nonteaching faculty and administrators ought to be re-evaluated with a focus on the central purpose of higher education. That purpose, I have argued, is to empower young people to achieve individual autonomy. Furthermore, this must be accomplished in a brief period of time. Undergraduates will spend fewer than 2,000 clock hours in class over a four-year period—about the same amount of time they will spend on a job in their first year after graduation.

The major effort to realize the purpose of a liberal education occurs, if it occurs at all, in the classroom. Accordingly, academic programs must not be allowed to suffer in order to accommodate the latest trends in education or to hire personnel whose place in the academy is not even remotely connected with liberal education. This is not to say that institutions of higher learning ought to be insensitive to vital concerns, such as social justice or the need of their students to find employment after graduation. It is also not to say that cultural diversity is an unimportant factor in establishing an atmosphere in which students will grow intellectually. Nor is it to say that those within the academy should not continue to rethink the question of purpose and make changes when those changes will accommodate the students' real needs. It is simply to say that we must never lose sight of the fact that the most vital need of every student is to be able to use his mind. All else is secondary.

If Arnold Toynbee were writing today, he would doubtless warn us that our civilization, like those before it, is entering a "time of troubles." In this regard, the term "crisis" is heard on every hand and, overworked though it is, the term at least seems to apply to higher education. The role of preserver and transmitter of high culture, a role that the academy has played since the Middle Ages, is being seriously questioned within the academy itself as part of its apparently inexorable move toward cultural pluralism. Furthermore, as we have seen, the academy suffers from confusion of purpose, coupled with a disturbing reluctance on the part of those responsible for education to raise the question of purpose in the first place.

The times are out of joint: the academy is floundering in the midst of a turbulent society that makes demands upon it that have nothing whatever to do with its central educational role. It is essential, therefore, to rethink the question of purpose and regain a clear focus. My suggestion is that we must begin by recognizing, minimally, that a democratic society has more real need for reasonable citizens than it does for accountants, engineers, schoolteachers, or Ph.D.'s. If the academy is to accomplish anything worthwhile in the years to come, all other demands that have been placed upon it must stand and wait their turn.

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