THE 'WHAT' OF EDUCATION

...First, there occurred a failure of purpose and an abdication of responsibility by the academicians who staffed the programs at many colleges and universities...

...It was expanded in the fifth century B.C...

...Appearance in the catalogue is more than nine-tenths of the law...

...We would create nothing less than a science of man, based on fact, not on a poet's wild vision or a metaphysician's elegant system...

...First, that tradition has given prominence of place to study of the past, that is to history in all its forms...

...Finally we must try to convince them that it is in the accomplishment of this task that man enjoys the greatest freedom...

...And yet, there are in fact an infinity of human actions and problems with which this methodology cannot cope...

...One might argue that a college should offer as many of these as hs size permits, and let it go at that...

...The rules and patterns of even the most advanced sociological and psychological theories are simplistic when put beside the analysis of human nature in great works of prose and poetry...

...They were based on the twin cornerstones of behaviorism and statistical analysis...

...There are a number of reasons for this lack of interest in subject matter...

...Behind the Decline The decline of the classical literary and philosophical curriculum which occurred during the last century may be attributed to several factors...

...In the last hundred years the character of the American economic and political system has increasingly required a predictable populace, firmly wedded to the notion of the normal type, easily analyzed statistically, and frightened by the eccentric and idiosyncratic...

...More and more social scientists now recognize this and teach humanistic psychology, whatever that may be, and stress social change in their presentation of sociology...

...In earlier centuries the response of die Western academic tradition to this dilemma has been two-fold...

...and we must make it our business to attack them at the root, by convincing our students that before they are children or parents or citizens they are essentially creators...

...If we accept as a solution the offering of every subject that can be conceived of by a given set of academicians we permit tradition and, worse still, the seeds of a particular society to override the creativity of teachers and learners...

...The workaday world, the economic pressures have always been against us...

...First, educators have in recent decades become increasingly concerned with methodology at all levels of schooling...

...There is a warning here...

...Although there are many who will still smile at this, that parenthetical addition says a great deal about where we are in higher education...

...and it is hard to see how they can succeed in reversing the moral effect which the subjects produce in college freshmen...

...Two great indicators of this are the folk art, especially that of television, which they create and absorb, and the therapy with which they attempt to deal with psychic crises...

...Above all the poet and novelist and dramatist can deal with the free creative impulse in man and with the infinitely complex questions of value raised by that impulse, in a way that makes these things palpable and immediate for their readers...

...and the literary and critical' wisdom of a millennium was summarized in medieval compendia...

...Those values are not far to seek...

...I received only a few weeks ago a proposal to begin a new program in my own college which called for sixty-four credits of study in liberal arts...

...these will soon become tradition...

...Was it not law that Lincoln read...

...Indeed, one of the most pathetic figures in our culture is the journeyman psychologist or professional counselor facing human tragedy of great depth, one that afflicts a man or woman whose consciousness goes beyond being normal, useful and contented...

...What then should the agenda of humanists be...

...The hope offered by the social sciences atid the fact that they were "new," a quality irresistible to most Americans in this century, made their growth almost inevitable...

...These things are not, of course, significant or dangerous deviations...

...And finally * there is an assumption, not unique to our culture, that the subject matter of a .liberal education is simply a given fact, not susceptible to discussion or change...

...We must make them see that the one inescapable task which every human being must undertake is creating a vision of himself and his world...

...The promise of positivism and the new subjects based upon it was filled with hope...

...The ancient schools were closed...

...for these works can deal with idiosyncrasy and eccentricity, with the tragic and heroic, with the vast range of human emotions and motivations in a manner not open to the social scientist...

...a breakdown which is rapidly dismantling all that the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance restored...

...We are teaching hard-headed Americans, often first-generation college students, many of them poor...

...Now and then pathetic attempts are made to deal with so-called deviation, things like abortion or homosexuality...

...This can be attributed in great part to his literary and philosophical education, which itself transcended the present and resisted the pressures of conformity and convenience...

...The image of a Lincoln reading by candlelight after a day of splitting rails is the image of our dilemma...

...By the seventh century A.D...

...The most powerful of these three forces is the pressure exerted by society...

...Revelation, as embodied in the scriptures and the elaboration of this by the Church Fathers was seen more and more as all that was required to prepare man for his role in both the earthly and supernatural community...

...but very fittfc attention has been paid recently to the subject matter of our teaching, which must be, one would imagine, crucial to the entire endeavor...

...Research, often extremely abstruse, eclipsed the concern for teaching...

...and that the ultimate truth or righteousness was a question of number...

...Even for the more enlightened it may be little more than a kind of delightful fantasy, which renders harsh reality more tolerable...

...It was not, however, just the newness or optimism of the social sciences that seduced American students...

...There must be a renaissance of humanities in our college curriculum, and our humanists must stir themselves to bring it about...

...Even if we put aside the question of professional or technical training and focus attention upon the liberal arts alone, mere is a vast array of subjects from which to choose...

...For the past thirty years one of the most romantic images of going to college has involved being allowed to study at last the wonderful truths of sociology and psychology...

...In the face of this kind of human suffering, the methodology is virtually helpless and almost comic...

...If our students can see themselves as creators, then literature will become not a peripheral but a central activity...

...What the most people did was right or "normal...

...and, as these students move on through higher studies they will, as teachers, perpetuate that tradition...

...The subject matter of a liberal education is not just a given fact It is the product of at least three factors: the educational tradition, the needs of society to provide intellectual paradigms for its learners, and the creative shaping powers of the academic community itself...

...Western civilization is not only facing but is well into a second breakdown of this intellectual tradition...

...This art can never present absolute idiosyncrasy which rejects conformity to the essential ideal, nor absolute tragedy for which the methodqlogy of the social sciences has no answer...

...The second cause of the decline of the literary and philosophical curriculum is precisely this meteoric rise of the fortunes of the social sciences, particularly in America...

...and several generations of American students have swallowed it...

...Upon our ability to do this, it seems to me, may rest our hope in maintaining a free as opposed to an engineered and manipulated society...

...and we must make them see the relevance of Oedipus and Hamlet, Socrates and Descartes to their lives, their careers, their community...

...and second, it has emphasized the study of those products of the human intellect which are least open to manipulation by a given society, that is works of literary and philosophical genius...

...All of this was packaged as science, absolutely value-free and antipathetic to the idea of moral training...

...The end result is a university system whose curriculum is dictated by the predominant social system...

...Second, academicians in large numbers have espoused the convenient belief that university professors should have the absolute right to teach whatever interests them...

...These ideas are nonsense, of course...

...THE WHAT OF EDUCATION GEORGE W. SHEA Escaping the "smorgasbord curriculum' One of tbe questions conspicuously absent from recent discussions of higher education has been the es-seatial one: what shall we teach...

...The social sciences fitted this set of specifications admirably...

...Even in the Roman empire, during its most oppressive years, although professional rhetorical training became a hollow and superficial exercise, it remained possible for the enlightened man to remain intellectually free and to transcend the moral worth-lessness of his leaders...

...Normality is always the test of happiness and happiness is always achievable...

...For great numbers of them literature is just entertainment, a kind of primitive or high-class television...

...and that it is an end worth pursuing however late the hour...

...It will be easier to convince them that poetry is not mere escape or fantasy...

...Almost blindly, in an attempt to ape scientifically verifiable, and hence excellent, scholarship the humanities turned over the moral shading of their students to social scientists, who, until very recently, denied that they had anything at all to do with the teaching of values...

...Above all we must attack the idea of literature which many of our students bring to their classes...

...Physics, Sociology, and Psychology are simply there...

...Harsh reality, however, can Kf dealt with, they will tell you, only by the serious sciences and social sciences...

...After this had been added: "that is social sciences...

...Above all it has required a populace that is satisfied in part and hopeful in part, and one that believes that happiness is easily achieved...

...to the degree that one diverged from "normal" behavior one was sick or, in rare cases, evil...

...but a superb example of what we must do throughout our lives: to perceive in a unique way and to shape ourselves and our world in accordance with our vision...

...Even in the realm of abstraction science is preferred or, as we have seen, the simple and seemingly effective rules of the social sciences...

...Throughout antiquity, the greatest obstacle to the control of education by a given state was this insistence upon the study of the great literary and philosophical works of the past...

...The social need of man, in this case both 4 and eternal, created a tradition in which or Horace could seldom be more than a distraction...

...but it involves, it seems to toe, an abdication of one of the'academic community's important roles...

...This meant that to achieve results they generally had to put their faith in the fact that man was capable of manipulation through the application of the right stimuli...

...It seems to me that a higher education which stresses these things will prepare its students for freedom, for the agonies of failure and success, and even for tragedy, better than one which stresses only the behavioral and statistical sciences...

...It was their belief that these subjects "worked," that they were in fact the key to our society and culture...

...We must not overlook the fact that creative writers and speculative philosophers seem especially able to resist political pressure, as the great Russian novelist Solzhenitsyn has recently shown us...

...Most college-educated Americans belong to the generations raised on the social sciences...

...In doing so, they must remember that humanistic studies have never had an easy time in the American university...

...We have had exhaustive treatments of why we must teach, how we should teach, and how we can finance our teaching...

...This is not, of course, true...

...In some cases this can be put down to the kind of academic "flabbiness" and inaction that often accompanies taking one's position of preeminence for granted...

...We have also opened them to the inevitable failure of these disciplines' methods to present a rich and satisfying answer to the needs of the humaii psyche...

...In many more cases, however, this abdication was the result of a shift in belief or commitment...

...In the light of this, there is a much stronger case to be made for the classical literary and philosophical curriculum than humanists themselves have been making in recent years...

...This is, of course, a possible solution, one which has been not iafrequently embraced of late...

...The notion that the teaching of literature or philosophy had a moral purpose became an unfashionable, even ludicrous, idea...

...to include the study of philosophy, which then embraced both mathematical and scientific disciplines as well...

...for the American commercial enterprise could easily absorb them...

...In short, we must face the fact that by potting our undergraduates on a staple diet of sociology and behavioral psychology we have prepared them for conformity, predictability and normality...

...In the "smorgasbord curriculum" from which everyone takes what he likes, beginning students will choose the subjects which seem to respond best to social needs...

...Here we come to the third and most terrifying factor in the decline of humanism: the need of our society to have its members formed through the study of subjects which reinforced its own values...

...The practical American spirit prefers the practical subject...

...The study of the poetry of the past was the first study of the Greeks...

...and make them see as well that this vision will be unique, in a way even eccentric, not statistical or "normal...

...This new breakdown is evident in the precipitous decline in interest in the past and in the study of history, and in the turning from the study of creative literature as a cornerstone of liberal education...

...Television art is little more than a dramatic elaboration of the conformist, statistical ideal and of the pervasive American optimism...

...We cannot pretend that we are teaching a class of Oxford undergraduates in Cardinal Newman's day...

...We have diminished their power to be free, to create, to enjoy idiosyncrasy...

...Brave though these attempts may be, the root assumptions of these sciences remain...

...I am moving toward a bold hypothesis...

...but these are always seen as soluble by the application of tried and true social engineering and therapy...

...But beyond this we ought to stress the greater range of creative literature in training man and his world...

...What is more, students educated in this way are more likely to cherish a free rather than a functionally comfortable society...

...Occasionally attempts are made to deal with serious social problems...

...much of this intellectual and academic tradition had been forsaken...