TWO VIEWS-II: THE NEED TO KNOW
Davis, Robert Gorham
struck a responsive chord. Indeed, work and education more often than not are ill-fitted. And the fault lies just as much with the college which has prepared its clients, as the employe r who...
...Keeping to the European or Western past can be provincial...
...Under such guidance and inspiration, education is largely self-education, and this is especially true in the humanities, which require least in the way of equipment...
...Effective action is communal, collaborative...
...Despite all the technological advances since their time, the people of the past are really ourselves...
...Is it excessive to know that Nijinsky was capable of an entrechat dix or that Italian opera enthusiasts in Austria-controlled Milan thought that the last name of the composer of Rigoletto promised a united country under Vittorio Emmanuele Re D'Italia...
...I am aware, of course, from reading his article, that Mr...
...By "education" he means jobtraining, and by "overeducation" he means education that creates dissatisfaction with unfulfilling work and with work poorly paid or looked down on socially...
...We cannot fully understand the relationship in education between truth and values without reading Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientifw Postscript...
...Berube's proposals are stated...
...He paid humanists to edit these manuscripts, had the new editions copied and disseminated...
...Third, the "personal value" of college should be made more socially conscious...
...Berube stresses "overeducation," to which the solution, we learn, is less education...
...Only those should follow the present normally uninterrupted course from primary school to college and graduate school who are learning effectively all that time...
...First, there should be national policy incentives to expand higher education opportunities for the poor and the working class...
...Yet most educated Americans have not caught up with Plato and Aristotle in their ability to analyze rhetoric or criticize the application of conceptual terms...
...Here too, as with the responsibilities of citizenship, the stress on "overeducation," on knowing too much, seems absurd...
...I wish that it were not so, that exposure to Shakespeare always created Shakespearians, and that the violence and banalities of television were just a bad dream...
...It is wasteful to try to find out everything for oneself...
...While the mass of people have become nominally more and more educated, the popular culture, dominated by unprincipled commercial interests, has become more and more brutal and debased...
...Socially and psychologically the Western tradition itself deepened greatly in the 19th and 20th centuries...
...Who can know too much about Shakespeare or tennis or music or ,the Bible or genetics or astronomy or the Egypt of the Pharaohs...
...But what kind of radical he is he does not say...
...To deal effectively with any situation one must know as much as possible about it, must do---as President Carter so vividly demonstrates--one's "homework...
...Anyone should be able at any time to reenter the academic process at the level appropriate to his training and ability, and this should be true throughout his lifetime...
...One could therefore propose college as a minimum requirement for all who desire it, and postgraduate work for those professionals who require the credential...
...But reality has to be faced, and therefore the minority fighting for devotion to something better is terribly important...
...He identifies himself with the radicals, the leftists...
...I do not speak of such difficult questions as approximately when Mohammed lived, or Moses---these draw a complete blank--but almost any question devoted to events before 1950...
...These are the good guys...
...Even with allowances for sleep, eating, commuting and household tasks, leisure time exceeds work time...
...Once we have read The Rebel by Camus we can never use "radical" of ourselves, as Mr...
...The situation is as bad with history...
...Berube does, without saying what we mean by it...
...The need to know, the passion to know, is so strong and autonomous that it can properly be called an instinct...
...His approach is strictly materialist an& left-political...
...It should be egalitarian in the sense that every able student, without regard to his means, should be able r undertake any course of study for which he is properly trained...
...The educational establishment needs a push from outside to redefine its mission...
...Education should do everything possible tO increase their numbers and influence and yet at the same time give absolutely everyone a chance to fulfill himself at work and leisure in a way worthy of the dignity of free citizens in a republic, the kind of republic that meets the ideals of both a Cosimo de Medici and a Horace Maltn...
...In keeping with the latest concerns, greater emphasis is placed on the role of women in our society, death and dying, the right to education, and trade between nations...
...He is certainly not interested in the kind of humanistic education that inspired Cosimo de Medici, an education that goes back to the paideia of the Greeks and humanitas of the Romans, and which gave men of diverse beliefs---Freud, the early Marx, Hegel, Milton, Dante, Augustine, Cicero, Aristofle---a common vocabulary and common appreciations...
...self-knowledge is moral knowledge...
...so in its origin, dissemination and use is the required knowledge...
...Now he organized a systematic search for ancient manuscripts throughout Europe and--with the support of the Sultan in the lands controlled by the Turks...
...Berube is not interested in learning as such...
...Can a man or woman be considereal educated who has not tried to come to terms with Dostoevski and Nietzsche, Kafka and Sartre, Brecht and Beckett, Fanon and Gramsci...
...It is unhealthy to have the young shut away in schools for so many years unless purely academic study is deeply satisfying to them...
...One thinks of Cosimo de Medici, an early capitalist, the wealthiest man of his time in Italy...
...There are a number of things one can conclude from the crisis in higher education...
...All Americans, of course, must have basic training in 15 April 1977:238 common of a very thorough sort, which should, among other things, create a respect for language, language as a conceptual instrument...
...But no one should be cut off because he discovers his capacities and interests late...
...But they have been badly deprived, badly cheated by the institutions in whose classrooms they have been sitting for from twelve to sixteen years and by the false educational or counter-educational philosophy that governed those institutions...
...But ultimately any serious situation one confronts is sure to involve the society, the culture, the cosmos...
...Berube uses some terms without necessary specification...
...Anyone who in recent years has taught young adults from a variety of backgrounds knows that most American students are woefully undereducated...
...This is what Mark Schorer's title implies...
...Berube's sense of relevance, which is that of radical students in the late '60s...
...As with other instincts, such as sex and hunger and the urge to make a home, satisfying the need can be intensely pleasurable...
...For the past thirty years, despite more youngsters attending college, higher education remained the privilege of the affluent and middle class...
...MOSBY TIMES MIRROR THE C V MOSBY COMPANY 11830 WESTLtNE INDUSTRIAL ORIVE ST LOUIS MISSOURI 63141 Commonweal: 2J9...
...Berube is not talking about a humane education of the whole person for a whole lifetime or for eternity...
...He refers to the socialist countries and their ability to make good use of their educated men, but he does not say which socialist country is his model or what the state of intellectual liberties is in that country or to what extent students there can determine the character of their own education or how creative the humanities and social sciences can be under such regimes...
...Most knowledge, of course, is both instrumental and consummatory, and therefore doubly satisfying...
...The college and university remains, as Daniel Bell characterized it, as the primary institution of society...
...6th edition, 484 pages plus FM I-XVI, 1 illustration...
...Generously commissioning the best architects, sculptors and painters of his period and treating them with respect, he started a building program that was to make Florence the supreme city artistically in Italy...
...Despite mass education and the wide availability of books, art and music in inexpensive reproductions, only a minority in this oulturc---as in cultures of the past-is devoted to high art and demanding ideas...
...Is he a Stalinlst, CRER R NEW LEVEL of understanding between you and your students Maoist, Trotskyist, anarchist, Social Democrat...
...Everyone at every age in every kind of occupation needs external pressure to get things done on time and to meet standards, and even--where temptations are strong-to stay honest...
...Unionization of teachers could even impede the reforms that are most urgently needed and that are being forced on us by increasing costs and decreasing funds...
...Thus, the tendency to overeducation can be said in truth to reach a point of diminishing return...
...In short, some of the reforms that logically follow from Berg's inference should be campus reforms...
...One needs to test and develop one's ideas in dialectic exchange with students at the same level of training, and to have written work critically reviewed in demanding detail by a master of the discipline...
...For the trenchant question raised by Berg and Miller concerns the after-effects of overeducation: morale and productivity...
...We cannot judge or deal with the present without understanding the past...
...of money, but also by winning and retaining popular support, he gained control of the government of Florence in 1434...
...Offer good only In U.8...
...What of the Hindu past, the Chinese, the African, the Middle Eastern...
...So much has gone into buildings, salaries, expensive equipment, and educational theorizing with so embarrassingly little result...
...Since the desire constafitly recurs, the pleasure is unending...
...He speaks of the need to "rearrange social conditions," but he does not say how far that rearrangement should go...
...I notice that Mr...
...The inequities in the present economy force some Conmsonw~sL...
...Berube gives when he speaks of "the happy few...
...But for most people the ordinary work week is forty hours or even less, and the work itself, especially in government offices, is often undemanding...
...This is certainly in part because public schools stopped demanding that students all work hard and meet high objective standards in their subjects before they go on to more advanced work or are given high school diplomas...
...Price, $12.95...
...I S COLLEGE WORTHWHILE?--Ii Responsible citizenship requires ~lrrtost impossible knowledge Mark Schorer once wrote a short story titled "What We Don't Know Hurts Us...
...The college should make its curriculum more relevant and the postgraduate school restrict credentialing so far as it can...
...To know oneself is to judge oneself...
...In a technological democratic society like our own, responsible citizenship requires almost impossible knowledge on the part of everyone...
...If I am an elitist it is precisely for the reasons Mr...
...New 6~ Ed#ion...
...These same commercial values control television, which has perhaps more educational influence on younger children than do the schools...
...How leisure is spent depends to a large extent.on the success of education in creating a lively interest in the arts and sciences and an eager desire to keep on learning...
...In mid-career he helped establish more humane mental hospitals and--succeeding to the seat in Congress of John Quincy Adams--valiantly opposed slavery...
...A new chapter has been included on the "earth", which deals with the responsibilities of individuals, institutions, and nations to the environment...
...It is not necessary to describe once more the character of students' writing, though I still wonder amazedly, when I discuss it with them, what in the world could have gone on in all those years of instruction...
...Second, there should also be national emphasis on relating the college experience more to the realities of the workplace...
...He judges education by the criteria of money, "social mobility" (never fully defined) and keeping happy at the workbench or typewriter...
...As a matter of fact the word "school" comes from the Latin and Greek for "leisure...
...the proper use of any other knowledge depends first of all on the extent to which one has obeyed the Delphic injunction, "Know Thyself...
...My experience in a program that sought to screen, encourage and develop social change agents in urban studies were mixed: The first director of the program achieved remarkable resuits, but the successor, a regular academic, reorganized the whole direction of the program...
...There should be far more experimentation than there now is with an alternation, beginning quite early, of responsible paid work and study, and with apprenticeships and internships in business, the arts, and the professions--work-study programs in which students can earn money, learn responsibility and find out what kind of work they like and are good at...
...to know ourselves we must know more about them...
...Many wives hold jobs and do the housework besides...
...By Austin Fagothey, S.J., University of Santa Clara...
...But self-education is usually most productive when it is carried on within a discipline, an institutionalized discipline...
...Jimmy Carter became president mostly by talking to people for two years...
...Cosimo had broken off the studies of his youth to go into business and politics...
...But educational reforms are not to be brought about simply by unionizing teachers and guaranteeing uninterrupted education through college for everyone, without regard to the character of the education or the special capacities and needs of the individual...
...Reform--"radical reform"--in education, if it occurs, will come with other much-needed reforms, because the same people will take leadership, because the reforms are interrelated and need the support of the same aroused public opinion--aroused morally and spiritually as well as politically...
...Berube about the need for reform in education and in our economy and culture...
...March, 1976...
...Thus, much of this credentials society criticism boils down to a critique of college curriculum...
...This was the education T. S. Eliot had in mind when he spoke of the historical sense "that compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order...
...At first it seems strange that education in the ancient world was so largely rhetorical, until one realizes how rhetorically dominated our own civilization is...
...The young people I teach are highly motivated, often continuing their studies on their own at considerable sacrifice...
...And the plain fact is that the academic profession has always attracted those least interested and likely to want to rearrange social conditions...
...This is a most appropriate time for a new thrust...
...He established a great library open 15 April 1977:236 to the public...
...Education is wasteful and alienating when students together in a course are not equally trained and motivated and when they are not held to high standards...
...and Canada...
...He encouraged the University of Florence to resume the teaching of Greek, attended the lectures bim~lf, and at fifty became an ardent Platonist, establishing a Platonic academy...
...This is particularly true as contemporary psychology, ethology and linguistics put more and more emphasis on instinct, genetic inheritance and the inborn human capacity for structuring and categorizing...
...The fault does not lie with individual teachers, often hardworking and devoted to their stu~lents, but with the fact that they in turn were not educated and do not know what education is...
...It is difficult, however, to see how policymakers can influence that development, and that, as in the past, outside pressure groups will shoulder the responsibility...
...This syndrome is more likely to occur in a worker with advanced degrees...
...The person tackling a situation, however, is always a self...
...But I disagree strongly with the terms in which Mr...
...He describes a program to screen and develop "social change agents," but he does not say just how they were indoctrinated...
...Such an education is hardly irrelevant to the present, except in Mr...
...RIGHT AND REASON: Ethics in Theory and Practice This new 6th edition of a highly successful text reflects the current ethics of our society...
...I am not being frivolous in citing such facts...
...One should not write off college, and leave it to the domain of the elite...
...American competitive business is dependent on advertising, which is largely rhetorical, much of it a rhetoric of lies and false values...
...Moreover, one must realize that the market will tend to correct itself...
...Examining the pros and cons of all issues, thought-provoking questions at the end of chapters promote student discussion...
...I am as ardent as Mr...
...How much does the alert voter need to know to take the fight attitude in such matters as the SALT agreement, the Cuban presence in Angola, the covert operations of the CIA, the dangers of nuclear power plants and of genetic engineering and Army research projects, the excessive and often corrupt influence of the big corporations and the rich upon government, the seriously needed overhaul--with adequate financing--of the whole system of criminal and civil justice, the solution to the decay of central cities and to youth unemployment in the cities, the economic sacrifices required to save the environment and put an end to pollution7 In the face of all this need to know--and in properly awakened minds the eager desire to know--Mr...
...237 men to take extra jobs in order to keep their heads above water...
...I argue for a widely diversified education which is elitist in the sense that students in the different disciplines at different levels both are selected and select themselves...
...The answer to overedueation is less education, not more on-the-job training...
...The historical sense, Eliot said, is what makes "a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity...
...But achievement also, obviously, depends on motivation, excitement over the work itself, pleasure in things done well, comradely competition, desire for rewards, and above all the example, praise and guidance of teachers who are themselves genuinely and creatively preoccupied with knowledge, art and ideas...
...College pays off for minorities, and the first function of college is still mobility...
...INSTRUCTORS NOTE: To receive a complimentary copy to evaluate firsthand for possible class adoption, simply write to the Textbook DopartmonL Please be specific as to your course and the applicability of the requested text therein...
...The Nixon era has passed, and its policies of educational benign negleetw reinforced, if not influenced, by the studies on public schooling by James Coleman and the studies on higher education by Christopher Jencks---can possibly be reversed under a more liberal Carter administration...
...Education in this country 'has become shockingly wasteful, harmful to those subjected to it, destroying rather than creating values...
...By adroit use ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS, a previous contributor, i~ a prolessor in the Department o/ English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University...
...Extremely adaptable, each chapter leads logically to the next, but may be read as an independent unit and still remain intelligible...
...And the fault lies just as much with the college which has prepared its clients, as the employe r who selects and hires them, or the larger public who worships at education's shrine...
...Berube does well to cite Horace Mann, who began his educational career fighting to rescue education from the control of local school boards and ended it as President of Antioch College, where he said to the last graduating class before his death, "I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity...
...Such education should be diversified in structure as well as content in ways appropriate to a diversified society...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 8
