Some Unorthodox Thoughts About Colleges

...one student even sued Columbia College for failing to do that...

...Those not passing may try again and enter college at any age...

...to be able to live together, they must be educated to be equal in the single respect in which they resemble each other, their humanity...

...minority students who can earn honest grades emphatically reject phony degrees...

...And to top humiliation with irony, they now find that it was scarcely worth the trouble...

...Fortunately in recent years this has not interfered with freedom of thought...

...Just because traditional education was a matter of routine in which plans were handed down Jrom the past, it does not follow that progressive education has to be a matter of pleasant improvisation...

...This is not only the most expensive method of talent-hunting ever devised, it is unfair to the better students and cruel to those who have no talent: they have been lured, by false promises, to give up two years of their lives, they have experienced failure and been discouraged from following nonacademic careers that might have been perfectly satisfying to them...

...In conclusion, I would like to clear up some possible misunderstandings and to reconcile some apparent contradictions...

...I studied day and night...

...This is what I call the psychosociological fallacy: if the analyst knows that our motives may not be pure and our independence may be illusionary, that does not mean that he recommends a deliberately partisan attitude...

...the students should audit them and select, each for himself, those teachers from whom he thinks he can learn something...

...But it must not serve as an excuse to postpone the tackling of these problems permanently...

...Thus, the History Department at CCNY designed a course, "The Self and History," to introduce the subject to an unwilling but captive audience...

...but the borderlines between those whose professions require academic training and those who became interested in other pursuits will be blurred...

...The trouble with "relevant" courses is twofold—they become irrelevant so fast...

...The university must provide opportunities for such meetings—above all, coffee-house facilities—but as an institution it cannot and should not act in loco parent is spiritually— nor could it, afortiori, relieve any student of the obligation to make his philosophical decisions for himself, or with his friends...

...Even at a time when those masses counted only by the hundreds, he grumbled: Perhaps a hundred years hence a few hundred more people may know what poetry is...

...John Dewey I shall first offer some reflections on the social purposes of the college, then cast a critical look at the liberal and populist responses to the challenge of the mass college, and end with some ideas on higher education in a socialist framework...

...but we shall have no culture [Kultur...

...Some are egoboosting, others ego-searching, especially those in the anthropology and psychology departments...

...and one Mr...

...Employers who only recently were satisfied with a high school diploma are now asking fora B.A.—a serious misconception, for a 22-year-old college graduate is in no way better prepared for many of the available positions than a 16162 year-old apprentice, and in some ways may be less adaptable...

...If it was a misconception of the elite college that teachers must tower high above their class, it is a misconception of the left that teachers must learn from their students...

...This cannot be achieved by forcing everybody to pursue a college education, nor by forcing the college to give everybody the same diploma...

...Socialist goals are served best, not by building ideal "pedagogical provinces," but by allowing the learning process to communicate and interchange with all the other aspects of productive life...

...Higher learning (so-called) just as the more elementary forms of education must be seen as an on-going enterprise conducted for its own sake, out of idle curiosity, realizing man's greatest potential in the free, purposeless development of his powers...

...it became a treasure to be maintained and displayed, embalmed, sterilized, catalogued, annotated, and commented upon...

...There would be no problem if the high schools were to produce a uniform level of knowledge as they do in France where the questions for the final exams are determined nationally by the Minister of Education...

...Only by separating it from the narrower purposes of status-gaining, career and professional or vocational training, can we discover all its possibilities...

...For indeed, why should not the ruling classes allow the general public to pay for the education of their own sons...

...From a privilege, college education has turned into an obligation...

...One is to combine productive work with education, the other is the use of a "national service" to perform the increasing number of unpleasant tasks that union labor no longer assumes: soil conservation, sanitation and health services, care for the aged, and the like...

...To admit them to higher learning should mean to offer them usable knowledge...

...It can certainly not be achieved by debasing the grades—which leads only to a further devaluation of the B.A., or to tacit disqualification of institutions known for such practices...

...The college lives on the mandarin myth that mastery of the liberal arts makes the adept noble and wise...

...But as I said, democrats mistook the cause for the effect, and this misunderstanding had serious consequences for both education and democracy...

...It follows further that such a reform can become effective only under conditions of total freedom to teach and freedom to learn...

...Hence Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Marx's friend, told the proletariat that "Knowledge Is Power," that they must acquire the one to get a share of the other...

...I shall maintain that certain slogans of the left, and even of the radical left—palliatives like "free tuition," "open admission," "student input," "relevance in programming"—do not answer problems that require basic structural changes and a totally new attitude to learning...

...If reason is to lead us, it must claim universal validity...

...More often, in fact as a rule, the obverse is the case: people became educated because they were rich...

...Although some of them earn "credits" in remedial courses and a third of them are dropping out, it is estimated that by the year 1999 more than 30 percent of the entire population will be holders of some academic title...

...There is no reason why colleges should not expand their area of interest in public issues of the day, hobbies, and vocational training...

...In a word, concern for the masses and concern for excellence can be reconciled if we can make education "relevant...

...Relevance" I take to mean that the subject matter must be of interest to both the student and the community, and that the method of teaching must "motivate" him...

...The symbol and paradigmatic instance of this approach is the controversial policy of "open admission," the opening of the college to all who have obtained a high school diploma, no matter how inadequate their preparatory schooling has been...

...academic studies should concentrate on knowledge that remains usable...

...The present practice of permissive admission uses a supposedly humane, progressive, compassionate program to impose on the college a burden the high schools and the family failed to shoulder...

...Against Gimmickry and False Relevance TO BEGIN with the last-named complex, teaching methods and classroom relations have been a major concern of the college revolution...

...Education was for the leisure classes...

...170 For a Reform of the Student Body Meanwhile a comprehensive plan for reform of the college should consider two further proposals that have appeared in socialist literature from St...

...If college is supposed to help in selecting the meritorious elite, statistics defeat that purpose: a half, even a third of the population can no longer be called an elite...

...For the minorities, the situation is getting doubly tragic...

...equal education equalizes the starting conditions for all contestants, giving each an equal opportunity to enter the race...

...The principle of equality does not require that all students begin at the same age level, or that those who need to catch up determine the pace of studies for those who don't have to catch up...

...Third, I seem to deprecate professionalism and to ridicule the humanist elites while insisting on the ideal of academic excellence and similar pretensions of the elite college...

...To those who instinctively reject the latter alternative, I answer that our government uses education as an instrument of national policies such as: training leaders and experts, equalizing opportunities for all, assuring society of a certain level of literacy and general culture that is necessary for its functioning...

...Parents, church and community leaders, minority politicians, and future employers bring pressure to bear upon the high school graduate to acquire an education, to "amount to something," to bring honor to his national, racial, religious, or home community...

...Professor Duberman suggested to the American Historical Association that a course should be taught about gay history...

...Remember we have freed them from research and committee meetings...

...The Problem IN our most populous states, half of all 18- to 22-year-olds are now engaged in some kind of "studies...

...This seems to me a necessary condition for the two main targets that I have pursued in this paper: • to restore the ideal of excellence to the purely academic purposes of higher learning...

...In the process the college has become a department store that houses a number of specialty shops and a rather well-developed bargain basement...

...Liberalism wants to equalize opportunity for all individuals but it does not increase the number of places near the top, nor does its educational policy touch the social structure anywhere...

...the administration and retailing of cultural goods can feed thousands of "educated squares...

...to liberate adolescents from the burden of studies that are unrelated to their vocational aims, but to raise the intellectual level and social status of the vocational and trade schools...

...This has been proven recently in Europe, where the limited facilities at the universities have led to the imposition of a numerus clausus based mostly on academic achievement, with the result of greatly improved high school records...

...Not only do these educational aims clash with each other...

...For their idea of relevance is quite different...

...It makes me shudder to think of that appalling conscription of brains each year made over to the government merely to satisfy the family's ambition...

...The issue is that all too many teachers do not know how to relate their special field to the rest of the world, to general philosophy, and especially to the human environment...

...The result would be either a gross distortion of those humanist aims, perhaps their transformation into mere ideology or, worse, into mere techniques of leadership selection, or else the utopian attempt to constitute a "youth culture" and a preserved academic culture land divorced from the labors and worries of the greater society...

...I studied more than I was fit for...

...the masses are constituted by the multitude and variety of elites...

...is becoming the entrance ticket to the labor force...

...Like Socrates, the middle class believed that virtue can be taught and that those who have been in school with the philosophers should rule the state...

...The best argument that can be made for open entrance still is the frank admission that it has nothing to do with education but that it may help to solve, or perhaps to transpose or delay, certain social and political problems with which, so far, city-planners and national policy-makers have failed to grapple...

...Open admission was introduced in New York City for purely political reasons at a moment when to refuse it would have meant revolution in the streets...

...He, of course, hated the masses, especially when they threatened to invade his cultural preserve...

...By rights we should really be happy, or even proud, to point at taxi drivers who have a copy of Joyce next to their seat, or to plumbers who can discourse on alienation in Marx...

...Are there no other instruments that may lead to a more democratic interpretation of the college's mandate...

...But in the spirit of Marx I should add that they would be expected to serve time only during half of the day, while the other half should be devoted to other aspects of their education...

...Education always serves some political purpose, and deciding what kind of a college we want is not simply a technical matter of finding the best means to an agreed end...

...In that case (let me finish dreaming) we would know that he is not a frustrated teacher of English but chose to be both a worker and a poet...

...It is hardly necessary to quote the great American educators who also held to this liberal illusion: that by spreading knowledge they were promoting democracy...

...The goal is best realized in the French system of "contests" at the "great schools," and so I have quoted Balzac on the effects of this system...

...Let us assume that between the ages of 16 and 21 the equivalent of one year is devoted to national service, the equivalent of another year to job-training in a shop, hospital, on the farm, etc., the equivalent of a third year to general studies...

...To make my meaning explicit, I shall draw on my experience with courses that might be called relevant...

...For a Reform of Community Attitudes THERE SHOULD be no need for a senior college...

...Yet our colleges still expect all these people to pretend, for four years, that they wish to be future scholars and although in most other respects these young people are considered adults, they are forced to live through eight semesters of prolonged adolescence, under conditions many of them had rejected even as teen-agers...

...That is to say: the teachers should be available on the campus...

...it only shows that education has been converted into a cerThis article is based on a paper delivered at a conference on education held on Max' 9, 1975, and sponsored jointly by the Rockefeller Foundation and Dis.sent...

...a society where everybody wants to be in the professions can exist only if it owns slaves or exploits colonies...

...The populists no longer hope to equalize starting positions but propose to equalize results or to eliminate competition...

...Learning should not be the privilege of any class or age group, of any professional or functional elite, and it should be a free exercise of the mind, independent of career goals and remuneration...

...To the idea of relevance, I oppose the concept of "tools of the profession...

...Nietzsche, who elsewhere showed himself so sensitive to the meaning of power and resentment, should have understood why the masses crave the paraphernalia of distinction, the appearance of intimacy with the "higher things in life," which alone can legitimize their claim that they, too, can be noble...

...Let them revert to their old particularities, and you will see these great states dissolve into a multitude of atomized groups...

...Is education to serve the individual, or is it to serve the government's purposes...

...From the vantage point of progressive philosophy, too, universalism is essential to education...

...relevant to them is what ought to be the concern of the community, namely, the philosophical and sociological critique of the institutions—an effort presenting the basic difficulty that one cannot criticize a science or ideology before one knows it...

...The college is supposed to do both: train leadership cadres and make the leadership career accessible to everyone—or make leadership superfluous...

...In fact, the kind of teaching here envisaged should make it possible for workers to change places across departments within a plant, to understand and to check management decisions, eventually to participate in the direction of their industry...

...Some teachers feel so guilty about their subject that they compulsively try not to appear to be teaching...

...But that would presuppose restricted enrollment, a tracking system, and rigid examinations on the French model that would not allow more applicants to pass than there were likely positions to be filled...

...but it actually originates in two or three democratic principles: it asks people to repay the community for the cost of their education, it imposes the same kind of service on all (with the sole exception of the sick), and it instills in them the spirit of sacrifices and solidarity...

...Free tuition has been a major tool for the recruitment of the service elites whom the French call cadres...

...Schole, in Greek, means leisure...

...The Populist Model RECOGNIZING that these policies lead to absurd or contradictory consequences, radical critics have abandoned liberalism for populism...

...A hundred and fifty years ago Honorrs de Balzac gave it eloquent expression in The Country Parson: I studied the exact sciences so hard I made myself ill...

...At the present juncture, our colleges try to reconcile all these conflicting aims—not because anyone thinks they should do that but because nobody thought of anything better 168 while the structure grew into all directions...

...If all the gimmickry still fails to "motivate" the student, populism may turn the problem around: instead of requiring the student to learn subjects that turn him off, why not require the college to offer subjects he can handle...

...Here specialization and high standards are, of course, essential...

...In a course on "revolutions," obviously, one has to talk about those of the past rather than those to come, and generally in "political" courses an academic teacher must insist that Aristotle and Machiavelli are more relevant than Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon...

...while in each field we must prevent the divorce of education from instruction, the study of cultural subjects should not be packaged with preprofessional or vocational training...

...Art appreciation was substituted for art, New Criticism for poetry...

...No amount of curriculum reform and of curriculm planning will change this condition unless the teachers' attitude is changed...

...These gentlemen seem to think that while all the arts must be learned by doing them, thinking must be learned by doing something else...

...To qualify for higher pay, even kindergarten teachers now need an M.A...

...Which again is in plain contradiction to the generally approved aim of research: to dismantle existing structures and to uncover new truths even at the cost of subverting the dominant ideologies...

...Thus, colleges now offer credit for courses in witchcraft, African dance, photography, dance or music practice, fencing, advertising, guerrilla warfare, current events, etc...

...To obtain the best abilities...

...They are prepared to learn only what they approve of: when I taught a course on "China and the Third World," I lost half the class after I had shown the similarities between a poem by Mao and one by Lao Tsu...

...Indeed, I wish to liberate studying from the elitist conceits that so far have endowed the "academic" careers with a halo of intellectual superiority...

...The regime of the middle class made education an initiation rite, with the educated squares its priests and the myth of fair competition its creed...

...It has vocational schools, traditional liberal-arts departments, and a number of excrescences serving communal, religious, philosophical, or political interests...

...Which teacher has not had a brilliant student who might have won a Nobel prize in philosophy but then went off to make more money as a brilliant lawyer...

...Arts and especially Logick, for that teaches a man not only by just argument to conclude the matter in question, but to discern between Truth and Falsehood...

...They are more apt to finish high school, and after graduation more of them, percentage-wise, go on to college, finish it, and enter graduate studies...

...Sir Edward Coke, Queen Elizabeth's Chief Justice and defender of the Magna Charta, stated in 1682: Our student should come to the study of common law from a University where he may learn all the Liberal...

...The present dearth of jobs offers a splendid occasion to bring this lesson home...

...You are the most exploited of all classes...

...Populists charge that the old-style academic college teaches subject matters that are irrelevant, while great masses who are not lacking brains, but may be short on leisure and background, are not getting the intellectual nourishment they crave...

...Unfortunately, this has become a catchword and has been confused with certain New Left slogans...

...The first immigrant minorities fought their way to a place nearer the top by acquiring the dominant culture...

...The notion of Culture was changed accordingly...

...Unfortunately, this is also the source of the crisis...

...Most come because it is the thing to do for a young person of good family—and even more so in the case of not so respectable a background...

...They may succeed in building little empires of patronage for their leaders, but they stand to lose all the long-run advantages of integration with the main culture...

...There may be guidance or counseling, and the focus of a person's studies may be subject to control, test, or examination at periods—say after two years and again after four...

...likewise, Professor Morgenbesser proposed to a philosophers' convention a course on the logic of abortion...

...Is it really true, as humanities and social sciences departments maintain, that a smattering of psychoanalysis, T. S. Eliot, urban sociology, foreign affairs, and Weber's hypothesis on Protestant ethics make better architects, electrical engineers, dentists, etc...

...for we are no longer in the middle ages, when a scientist had to be either a teacher or a churchman...

...It is a myth that "education" as such increases the total number of jobs or the average income in highly industrialized societies...

...and the equivalent of two more years to preprofessional or vocational training, with time off for travel and vacations...

...This proviso is essential to the reform of teaching, a necessary selfselection of those who have the calling—for obviously, the training of such teachers cannot be programmed and planned...

...By opening the college doors wide, we have only raised the ante, and soon it may be necessary for taxi drivers to have a degree...

...By contrast, professional training should begin early...

...at least in this country the academy is still the place where the free play of ideas is not just tolerated but desired and cultivated...

...Its reform must not be confined to the trivia of registration procedures or classroom relations...

...but I wish to take it out of the context of career competition and I wish to liberate from compulsive education those who do not feel the need for it at a specific age...

...Sociology of knowledge tries to lay bare the social roots of our beliefs, but it does not distinguish between the true and the false knowledge...

...But how much time a student takes to complete his studies, and whether he does so by attending lectures or by reading for himself or by participating in bull sessions, that should be up to him...

...their principles are also at variance with other principles imposed on our educational system from the outside...

...Modern technology, however, not only has rendered this class distinction obsolete, it even calls for its abolishment, and the training in manual skills no longer excludes but demands the expansion of verbal capabilities...

...From the point of view of minorities, I think it is a fatal mistake to segregate their special-interest departments out of the general college...

...Third—and this is again a criterium on a different level— the college is supposed to develop each person's potentialities so as to maximize earning ability...

...We do not honor them if we pretend that they don't care for excellence...

...We also wish to separate the purely academic concerns from the intellectual needs of the mass of students who have no ambition to engage in graduate studies...

...For it is not our business to tell the student what to think about current issues but to give him the tools that should enable him to analyze future situations we cannot even foresee now...

...Statistical evidence shows that, even under the most fairly designed systems, those whose families have the know-how of the machinery also use its educational facilities to better advantage...

...The Liberal Model THE LIBERAL UTOPIA is expressed in the slogan "Gangway for talent...

...What end has the government in mind...

...the bourgeois begrudges his pleasure, or else he feels he has to justify it...

...They hope that the advancement of their sons will bring social status and self-respect to the group as a whole...

...Or is it perhaps a mere prejudice, inherited 163 from the Middle Ages, that knowledge of "higher things"—including Latin grammar, Greek poetry, and astronomy—makes a man capable of advising kings and commanding armies...

...Moreover, as I have emphasized, the community at large is increasingly interested in multiplying the vocational schools so that each student finds a niche where he or she can best contribute to the general well-being...

...Simon and Owen to Marx and, indeed, have been tried out recently in Cuba and China...

...eunuchs trained in aesthetics...

...Wrong as he was, he might have been right had he found not a single teacher, no older student or fraternity brother, no cafeteria group or guest lecturer, with whom he could discuss the relation of his field of studies to his place in the world, or who could have directed him to books, meetings, or study groups concerned with such basic problems...

...advancement was the reward of merit, which had to be proved by studies...

...A similarly noneducational reason had prevailed, 30 years earlier, when the Roosevelt administration added two years to the high school curriculum...

...For many centuries they have seen that the mighty were educated...

...If it were hateful of talent, it could not find a better way to produce mediocrities...

...Nor need we wonder why the masses should believe this...

...When I teach my course on "imperialism," I can either start out with 167 Thucydides' description of the treatment of Melos at the Athenians' hands and then wind my way, through various types of power play, to the imperial powers of the day, in which case the students who came "committed" stop attending after the fourth week...

...In my experience, committed students have decided what is "relevant" long before they sign up for a course...

...For, on the other hand, we know many doctors and lawyers (don't we...

...Comfort, of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, proclaimed in the columns of the New York Times that all the logic one ever needs can be learned by motorcycling...

...the intimate permeation of teaching with research and publishing, even with public duties is unavoidable...

...Indeed, I wish to assure every citizen all the education he or she is capable of...

...Or they feel that the subject must be "sold" to the students by a number of marketing devices: creative teaching methods, special student-teacher relations, "student input" in designing curriculum (the student revolution has been bureaucratized even in its terminology), and a number of gimmicks, the gist of which is pretending not to teach the subject...

...The poorest argument is that it helps to find talents that otherwise might have withered...

...The idea of national service or labor service has acquired a militaristic or totalitarian ring through its abuses by dictatorial governments...

...After all, since our aim is to give everybody a certificate, and since we must suppose that every student may be interested in something, we might try offering the smorgasbord of courses that is customary in adult-education institutions...

...We shall not hold it against them that they availed themselves of the freedom not to learn...

...of pressroom work for every future editor, etc...

...Engineers, musicians, dancers, accountants, and other aspirants of practical arts must take 32 points of liberal-arts credits (those who have never tried to teach philosophy to engineers don't know what real frustration is...

...Hardly had they won the right to attend college when it became a duty...

...The aristocrats, whatever else one might say about them, knew how to enjoy their culture...

...This scheme should make it possible for each student to achieve some degree at some time, be it a "bachelor of arts" or a "bachelor of applied arts," and no trade need to appear as uneducated in the eyes of the others...

...Likewise, I may seem to condemn the dilution of academic institutions by nonacademic departments and nonacademic goals, and yet to offer a smorgasboard of career studies...

...Seemingly this is democratic, for it assures fairness to all in the great race to the top...

...At that time, the left...

...Last year the Metropolitan Opera advertised under the slogan, "Strike a Blow for Culture"—as though music-lovers needed an excuse for indulging in pleasure...

...The theory of education proposes to determine this abstract and unique ideal...

...While it should restore the ideal of excellence to scholarly pursuits proper, the scheme is specifically designed to restore dignity to those trades that are now considered as inferior because the training is merely manual...

...If it was a misconception of the conservatives that learning must- be difficult, it is a misconception of the left that learning must be painless...

...It is supposed to develop each personality so as to permit the individual an unfolding to the greatest potential, and to discover those talents whose development would bring greatest profit to the community (which, of course, is not the same thing even if we could agree on which community we mean: as a diamond-cutter, Spinoza may have been a failure...

...Only in some cases was this true...

...My prize, however, goes to the history professor who advised the Newsletter of his Association that he was assigning readings on microfilm "so that even the mechanically inclined student may identify with a historical project requiring the use of machinery...

...Much that seems topical today will be obsolete all too soon...

...The Purpose of College IN FACT, if the college has a claim to the position it holds, it is precisely this: that it teaches methods of dispassionate discourse and investigation, leading to knowledge that is verifiable or communicable in a framework of universal objectivity...

...Even Paul Goodman, that archdecentralizer, deplored this dissolution of the university into a diversity...

...They do not give the student the tools, the intellectual precison instruments to make such decisions...

...it is reactionary policy to tolerate pockets of tribal cultism and of special-interest mystiques...

...My whole future depended upon the admission to the engineering school...

...Many precious faculties which later would develop and grow strong are extinguished by the students' lamp...

...If it wishes to select and open careers to talent and intelligence, it could have chosen no less suitable a method...

...or with Alice: How fast must I run to stay in the same place...

...The middle class went after culture in dead earnest: One had to earn his place...

...Again, there is no limit on the time each may need to fulfill the requirements, for the principle of equality does not imply that all students progress simultaneously...

...Now we must discuss its aim...

...in my experience as a teacher in three countries, I have not seen a bright kid whom a poor school prevented from reading above his age level, and most countries offer gifted students, who for some reason could not finish high school, some "special way to college...

...Thomas Hobbes rightly opined that "Leasure is the Mother of Philosophy" (quite literally, since the original Academia was Plato's pleasure garden...

...I seem to criticize free tuition and open admission, yet to advocate free education for all...

...But, mercilessly, we encourage them to graduate and then let them swell the ranks of the academic proletariat...

...thought that the "mass college" was a devilish invention, along with "mass society" and "mass culture," contrived by the corporate state and late capitalism...

...and everybody has his own idea of relevance...

...What is to be reconsidered is not the curriculum but the structure and purpose of the college...

...Modern human beings must be aware of the enormous diversity of types...

...Unfortunately, not every profession is suitable to this kind of preparatory stage, but the general idea has been accepted by industrial corporations, and recently several writers have suggested, I don't know with how much irony, that future judges should start out as jail guards or, better still, as prisoners...

...For others continued education would be entirely voluntary, but since the various educational lines have not been marked off by class divisions and age fences, we might indeed see a plumber who reads poetry for enjoyment...

...Even with free tuition and public support for poor students, it is still true that more doctors, higher civil servants, teachers, engineers, and lawyers had fathers in those same categories and fewer came from a working-class or peasant background...

...This brings us to the fourth, and final, obligation of the colleges: to cultivate the arts and sciences and the critical faculties of the students so as to maintain the prevailing system of values and to develop the integrative functions of intellectual activities...

...But the horror stories about our open admission policy that have been given wide publicity in the press are unfair to the idea of equality...

...The device was, first of all, used to placate irate blacks, to ward off irrational student revolts and, not least, to get unruly 165 kids off the streets...

...For a Reform of the Curriculm THE TWO last years of high school shall be phased out and colleges shall admit 16-yearolds who pass an entrance examination with grades better than B for 10th-grade standard performance...

...If a sufficient number of workers come to their job equipped with such knowledge, the gap between educated and uneducated may be bridged...

...To this day, higher education seems to imply a license to enlist the services of the lesser breeds who did not have the advantages of a class education...

...We know that students come to the college because they believe (mistakenly, I feel) that teachers will give them a philosophy (Weltanschauung...

...Moreover, it is impossible to say whether the rescue of such talent was truly due to the method of admission...

...But it was easy to reverse the conclusion: if all have been educated, they don't need rulers...

...But I don't see what all this has to do with academic credit and why these courses have to be taken between the ages of 18 and 22...

...but the idea behind open admission had been to help people avoid being taxi drivers...

...Students are always interested in teachers who speak from experience...

...The first reform I would suggest, therefore, is a clearer separation of research from teaching at the college level, and hiring practices that reflect an orientation toward teaching in preference to scholastic achievements...

...Yet, miraculously, in liberating this function, which we rescue from the ideal of the liberal-arts college, we also give meaning to the modern mass college with its vocational and professional schools and other interests...

...For a Reform of the Teaching Profession THERE is, however, another enemy of universalism, one that the left has denounced for many decades: professionalism, the narrow view of the specialists who consider teaching a burdensome though unavoidable sideshow of research, who rarely read a book outside their field, and who are not capable of introducing their students to the wider aspects of their science...

...Hence, they turn the problem around: let us offer the students courses that do interest them...

...If we have to emulate a quality of earlier ages, I would recommend—how shall I put it?—a certain humility: a dedication to the job that does not demand compensation in terms of dollars, long vacations, tenure, and consultants' fees: a passion for teaching that forbids a teacher to take time away for writing papers, for attending conventions, going away on a Fulbright, and similar projects that college teachers now consider requirements of professional standing...

...The college shall offer courses in general knowledge, topics of current interest, preprofessional and vocational training as well as training in manual skills, performing arts, and sports...

...If at least, at the end of four years, we could assure the graduates some professional employment...

...To do 171 that it must first of all liberate itself from the attitudes that have survived from its elite age...

...who never touched a book outside their field since their college days...

...they have concluded, erroneously I think, that they were rich because they were educated...

...It is obvious that the community pressures will continue to block an evolution of the college in the direction of a strictly "humanist" education, and it is not even desirable for the college to strive at humanist ideals within the context of a capitalist society...

...Of course, this does not make us a nation of scholars...

...Let those who are primarily interested in research find their living in the graduate schools, in government, industry, and foundations...

...The Model of the Elite College —for the Masses NEVERTHELESS, it is axiomatic that education entails greater respect and higher income...

...Once the average college graduate expected to be a doctor, lawyer, teacher, etc...

...But teachers should be more available for private sessions with students...

...Finally, I seem to have admitted that all teaching implies partisanship, and yet to recommend (and indeed to hold possible) a strictly "detached" ideal of knowledge and of instruction...

...It would be easy to make this plan palatable by saying, Make a stage of factory work compulsory for every future manager, of nursing for every future doctof...

...Scientific polls confirm what every teacher knows: few students come to the university in search of knowledge...

...or I can begin by debating with these students the American involvement in Angola (or whatever the issue may be at the time), in which case the political-science students will never learn who Akbar the Great Mogul was and what imperialism is...

...Instead of forming liberally educated personalities we bring up professors who use education to avoid living...

...As Emile Durkheim said: 172 The object of education is to realize in each individual the attributes of the human species, carrying to the highest point of perfection...

...Students may take interim exams from time to time in fields of their choice, and after accumulating a prescribed number of points for passing, they shall receive a college degree...

...But the late-comers now emulating them only crowd the ladder to the top...

...Nevertheless, a significant number of people from humble families have become "socially upward mobile" through the education system...

...tificate hunt...

...The expression Bildungsphilister is Nietzsche's...

...Some of these may require continued training for specific purposes and postgraduate studies...

...The whole idea of education [Bildung] is wrong...

...This will become even more evident if and when teaching is no longer considered a specialized profession but teachers are drawn from all fields, be it that their achievements earn them a call to a university, be it that they offer their service in order to have a change of pace and environment, time to think, or a chance to talk...

...Specifically, they were learning all the useless arts as well as Latin formulas, to set themselves off from the common people...

...At all institutions, students pay a nominal fee for registration and a modest contribution to health services and the student union...

...Its study became the main prop of legitimation, the admission ticket into the upper class...

...Far from being the gate to the leisure class, the B.A...

...on the contrary, he warns us to eliminate the sources of . irrational behavior...

...Their mobility implies an obligation to transfer out of their class into the dominant culture...

...the late Paul Goodman exclaimed at Berkeley in 1968...

...Even Frantz Fanon deplores that so many students from underdeveloped countries go for degrees in the humanities rather than in engineering, pharmacy, agronomy, etc.—a suggestion that my more committed students usually resent...

...Little did Goodman (or for that matter C. Wright Mills) know that the complaint is as old as the university itself...

...they have been selected as the most talented or the "fittest" and co-opted into the dominant elites...

...Frankly, as a teacher, I don't feel that it is my job to "motivate" the student or to cater to his taste...

...I hope that these interests can be served by the proposals that follow and that must be understood as a radical departure from existing attitudes...

...Indeed I see no contradiction between concern for the socalled masses and anxiety for the elite standards...

...it would be merged with the postgraduate courses of the university...

...Some cater to the special interests of minorities, others to the need for political orientation and discussion of public issues...

...The populists, however, are not concerned so much with the social mobility of individuals as with raising the social status of entire classes or racial groups...

...But under the rule of free tuition, by democratic right, the social mobility of the few must still be financed by those whom they left behind— and no law forces them to reimburse the taxpayers out of the higher incomes they will earn later...

...As this is the aim of the liberals, it is not surprising that, instead of exposing and exploding the myth of the "liberally educated personality," they tried to become its exemplars, representing 164 vicariously the masses...

...The errors probably ought to be sought in the elementary school system, and the only way to remedy the damage done is for the college not to lower but to raise its entrance requirements so as to exert pressure on the high school to improve its performance...

...The college, by contrast, needs to be liberated from community pressures, from career considerations and political influences...

...To counter this attitude, trade curricula shall also include instruction in the wider aspects of each industry, its commercial ramifications, its management problems, and knowledge of the sciences used in its processes...

...In a word, we must try to deprofessionalize the teachers...

...though I have yet to meet one who will admit having learned anything in education courses...

...Lectures became obsolete when Gutenberg invented movable type...

...They should be part of what today is called "continuing education...

...Such courses might be legitimate—provided they are motivated by "idle curiosity" and teach respect for "workmanship," two criteria I borrow from Thorstein Veblen...

...introduced first by absolutist rulers, it is still the custom in Europe, East and West...

...It cannot give up this claim without undercutting its raison d'etre, providing the leading elites for the community...

...To the majority of students and their future employers, this is the essential business of the college...

...This, however, is not the issue we are dealing with here...

...Some may wonder with Groucho Marx: Would I join a club willing to have me as a member...

...Culture now can be learned and taught...

...Above a certain level of literacy, additional education may even reduce the number of individuals who know how to produce real values...

...The pursuit of truth is still the business of the scholar, or of everyman in his character of scholar...

...Today he or she looks forward to being a bank clerk, a dairy products inspector, an insurance agent, an FBI sleuth, a recreation activities director, an accountant, a nurse, a dietician, an aircraft parts storage supervisor, a communications or media expert, etc...

...Students shall have the choice between a number of curricula—such as scientific, humanist, social-political relations, technical services, practical skills—and they shall have auditing privileges for all other courses...

...By that time a person should know in which area he or she could develop a career, be it in the arts, sciences, social services, professions, or mechanical skills, business lines, or services...