Higher Education: What it is; What it is not; What it's For

         Education is not job training; it is not even schooling.  Education is knowing what things are for, not simply how they work.  The truly educated person understands the proper uses to which such things as bodies, brains, governments, art, and sport are put, not merely how to eat, how to manipulate difficult mathematical formulae, how to win an election, how to paint a still life, or how to hit a curveball.

         The difference between these two conditions of mind is the difference between wisdom and information, between knowledge and data, between knowing and knowing about.  Those who acquire the former are genuinely educated; those who gain only the latter are mere technological functionaries, replaceable by the next generation of machines.

         But no machine can replace Socrates, or anyone like him.  Socrates and his ilk can do what no machine ever shall -- love, worship, exult, grieve, repent -- in short, understand.  Authentic understanding and the suitable responses it engenders within us are not the product of mere job training or of technical expertise.  Here’s what I mean:

         When asked who was the wisest of men, the Delphic oracle replied that it was Socrates himself.  Socrates was shocked to hear it.  "Who, me?" he wondered.  "I don't know anything."  But as he contemplated the oracle's answer, Socrates realized the oracle was right.  Socrates indeed was wiser than other men.  At least he knew he was ignorant; the others were ignorant and didn't know it.  As long as they were ignorant of their ignorance, they could never change it.

         Such true but humbling lessons about ourselves we do not learn from those who could or would train us only to program (or even to design) a VCR.  That is because a teacher can take no student any further than the teacher has gone, and the technicians and self-esteem peddlers of our day cannot and do not teach students the truth about themselves or about the human situation.  Rather, they teach those students that to feel good is at least as important as to do good, and that to get a job and make money is the central purpose of an education and the chief means to happiness.

         Because such views are truncated and foolish, and because foolishness is purchased at the highest possible price, Socrates insisted that a teacher's proper task is not to raise the student's self-esteem.  The teacher's first task is to reveal to the student the student's own ignorance, in the hope that such self-knowledge might spur that student to action, that is, to mental and spiritual life.

         Socrates was no lackey of the self-esteem mongers of his day.  He understood that real self-knowledge was often a painful and deflating thing, not something that made you feel especially good about yourself.  When people discover the truth about themselves, they frequently discover something they fervently hope others will never find out.  Socrates knew that real self-knowledge feels a great deal like mental root canal.  But that painful fact did not persuade him that his students must be protected from such discovery.  He knew that the truth often hurts because the truth about human beings is often unflattering.  Unflattering or not, Socrates knew that it was an absolutely necessary component of education.  Without it no one can truly be called learned.

         Socrates understood that we enter this world in complete, total, and seamless ignorance, and that precious few of us ever penetrate that darkness with even the faintest flicker of wisdom or insight.  He understood that, given our naturally benighted condition, undue self-esteem is the fountain of intellectual apathy and the death of learning.  Feel-goodism is to the mental life of the uneducated what abortion is to the unborn.    

         In Christian terms, we are a fallen and sinful race.  We ourselves are the reason the world has gone haywire.  We are both the crown of creation and the scum of the earth.  As the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve, we human beings are the best things God ever made.  But as the sinners we have become, we are the woeful products of the evil thoughts and actions to which we have addicted ourselves.  Those twin facts, our high birth and our low descent, said C.S. Lewis, are reason enough to raise the head of the lowest beggar and to lower the head of the highest king. 

         But such things no mere technician could ever teach, and about ourselves the charlatans of self-esteem deceive us.  Repentance and hard work are what we require, not premature or undeserved congratulations, not heavy doses of vapid feel-goodism.  Martin Luther's torments of conscience, his soul-wrenching bouts with anfechtung, not Norman Vincent Peale's positive thinking, are more likely to cure what ails us.  That’s another of saying that the job well done precedes the feelings of satisfaction; it does not follow them.  As in so many other things, the modern technicians of schooling have set the cart before the horse.  They bow in abject servitude to the tyrannous and impotent dictates of the so-called affective domain when they ought to banish it forever from the classroom.

         If you desire simply to train yourself, then learn to read, to write, and to compute; learn history and science as well.  But do not confuse the acquisition of these skills and of this information for education; they are not.  These things are the necessary means of acquiring an education; they are not education itself.

         But if you desire to become educated rather than remain merely trained, then you must remember that the educated person can give careful and insightful answers to the fundamental, or diagnostic, questions of life, questions like:

         "What is a good life, and what good is life?"

         "What is a good death, and what good is death?"

         "What is a good love, and what good is love?"

         "What is a human being?"

         But not only do most college students not know how to answer these questions, they have never even learned to raise them.  Because they and most of their teachers live without the benefits that come only from a classical liberal arts education pursued under the lordship of Christ, those students have never learned what Aristotle knew:  "He who would succeed must ask the right preliminary questions."

         Such preliminary questions do not include the questions professors most often hear from students, questions that seem naturally to arise from the indoctrination those students receive from the technicians and job trainers of our day -- questions like

"Will this be on the test?" 

"Will this help me get a job?"

"Will this make me feel good?"

Christian Colleges and the Liberal Arts

You must never think that the liberal arts are abstract and impractical.   They are not.  They are the weapons of our war, the war in which we all are involved, though sometimes on opposite sides, the war between God and Satan, good and evil, true and false.  The stakes could not be higher or the outcome more important.  To deprive us of the liberal arts is, as Luther observed, one of Satan’s chief intentions.   Few objectives serve his purpose more effectively.

The nature and content of an excellent liberal arts education is not altered by the mere turning of a decade, or even of a century.  Decades from now, the great books will still be the great books, even if the fools of that day, like the fools of our own, think otherwise.  That which made the great books great -- the great ideas -- will remain great as well.  The mere passing of time does not alter that fact at all; rather, it underscores it.  Students then, as do students now, will still need to raise and to answer the perennial questions:  What is a good life, and what good is life?  What is a good death, and what good is death?  What is a good love, and what good is love?  What is a human being?

         To answer such questions, students will still need to master the words and ideas of Jesus, Plato, Aristotle, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Burke among many, many others.  That this very partial list of sages happens to contain no blacks and no women is inconsequential because truth is neither gender-based nor race-based.  Truth is what it is, regardless of what we might think about it, and regardless of who does the thinking.  What makes the great books and the perennial questions valuable is not that they come from (or do not come from) dead, white, European males, but that they illumine the human condition.  Those books and ideas help us understand more about what it means to be fallen creatures in a fallen world.  That condition is universal and does not change.  That condition is not dependent upon race or gender; nor is its solution.

         A Christian college, therefore, needs diligently to resist the temptation to follow the spirit of the age, if for no other reason than that to go with the age is to go where all ages go -- into the impenetrable oblivion of the irretrievable past, as the inimitable Vance Havner used to say.  But if one goes with God, one discovers that God is the Eternal Contemporary.  When all our tomorrows arrive, we shall discover that He has been there before us.  For that reason, we must never substitute relevance for revelation.  If something is revelation, it is relevant.   But being relevant does not mean something is revelation.  That lesson is one no Christian liberal arts college can ever afford to forget, though I could name many that have.  We must never entrust the education of our children, or of our children’s children, to those who neglect our cultural ancestors, especially if they determine that those ancestors have not a suitable gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference.  Neither the Christian church, in general, nor a Christian college, in particular, can truly prosper under the intellectual leadership of administrators and scholars who neglect the copious and enlightened patrimony of the West.  Multiculturalism is no academic virtue, not if it means diluting the rich inheritance of the past with the empty leftisms of the present.  In that light, Christian colleges must resist the lure of trendiness, a temptation that normally entails the proliferation of politically correct programs and policies, which almost always come at the expense of the permanent things we can ill afford to lose.  Like it or not, students come to college without the knowledge, discipline or wisdom needed to select a suitable array of courses.  They must be channeled into taking what they need, not spinelessly coddled.  If you spare them this relentless pressure, you help prevent them from getting an education.  If in your false mercy you spare them high, difficult and broadly ranging curricular requirements, education is dead. 

         Put differently, knowledge and wisdom are not properly subject to politics.  When things outside the academy control the academy, that is the death of learning, even if those things are part of a political agenda you prefer.  As result, and to its great peril, the American academy is now in danger of forgetting that fact.  Christian liberal arts colleges ought not to offer women’s studies programs, black studies programs, or gay and lesbian studies programs any more than they ought to offer male studies programs, white studies programs, or heterosexual studies programs, things we all rightly see as highly inappropriate, even abhorrent.  Not only ought colleges not offer such white, male, heterosexual programs, we face today an array of such ideologically blinded zealots who actually insist that such twisted offerings are what we do offer, as if they couldn't tell the difference between courses about being male and courses about being human.
         You must never consent to go through life unaware of the best that's been said, done, thought, or written.

Education for Sale: $199 per Month

         I’ve read that at least one college has decided recently to let students take as many courses or credit hours as they wish for $199 per month, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level.  While to some folks that might sound quite tempting, to me it does not.

         Education, like nearly all other very-hard-to-acquire skills and conditions, is an apprenticeship.  To get it, you must spend time, lots of time, interacting with the master.  Time online is not time with the master, even if he (or she) is in front of his computer the same time you are in front of yours.

         Try to imagine how much worse off the disciples would have been had they spent their time with Jesus online.  Even having spent three years with Him face-to-face, one of them denied Him three times, another betrayed Him, and all the rest ran away in fear.  One wonders at what level their theology and piety would have languished without those three precious and unparalleled years of eye-to-eye interaction with Jesus in the flesh, absorbing His tone of voice, the looks on His face, and (given the way we teach even when we are not teaching) His activities and mannerisms when He was off duty.  We must never forget that God's appearance among us was an incarnation, not an inpixelation.

         Imagine how much less effective Socrates would have been without the face-to-face interaction that allowed him to ad-lib the kinds of questions that needed to arise in response to the unpredictable, spontaneous, and sometimes boneheaded statements made by others, things not to be known beforehand or incorporated into an online lesson plan.  If teaching were primarily just imparting information, and if learning were primarily just acquiring it, then perhaps this computer-based approach might work, but even then only moderately well.  That’s because such enormous amounts of real teaching and learning do not come within a hundred miles of what can be gotten online that even $199 a month is likely to be overpriced.  We all know how fraught with intellectual peril a combox can be.  We know the same about Skype, or at least we ought.  And, once we figure out how to do holograms, the same problem still will face us, even if those holograms purport to be of Obi-Wan Kenobi or John Calvin.

         Imagine trying (1) to teach someone to hit a curve ball, or (2) to do brain surgery, or (3) to do high-level theology online.  If doing the first two online seems impossible, then please note that from among those three diverse activities, theology is by far the most complicated and difficult.  Like hitting a curve, it requires mastering the appropriate natural laws (this time of souls and of sin), and, like the medical example, it requires expertise in surgery, (this time in the dissection and cure of souls).  Doing theology is a highly-complex, skill-based, academic activity that requires many thousands of hours of practice:  I do not exaggerate.  One can never become a theological virtuoso without those thousands of hours.  After all, we are not talking about something simple like the physics of spheroid rotation through the air or mapping the brain’s nervous system and function, we are talking, at the root, about God.  If, because of their native complexity and their unsuitability to electronic learning, you cannot acquire the former skills via the internet, then you can’t acquire the latter one that way either, and for the same reasons.

         To be clear, the difference to which I am pointing when I reject the low-priced online learning offered by the college in question is the difference between job training and education.   The internet is perhaps suitable for the one, but not the other.  I say so because I think that those who go to college ought to go because they seek to be educated.  If they do not, if they seek merely to be trained, then send them to a trade school and let them pursue their job training however they wish.  My concern here is with education, and with the ways it is best promoted and gotten.  This is not the way.
        You wouldn't try to be an online parent; don't try to be an online teacher.  Neither of those important task is well-suited to a computer screen. 

Socrates, Interrogation, and the Liberal Arts (by Robert P. George)

“. . . Socrates’ method of teaching was to question.  He is the great exemplar of what the late Allan Bloom labeled “the interrogatory attitude.”   The liberal arts ideal assumes, to be sure, that there are right answers to great moral and existential questions.  It is the enemy, not the friend, of moral relativism.  But liberal arts teaching is not fundamentally about telling students what the right answers are -- even when we are justifiably confident that we have the right answers.  Nor is liberal arts learning merely a matter of receiving and processing information, even if it’s great information, such as historical facts about the Western tradition or the American founding.  Nor is it merely a matter of reading Aristotle, or Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Tocqueville and knowing what these great writers said.  Liberal arts education is about engaging with these things, wrestling with them and the questions they suggest.  It is about considering arguments and counter-arguments, examining competing points of view . . . The point of the interrogatory attitude, rather, is precisely to move from ignorance to truths -- truths that can be affirmed and acted on.”

Robert P. George, “Academic Freedom and What it Means Today,” in Roger Scruton (ed.) Liberty and Civilization (New York:  Encounter Books, 2010), pp. 86, 87