THE HIGH COST OF NON-EDUCATION!

THE HIGH COST OF NON-EDUCATION!

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 1, 2014

REFERENCE:

This is another vignette from “Six Silent Killers.”  More than five decades ago, I received my first degree at a land grant institution, meaning a state university, at a fraction of the cost of a university education today.  I went on a merit scholarship, which meant my tuition was paid for, worked as a laborer during summers at a chemical plant, being paid the same wages as regular laborers.  This allowed me to pay for my room and board and books without ever going into debt with student loans.  Although a chemistry major, my degree was heavy with required and elected courses in the humanities.  This opened a world to me that has proven more important than the skill set I learned at university to make a living.  As with everything I write, that debt is apparent.

ALAS, WHERE ARE OUR WALT WHITMANS TODAY?

Some 300 years ago, America broke away from the confinement of European society to establish a new identity. Some 200 years ago, America produced an incredible body of men who were multidimensional and dedicated to giving substance and direction to the American spirit of individualism. 

They were not afraid to be different, not afraid to be outsiders, not afraid to cultivate the inner world of expression as they sensed it. American poet Walt Whitman captures this spirit when he proclaims with innocence, “I am larger and better than I thought. I did not know that I held so much greatness.”

Yet we bristle when someone makes such a proclamation. We think greatness is rare, whereas Whitman knew that the seeds of greatness are in everyone. Where are the Walt Whitmans today? Where are outsiders who march to their own drummer, as did Henry David Thoreau?

Many of the giants of our republic lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, William Cullen Bryant, Aaron Burr, John Calhoun, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Greeley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Andrew Jackson, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, Herman Melville, James Monroe, Henry David Thoreau, George Washington, and Daniel Webster. These men were aristocrats in temperament and democrats in spirit. They had a quiet reverence for things mystical, a consuming passion for living practical lives. America was young and had not yet succumbed to mediocrity, nor to self-conscious self-approval.

From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s "Self-Reliance" (1844) to Henry David Thoreau’s "Walden" (1854), there was a transcendental connection between the spirit and Nature. 

Transcendentalism was a popular religion of the time. It flourished in New England during the first half of the nineteenth century. Never a systematic philosophy, it held the romantic view that individual intuition was the highest form of knowledge and that God was within Nature.

Much influenced by Eastern religious teachings, many of these early American thinkers held a mystical belief in individualism in harmony with all things in Nature. The word that best describes them is “balance.”

It was during this same period that the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to study its prison system. From his diary of that visit in 1831, he returned to France to publish “Democracy in America” (1835), outlining the advantages and shortcomings of a democratic political and social system. Tocqueville saw values and perils of the democratic way of life that remain pertinent to this day.  

Richard Reeves relived Tocqueville’s journey in his “American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville in Search of America” (1982).  Reeves reaffirms Tocqueville’s perceptions and notes that the seeds of comfort and indifference were already in the soil when America was a young nation. A case could be made that America has been trading off its early greatness for the past 180 years.

Look today, and you are likely to find the same dismal landscape Tocqueville warned could develop if America was not attentive to its democracy. He stressed the importance of education in maintaining this vigilance. 

Historian Page Smith echoes his sentiments in “Killing the Spirit” (1990).  He finds America’s most prestigious universities failing to educate because teachers are not personally involved with students. Students get instruction, not education in the form of information transferals, communication techniques, or some impersonal, antiseptic phrases to cover non-teaching teaching to facilitate non-learning learning.

Interaction between professors and students is minimal or non-existent, Smith says, because professors are preoccupied with scholarly research and publication. Career minded faculty, Smith notes, cannot afford to spend time with students. They must publish or perish by having their scholarly tomes appear in the right journals. This helps them win promotion and tenure, which means they stay employed.

Boston Globe journalist Jeff Jacoby paints an even gloomier picture in “The Low State of Higher Education.”  He writes:

At Bristol Community College in Fall River, MA, students can enroll in five levels of basic math, starting with—this is not a misprint—addition. At Boston’s vast Northeastern University, more than 30 percent of entering students take remedial English.

They study spelling, punctuation and, as the English Department chairman puts it, how ‘to get from the subject to the predicate without harming themselves.’ The situation is hardly better at the top of the higher-end ladder. Of the 50 leading American universities, only one offered a remedial writing course in 1939. By 1993, 70 percent of them were teaching the equivalent of ‘Sub-Freshman English.’ Meanwhile, the history courses that were mandatory at 60 percent of the institutions in 1964 were required by 2 percent in 1993. Literature requirements, which existed at 50 percent of the schools in 1964, had vanished entirely by 1993…

Rigor has all but disappeared from the American campus.  As disturbing as this is, cultural bias of another kind is prominent in the curriculum. Jacoby continues:

So what do college students take? The Virginia-based Young America’s Foundation examined the 1996 course offerings at dozens of prestigious universities to find out. What it discovered was a bizarre array of political correctness, victim chic, and down-with-America “multiculturalism.” At Georgetown University, where Shakespeare is out, “Prison Literature” is in.

Students read books by criminals… Haverford scholars can take “Sex and Gender on Film: Screwballs, Devil Dames, and Closet Cases”… Brown University offers “Christianity, Violence, and Victimization,’ “which teaches that “Christianity has helped to create and perpetuate a culture of violence, especially against women.” Religion-bashing is also big at the University of Pennsylvania, which gives credit for ‘“The Historical Origins of Racism: Views of Blacks in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”

Education, it would seem, has become a venting place of frustration, anger, and disillusionment, moving away from its original focus of providing tools for life.

Smith calls this a “cult of dullness,” in which clear writing and inspired lecturing are deviant and suspicious behaviors. Nothing is done to challenge the student, but apparently everything is done to entertain and remove his angst. Smith believes academic research would be defensible if there was some essence to the product of the research, “The vast majority,” he writes, “is mediocre, expensive and unnecessary.” 

This fits nicely into the postindustrial model of non-thinking thinking to do non-doing doing of non-thing things, which was covered earlier, because what these professors have to say, according to Smith, amounts to practically nothing at all. 

This was alleged to be the curse of one of America’s most acclaimed novelists, John Updike. The late Granville Hick’s of the Saturday Review of Literature lamented upon reading Updike that “he writes like an angel, if only he had something to say.”

Style eclipses substance, impression takes precedence over making a difference. Smith calls this “scientism,” a devotion to the scientific approach in all fields of study, including the humanities.

This has driven the spirit out of enterprise, leaving life an empty shell to be filled with noise as entertainment. We don’t seem to be moving from ignorance to enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense, but instead building dream house out of sand.

Who pays for this? At first blush, you might think it is borne by parents who make sacrifices for their children’s education, which now can run as high as $240,000 for a four-year degree. It is, however, future generations of Americans who will pay in the form of the society this education generates. What Tocqueville observed and reported 180 years ago has largely come to pass.

What will America be like 180 years hence? 

Cut across American society, from the academic community to the government, from industry to commerce, from religious institutions to charitable organizations, and without exception, there is no easy sanctuary for greatness. An individual of greatness must spend much of his energy fitting in, coping, and not offending the mediocre.

Organizations are obsessed with internal politics, which are often vicious, leaving little energy for individual or collective excellence.  The real hope for America is the growing professional class of workers, who are aristocratic in temperament and democratic in spirit. This workforce must take hold of its power in consort with management, acclaiming differences and diversity, and channel its power to a common purpose. 

The traditional formula for continuity and succession planning will not accomplish this. It has succeeded instead in holding the organization back, giving relevance to Thomas Babington Macaulay’s refrain in "Lays of Ancient Rome" (1842):

Was none who would be foremost, to lead such dire attack, but those behind cried “Forward!”  And those before cried “Back!”

We need greatness as it once existed. We need real change, not cosmetic change. We need thinking that uses all our faculties and all our people. What we don’t need is an organization of like thinkers and doers, who rarely experience an original thought or dare to wander far from the crowd. 

Nor do we need people who know how to get promoted far better than they know how to work. Many young men and women enter the working world with their idealism intact and values on display. If these values are in conflict with the prevailing culture, they either give in, give out, get out, or tune out.

A workplace culture has a low tolerance for dealing with conflict in values. Throughout American history, greatness has come in strange packages. Walt Whitman would tail President Lincoln about Washington as if obsessed with capturing a glimpse of the great man. Whitman was a strange and wonderful man, and today many critics consider him America’s greatest poet. He proclaimed the dignity and freedom of the common man as he sang the praises of democracy.

His style, which Hawthorne thought clumsy, has had incalculable effect on later poets, inspiring them to experiment in prosody and subject matter, as he did. Could Whitman function in today’s corporate society? Would his genius be allowed? Would anyone acclaim his work?