The Peripatetic Philosopher shares a chronic condition:

PLAGUED BY AN EXCESS OF INTELLECTUAL EMPTINESS!

James Raymond Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 30, 2017

My Beautiful Betty (BB) is wont to say reading something in the newspaper or seeing something on television -- they're saying what you've written about!  

And they are!  Now for some 25 years (at least), I have been writing about how empty higher education is (Work Without Managers, 1991), how inflated the grading system especially in high school prep schools and our pristine universities (The Worker, Alone, 1995), how self-indulgent are our students and workers (Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, 1996), and how all of this has created a "spoiled brat” society of students and workers (Corporate Sin, 2000 and A Look Back to See Ahead, 2007), not to mention tons of missives.  If you have not read any of these books or missives, you’re not alone.

Then I was recently talking to a university student, who blames "poor professors" for her angst, and my sense is that she is not alone either.

I mention this because George Will, the celebrated pundit from Washington, DC has a column today on precisely what I have been saying for decades, not from my Ivory Tower, but from my experience, having been an adjunct professor for ten years and with innumerable encounters in corporate society over the years with what Will's says in this morning's op ed page of The Tampa Bay Times is "an outrage of egos." The Washington Post columnist is essentially quoting Tom Nichols, a professor at the US Naval War College.  

Students today treat education as an entertainment with hitting the books hard only a diversion from the more pressing enterprise of finding university life as a fun experience.  

Students of elevated grading and going to the "best" colleges and universities are more interested in "developing connections," Will's points out, “than having a learning experience.”  Now, we have a President of the United States in the Donald who is cut from that same mode with an equally anxious temperament.                 

In the Naval professor's article, which appeared in the Chronicle Review, referenced is a study where most students not only expect but get "A's" at pristine universities with the academics having no trouble giving them as the “A’s” are ballast to keep the academic ship floating with huge tuition student fees. 

At the same time, according to the study, in 2011 at the University of Chicago, 45 percent of the students admitted that none of their courses required more than 20 pages of writing and 32 percent had no class that required more than 40 pages of reading in a week. 

The University of Chicago, incidentally, has tuition in the neighborhood of $60,000 a year or a quarter million dollars for a four year degree, which the article claims is usually stretched out to five or six years.

"College in an earlier time," Nichols writes, "was supposed to be an uncomfortable experience because growth is always a challenge."

My operative word in my works is "struggle," something that has been apparently taken out of the brew.  Those who have read me will find this line of Nichols echoing mine: "Rather than disabuse students of their intellectual solipsism, the modern university reinforces it."

We have created a world of "spoiled brats" and then wonder why the Donald has risen to the presidency.  

We are yet to find out if the Donald is what the doctor ordered because when he says something -- like Andrew Jackson before him -- he doesn't erase the "red line" as President Obama did, but re-enforces it with executive order, creating the havoc that we are now seeing across America on his visa policy for immigrants from terrorist countries.  

Typically, good standing immigrants blame the president instead of taking their wrath out on the cause of the policy: terrorists from their countries who have been able to gestate in situ with little interference or control.  This is part of the same syndrome expressed by Professor Nichols about college students: the focus is on the wrong offender! 

I write about this in somewhat of an oblique fashion in my yet to be published book titled THE VELVET GLOVE & IRON FIST:

A worker in trouble feels he needs another degree, another seminar, another shot of inspiration from the master, the person with all the answers, who, like his religious predecessor, is unlikely to have spent much time doing in the real world.

   

Americans have created the mystique that suggest that they are incapable of taking care of themselves.  Thus is born the syndrome of terminal dependency:

In the workplace: dependency is on the manager for guidance, direction and control, or counter dependency on the company for security, identity and recognition.

At home: dependency on elaborate social outreach programs of the government meant to compensate for the disappearance of a family centered culture. The majority of families seldom share a daily meal together, the round table of a family centered culture. The government now owns the problem; a prob­lem that it can never solve.

In school: dependency is on teachers and school administrators to assume a responsibility that is a privilege granted to the student for greater mobility and opportunity in an increasingly more challenging economic environment. Schools are expected to create purpose, order, motivation and a desire to learn when that is the student's responsibility.

On television: dependency on the talking heads to enter­tain, enlighten, shock, embarrass and excite in order to fill the menacing silence with distracting noise; to divert the mind from its function and unique singularity.

In the community: dependency is on Law Enforcement and the Criminal Justice System to orchestrate morality, to be the community's conscience when the community has abdicated that responsibility. A community gets the police and justice system that it deserves. If the community is hypocritical, violent or corrupt, the police will mirror that aspect.

Americans sense the disorder in their lives, so they read, they listen to pundits on television, they surf the Internet, they explore apps on their iPads, they text and tweet, they look everywhere but to themselves for order. They argue among themselves. In the end they do what "the experts" say.

A vast majority of students and workers find themselves in a “catch 22.”  They feel helpless and isolated on the one hand from each other, and slaves to the system that they didn’t create on the other.  They feel little obligation to respect the authority of the system or obligation to abide by its protocols.  They argue among themselves but fail to challenge the system, claiming, “It’s not my problem!”

Nothing changes, because they look always for change elsewhere, not in themselves. It has been my experience that most workers expect:

Management to be more responsive to workers' needs than workers are to the needs of the company that employs them.

Social services to be more accessible to workers' needs than workers are to the social needs of others.

Teachers and administrators to be more motivated to teach than students are motivated to learn.

Police to be more patient, tolerant and understanding of citi­zens and their needs, than citizens are willing to be respectful of police and understanding of the limits placed on police in the discharge of their duties.

Notice where the emphasis is always placed? Always on others! It is always "somebody else's problem," not the student’s/worker’s. 

You would think these service providers would challenge this absurdity. But rather than challenge these impossible demands, these providers attempt instead to do the impossible.

Meanwhile, citizens tend to identity their frustrations with causes outside themselves.  These causes are packaged and promoted by self-interested experts – educators, university professors, media outlets, other authors, companies and governmental bodies – who have a stake in exploiting self-indulgence and angst.  

As long as students/workers remain immature, on the edge in self-ignorance, these promoters not only have a customer, but a field day. 

But alas!  It is still all for naught. Outward order begins with inward order. There is no other way. A community, a company, a fam­ily gets better one person at a time. This is true in the case of economic parity, or matters of recognition, identity and social consciousness.

It is equally true of government, science and reli­gion. Government cannot do for the citizen what the citizen best do for himself. Nor can science forgive the A.I.D.'s epidemic by promising a miraculous cure for a social tic. Nor can religion celebrate the nobility of man by denying man's nature.

It is not the lack of leadership, alone, that is at fault. It is also the failure of people to pay attention. Their lack of vigilance finds madness has gravitated to the collective norm. It is sanity that has become suspect. How do I prove this? I ask, "What has been your experience?"

Life is without cause. There is no direction, no safe harbor in sight. It puts me in mind of "The Flying Dutchman," the man on the legendary ship who can never make port, and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. Likewise, humanity never seems to find purchase of common ground on this planet.

In the microcosm, this is exercised in the 21st century by students and workers alike.  Students failing to realize education is a job on the way to another job; failing to see self-interests and the collective self-interests of society are indistinguishable from each other. 

Everything starts and ends with the solitary student in the classroom and the solitary worker on the job, for each person comes in alone and leaves alone and there is no profit in blaming everything and everyone if it doesn’t turn out as expected.   

Man is still unfinished. He is only a recent inhabitant of earth, here no more than a few hundred thousand years. The purpose of his life is to live it, period. What he does is an expression of that purpose.

The problem with many students and workers is that they seem unable to see what is true from what is false. They want to be told. They don’t want to struggle to find it out on their own; so they wait. The wait freezes them in suspended adolescence, grown children who first fail to act as young adults as students and later as workers on the job, falling back on parents to bail them out of whatever difficulty they get into at whatever juncture of their existence.  How long will this go on?  It is difficult to say.  The prospects are not encouraging.