The disastrous demotion of education today
Franklin W Knight
Jamaica Observer
October 20, 2003
IT is terribly sad, but undeniably true, most university undergraduate students fail to understand why they are at the university in the first place. This is not the same as saying they will not readily, if glibly, give a reason for being at the university. Walk around the Mona Campus and take a random sample. The place, from the perspective of a non-scientific observer, appears to crawl with business majors. Nor are they alone. Others frankly admit that they are at the university to get a job later. In short, the university, one way or the other, becomes merely a stepping stone to upward economic mobility. The pattern appears to be universal.
In the classified rear section of The Economist for the week of October 11-17 2003 there were no fewer than 23 advertisements for business schools. They include some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world: Oxford University, Harvard, University of London, Columbia, Duke, Princeton, Thunderbird, and Erasmus. There was not a single advertisement for arts and science students at any of the universities. None of the advertisements suggested that those universities also offered opportunities for a fine liberal arts education.
This fundamental confusion about the true purpose of the university also applies to the current concept of education. When students admit that they are at the university to get an education they betray the same dismal and disappointing attitude that they do about their reason for being there. No one should be admitted to the university to get an education. One should be admitted to the university to further one's education. The university is neither a supermarket nor preparatory technical school. Anyone who has not already started on his or her education is way beyond the pale of intellectual salvation by the time that person is admitted to the university.
Education derives from the Latin, e duco, which literally means "I draw out of myself". Therefore, to be educated is to develop inner qualities latent in the individual. Often it is described as the discovery of one's talents. And the overriding assumption about education is that it is achieved in a social setting. One who is educated develops qualities that contribute toward a better community and a better world. Education shapes the moral and ethical precepts that guide our lives and serve, even indirectly, our fellowmen. Education enhances one's humanity. Education is therefore fundamental to the enhancement of civil society.
Yet one would never know this in today's world. Most universities around the world have abandoned their essential rationale for being. Implicitly or explicitly they have succumbed to the general idea that universities should foster job-enhancing functions. Libraries and general reading are demoted. Courses and majors are blatantly calculated to appeal to prospective job seekers or employers. Training the mind is sometimes not mentioned at all. One sees that clearly in the common language of the universities and the merging of conventional business terms into the operational daily discourse. The old terms of teachers, administrators and students are slowly being replaced by terms like "product" for courses, "product deliverers" for professors, "clients" for students, and "managers" for administrators. Not surprisingly, the "managers" are being generously compensated as though they work for General Motors, rather than in a non-profit enterprise. All this is depressingly sad.
The contemporary deplorable demotion of the true value of a liberal arts education was presented in an excellent article by Professor Marshall Gregory of Butler University, USA, in the prestigious Chronicle of Higher Education on September 12, 2003. At the university, Gregory wrote, "Students' overriding concern should be how to develop as fully as possible their basic human birthright: their powers of imagination, aesthetic responsiveness, introspection, language, rationality, moral and ethical reasoning, physical capacities, and so on. Those are the powers that students must cultivate if they are to strive for excellence."
Indeed, education is, and ought to be, a lifetime process. It should not be regarded as the pragmatic provisional stepping stone to a crassly profitable life. Nor should it be equated with institutional certification manifested in degrees and certificates. As Marshall Gregory stated, "Liberal education is the pursuit of human excellence, not the pursuit of excellent salaries and excellent forms of polish and sophistication. Liberal education is not even about excellent intellectual achievements. Its goal is more ethical than intellectual. It focuses on individuals as moral agents, and it teaches students how to reflect both analytically and evaluatively on the fact that the choices we make turn us into the persons we become." No one could have said it more beautifully.
Franklin W Knight is professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.