Higher Education for Today

May 07, 2012 Editorial

Recently, Richard Wolin of CUNY’s Graduate Centre reflected on the changing views of ‘higher education’ in the US. The excerpts below might be of interest to Guyanese educators and policy makers.
For a long time it was a cultural commonplace that the doctrines of Protestant humanism provided the essential elements for higher learning and that moral education, grounded in the study of Scripture, was one of higher education’s central goals, uniquely useful for shaping character, training ministers and producing upstanding civic leaders. But when the modern research university emerged in the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the college system struggled to preserve its mission. Of what merit was general education amid a pulsating scientific-industrial civilization that increasingly prized the values of professionalism and narrow expertise?
The new educational gospel was that unimpeded scientific inquiry, if properly nurtured, could provide the moral compass that many people sorely needed after Charles Darwin’s writings about evolution aroused serious doubts about religion. But instead of establishing true north, the intellectual specialization of the modern research university seemed only to accelerate the fragmentation of knowledge, and as expectations of moral renewal through “value free” scientific inquiry receded—although science is a rich source of information about the formal properties of objects, it is for the most part agnostic about which values or ideals we should esteem and why—the idea of a liberal arts education was resuscitated.
Many of our standard assumptions about the Western tradition, rationality and science have been steadily undermined, not all of them justly. The 20th century will be remembered as an epoch of industrialized mass murder, confuting the Enlightenment assumption that science and the improvement of humanity go hand in hand. Moreover, the most heinous atrocities radiated from the heart of Europe, casting serious doubt upon the West’s self-proclaimed moral and cultural superiority. Still, the fashionable post-modern rejection of reason risks depriving us of the only means we have at our disposal to think through the problems and dilemmas of the present age. As the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno observed about debates concerning the legacy of Western reason: only the hand that inflicted the wound can cure the disease.
Classic treatises on education, such as Plato’s Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, stress that education should not merely seek to impart a narrow set of practical skills. After all, the latter might just as well be obtained through apprenticeship.
Instead, they were firmly convinced that education should address a more fundamental set of moral and ethical questions linked to our core values: who we are and what kind of persons we would ultimately like to become. One of the central problems of undergraduate education today is that it increasingly reinforces the “instrumentalist” view that the major decisions in life concern the efficient selection of means rather than a reflection on ends. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that higher education has been degraded to the status of an enfeebled auxiliary to reigning social and economic interests.
These educational ideals are hardly ethereal precepts devoid of moral and institutional standing in the contemporary world. Article 26 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates that education should have three aims: “the full development of the human personality”; “the strengthening of respect for human rights”; and the promotion of “understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups.” In a parallel vein, a recent Human Development Index report underlines the importance of viewing development in non-economic terms, which would entail “creating an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests…. Development is thus about expanding the choices people have to lead lives that they value.”
As concerned citizens we must make it our goal to remind educators and legislators to set their sights high. What is at stake, in addition to credits and degrees, is nothing less than the basis for informed democratic citizenship.

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