My job once made me the luncheon guest of an internationally known cleric and scholar of classical literature. He was charming in conversation, gracious in hospitality, gentle in demeanor. Also, he displayed a precision of mind that I had previously associated with technical or scientific education.
I confessed my surprise, and he explained. His vocation required his being able to discern nuances of meaning in language, and to preserve them as he translated from a first language forward through two or three more. Precision of thought was essential. Achieving it had required of him as a student arduous work and mental discipline.
At this point -- even though we were in the dining hall of a monastery -- he raised his voice and pounded the table so hard the silverware jumped. "This modern idea that learning can be fun is hooey! The only way to learn is to break your ass!"
He is many years gone, but I think he might agree that related questions for today are: Learn what? And, Why?
Lawmakers in my state undertook to answer aggressively. Election cycles had installed people who viewed themselves as new brooms. They shuffled governance and administration of the state university system. They called for greater "efficiency" in the university's operation. They declared disdain for "frills." They declaimed on equipping students to find jobs.
Their precept? The value of education is measured in its near-term economic utility.
We can be glad this view was not shared by the progenitors of western civilization. We should regret that it is not peculiar to my state or wholly focused on college. It represents an elemental departure from any fully formed concept of education.
Dorothy Sayers, the mystery writer who was also an accomplished classical scholar, said as early as the 1940's that foundational concepts of schooling had already been compromised. I would paraphrase her argument this way:
The first function of education is to teach people to think, and to communicate accurately. As words are our means of delineating ideas, precision in one requires precision in the other. Or, in the obverse: Muddy thinking and muddy language both shape and reflect each other.
Students are not drilled in the logic that properly links words to words and creates sentences with exact meaning. They are not experienced in dialectic argument as an exercise -- word used advisedly -- in reasoning. They are permitted to consume facts without synthesis and to recite them without understanding.
The result? People no longer fully understand how to read or to express themselves. They are hobbled in thinking and communication.
Anecdotal evidence can be pertinent, and mine has the virtue of being consistent over many years. In a career of supervising writers, I encountered with dismal regularity some who could not reliably distinguish an expression of opinion from a statement of fact.
Despite their having reputable educations.
Even when they had written the sentences themselves.
They did not fully understand how to take accurate meaning from an English sentence.
When schooling shapes people to know more than they understand, what consequences ensue? (Not least in some quarters of academe, where cataloging may pass for scholarship.)
We have leaders who can't muster language of leadership. Ideas religious, moral, ethical and political are presented in the form of slogans. Discourse is shallow -- and here consequences may be especially severe. One inescapable implication of America's distemper in recent years is that many people don't recognize propaganda when they hear it.
My state has a history of endemic rural poverty. The farmers and laborers who were willing to pay taxes for our university wanted their children to be freed from a future behind the plow. Yes. But not merely by getting better jobs.
They wanted their children equipped to be full-strength participants in an emerging society; to discern a variety of life choices and to make them well; to contribute to shaping the climate of attitude and opportunity in which their own children would live.
Of course education can improve employment prospects. But its proper purpose, fully realized, is not merely to make better earners. It is to make better minds.
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