Dear Readers: Dr. E., here. This is a tag team article by myself and Shaun Mullen. Below, his article re rubble of higher education I’d preface his good writing by commenting
ON MONEY
how noticeable it has become: the cost of a university education is out of reach of the average middle class citizen… without encumbering oneself or one’s family for many decades after graduation. A person ought not have to pay the price of a new hou$e in order to get an education and yet once graduated have to live in a hovel, not by choice, for years on end… because of debt stretching to the seeable horizon.Amazingly, many of us who strove hard for higher education, and who have grandchildren, are still paying off, or just paid off our own student loans from years ago, whether to relatives or to banks or a government program. (Dont get me started on those who fail to pay their student loans and burden us all with their mockery of a serious debt of honor). (Likewise, let’s not start right now on lack of transparency of internecine university politics, including salaries and payouts by universities while blinded unquestioning parents foot huge tuitions and fees that help keep some ensconced who ought to have been put to pasture long ago.) (Let us save for another day soon, the compensation packages at universities, as well as teacher sexual predation on young adult students, and the true cost of advertising a golden education, but giving a pedestrian rhetoric short on golden mean. Teaching throughout a golden mean would allow one to know the difference in speech, for instance, amongst cowardly speech, and reckless speech, and speech that has meaning and strong impact, but is neither reckless nor cowardly. That’d be the stuff of leaders and stateswoman and statemen who hold a vision, instead of only a reactive stance to current culture.)
ON MEANING
Most of us who were born to the lower classes and managed to struggle for higher education without helps, without quotas, without ‘contacts,’ without being carried on a cloud of money… only our own blood and bones to rely on… did so believing education necessary to do our work in the world, to in some way bring not just making a living into commitment, not just to shelter our progeny, but because we also believed what we studied would help us to contribute to the world in ways that would matter’ we wanted to help, hold, create, assist whatever was within our reach.While it is true, that what we often see on TV of souls who happen to be college students looking drunken and drugged, and at that moment, having little interest beyond a whole other pc route, and that this is most often treated superficially by ‘lookers’ as one big ‘har,’ … when I teach at university, I am more so taken with the gut-cutting grief of the students’ questions about how they fit into the world WE made, and what to me is both heartening and sometimes heart-breaking dedication of the students, of the souls there, intent to go forward into that world not made by they themselves… and yet they, these young, our young, are often at the very top of their desire to do good in the world…
That last, the desire to do good in the world, is to my thought, the rootstock mission to educating a mind, heart, body, spirit and soul. Yet, as I visit university campus as diversity lecturer, as visiting scholar, I see often, swirling around those who are attempting to do good, a cultural perseveration like the insane uncle in the back bedroom, ever adding to the heap of political screed, rather than showing up able and equipped and building for all.
In contrast, I’ve met thousands of students firsthand who ignore the crazy uncle ever waddling onstage with index finger in air and overtalking others, but they also wish they could take advantage of all that money poured into absurdist political campaigns and put it to far better use than the odd pronouncements by candidates standing right there in ads they’ve paid often millions of dollars for, saying, “I approve this message.”
ON MERCY
Why consider students’ desire to do good in the world as highest ethical longing to be the radical mission of education? Because I’ve seen it in spades amongst the young, the middle aged, and the elders as well: the overculture has many good things to offer, many. As do universities… just the short list of humor mags, theatrical productions, university presses safekeeping some of the most treasured and easily lost data imaginable, many of the not only brilliant teachers, but more so, the teachers who know craft and who unfurl it with great heart for teaching and for learners also, not just one or the other. But also, the overculture’s lesser mind wheedles and offers daily to buy us away from ourselves, and daily, its usuries placed on our creative and spiritual lives, and our forfeitures to those vacant goods but very real debts, are sometimes paid by us in ways that cripple and delay and sometimes kill us.In many ways, the least of culture will attempt to steal one away from one’s soul every day, attempts to detract and distract us from endeavors that carry meaning for us… like a small story told in our refugee family about a weaver man whose weavings were torn out by lesser and jealous hands each day… and he had to, in order to please his beautiful soul, set himself to reweave the weavings of his life, to reclaim, to steal his soul back every night.
That we live in a culture that is able to rise to so much good, does not mean that good cannot be darkened by lack of vigilance to the huge merits and longings of the young to help this world and its people… for distractions, according to not Machiavelli, but common sense, is the best way to keep each new generation ever in discord with one another, to hand them the bloody whiffle bats of older-generation feuds… without offering that the young think far more largely for good of all, and thereby not keep themselves as past generations have been, festering over being ever helpless and poor in peace and power.
Here is Mullen’s article:
We Have The World’s Finest Universities, Why Then Is America Such A Mess?
by Shaun Mullen
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
~ HENRY ADAMS
In his masterful The Education of Henry Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President and Founding Father John Adams concludes that college educations in general and his in particular were next to worthless.
As biographies go, Henry Adams is as introspective as they come, less a record of Adams’ considerable accomplishments as a journalist, historian, academic and novelist than a brutally frank admission that his traditional education (at Harvard, no less) failed to help him come to terms with the rapid changes that America was undergoing during the Second Industrial Revolution, the period from roughly 1814 to the outbreak of World War I.
Adams calls his schooling “time wasted” and concludes that self-education through life experiences, friendships and reading were ultimately more important.
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Adams’ harsh criticism of higher education is as applicable in 2010 as it was in his time, if not more so, and it again came to mind as the 263-year-old university that I attended and many years later went to work for welcomes another freshman class this week.
This, I suppose, is an exemplary case of biting the hand that fees me. My university is a damned fine one and has come far since I was a member of the Class of 1969 and went out into a world in tumult because of war — Cold and Vietnam — as well as sweeping and barely comprehensible societal and technological changes.
The students with whom I interact at my university are top rate and earnest about their studies in a dizzying array of academic majors ranging from art to chemical engineering to marine science to my favorite, material culture.
But I cannot help but conclude that the members of the Class of 2014, like my own, also are ill prepared for the world that they will encounter beyond these ivied walls, nor are they any more prepared to make that world less tumultuous — kinder, gentler, and more equitable and prosperous — than I and my classmates were.
This long-running crisis in higher education is simply not on our societal radar, although another crisis is: That the cost of a college education is increasingly out of the reach of a disappearing middle class at a time when the global environment has become so competitive. If fact, the College Board says that the U.S., once the world leader in the percentage of people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th.
* * * * *
An obvious rejoinder to my harsh conclusion is that it is not the job of universities to prepare students to make the world a better place. It is their job to educate them, whether in the Impressionists, physical sciences, oceanography or the archaeology of past and present.
I agree, but only to a point. A classical education still has an important place in liberal arts curricula, as do the laboratory and theory in science curricula. Universities are nothing if not tradition bound, and that too has its place. But isn’t it ironic that the U.S. justifiably boasts the best college and university system in the world but the country itself is such a mess?
Can there really be no connection?