Saturday Note: Back to School
The weather this morning was beautiful: clear, crisp, sunny, and inviting. High atmospheric pressure cheered one into standing up and getting going. That’s how Fall is in the Northeast: we snap out of the stupor of August (and early September!) and remember how many interesting things there are in the world. It’s a seasonal response conditioned, long ago, by the promises of new courses, new teachers — and another chance to be a better-organized student.
Making breakfast this morning, I slipped the first disc of the first season of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into the kitchen television. (By far the most-watched screen in the house, it is unconnected to the outside world). What enormous fun this show still is! The nation trembles as an invasion of Moon Men impends (of course it’s just Rocky and Bullwinkle). An announcer advises listeners to panic: “This is not a play,” a sweet reference (considering the age of the target audience) to Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds hoax twenty-one years earlier. Meanwhile, two straphangers discuss the situation. The most surprising thing about the show is its presumption that everyone lives in New York City: subways don’t require explanation. Neither does the tone of the discussion. “So, what else is new?” shrugs one of the men. When genuine Moon Men arrive — largely to thwart the onslaught of lunar tourism — Rocky asks Bullwinkle if he’s ever seen such strange creatures. Bullwinkle shrugs: “Maybe they’re Congressmen.” With Rocky and Bullwinkle, the noble Warner Bros tradition of aiming adult humor over the heads of innocent children, nurtured in California, came back home to Brooklyn.
While we breakfasted, the Times was deposited at our door, and I pulled it apart according to normal protocols. The Saturday newspaper part went to Kathleen; I took Travel, Real Estate (which Kathleen will pore over later, a long-standing hobby), Arts & Leisure, the Book Review and the Magazine. This week’s Magazine, I see, is “The College Issue.” I have no doubt that reading it will inflame my dyspepsia. What’s going on in institutions of higher learning today is bad enough, but the Times will find a way to trivialize it even further.
I’m in the middle of a very provocative book, Anthony T Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. The author, a former law professor at Yale who now teaches in the Directed Studies Program there, believes, as I do, that if there is one thing that higher education ought to do, it’s to ground young people in the Big Questions, so that they won’t have to spend their already taxed adult lives re-inventing the wheel. I’m not about to discuss any further a book that I haven’t read, but I’m struck by a historical detail that I’d never quite put together before. Prior to the middle of the Nineteenth Century (our Civil War marks the era here), the undergraduate curriculum was pretty much set in stone. Everybody studied the same things at the same point in the college course. Teachers were expected to teach most courses, if not all of them, and — get this — a college president, far from being the fundraising tout of today, was usually the best teacher on campus.
Many of the things that undergraduates studied at Yale in the 1820s would be deemed obsolete today — I doubt that Christian Apologetics has much of an academic future — but the idea of a uniform education for all students remains attractive. To a degree, it doesn’t matter what the curriculum comprises, because the important business is the conversation that the students have about the material. And because that’s the case, one might as well teach Plato and Descartes, both celebrated posers of Big Questions.
In my opinion, neither Plato nor Descartes has any Big Answers. Plato was full of answers to life’s knottier problems, but most of them range from mildly fascist to outright pernicious. Descartes’s answer to the problem of consciousness is still making it hard for many people to accept the implications of modern neuroscience. It’s precisely because Plato and Descartes not only ask Big Questions but propose powerful Big Answers that young minds can hardly do better than to wrestle with them, especially as Big Answers are not to be looked for among undergraduates. You may emerge from college, degree in hand, with the conviction that Plato’s and Descartes’s answers are wrong, but it’s going to take you a while to understand why.
Watching Rocky and Bullwinkle (or, rather, listening to the dialogue as I squeezed the oranges), I wondered if the show has figured in any inventive college courses. Since I’m such a fan of the show, I must think that it would be cool to “study” the hermeneutics of Boris and Natasha for a semester, right? Wrong. I enjoy the show as much as I do now because I spent my college years studying the things that the show makes fun of, such as empire and oligarchy. I wouldn’t have learned why the title of one episode, “Invitation to the Trance,” is a well-placed pun if I my readings had been confined to pop culture.