In his review of some of the depressing books about higher education that have been appearing right and left lately — among them, Professor X’s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, which I think I’m going to have to read after all — Louis Menand advances three theories of education. They’re not essentially incompatible, and I don’t see why we can’t operate them concurrently. But most people, it seems, naturally favor one theory over the other two, and wonder why anyone would consider the others as viable alternatives. That’s almost as interesting as the theories themselves.  What everyone does agree about is that the Theory 1 approach is not for everyone.

Theory 1 holds that the purpose of higher education is to make the most of society’s most talented minds. This means not wasting energy on minds that display little or no academic talent. It means winnowing and culling, with high standards and tough grading. Theory 2, looking through the other end of the telescope, regards education as a socializing tool that, for that very reason, ought to be made available to everyone. Theory 3 is vocational: education enlarges your skill set by teaching you things that you need to know to get by and/or ahead in real-world situations. All three approaches are utilitarian, which is what makes them compatible in the end. Nobody is arguing that
education is an inherent good. I don’t have a problem with that, so long as we make it easy for people who feel that education is inherently good to educate themselves. 

What distinguishes the first theory from the second and third is not its apparent high-mindedness but its faith in abstraction and indirection. In other words, the liberal arts. Or maybe not. I’m not sure that “liberal arts” means anything anymore; Menand keeps coming back to “toughing it out with Henry James.” As synecdoche goes, it’s not inapt, because Henry James, at least in his late style, is so extraordinarily articulate that he is difficult to follow, and the ability to follow James’s sentences fluently enough actually to enjoy them is a good sign of the literate competence that we expect of so-called professional people — people who are effectively a law unto themselves, as doctors and lawyers quite often are. (The compact that we make with professional people is that the law that they implement will be sound.) There is an almost hieratic vagueness about the liberal arts that becomes palpable the minute you start looking for books about critical thinking. Everyone agrees that critical thinking is a key compenent of a liberal arts education. But you can’t buy books that will teach you how to do it, the way you can buy chemistry handbooks. Critical thinking turns out to be more of an experience than a skill. Those of us who have had the experience recognize it in others, like vacations in Paris. 

To some extent, in short, “the liberal arts” is simply a racket that the proponents of Theory 1 have settled on — did I say, “racket”? That was rude; I meant “convention” — as a “measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential,” as Menand puts it. It happens to be an academic convention, in that mastering the liberal arts entails a lot of reading and writing. Professor X, quoted by Menand, puts it very well: 

“I have come to think,” he says, “that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.”

It is impossible to demonstrate a mastery of the liberal arts without the ability to write clearly and effectively — which means, engagingly. “Mysterious mix” is putting it mildly. My point here, however, is not to talk about what makes good writers. It is rather to suggest that an education scheme bottomed on the liberal arts is going to serve Theory 2 and Theory 3 very poorly, because most people are not good writers. Why? Most of the bad writers are probably poor readers — of the kinds of liberal arts materials that are adumbrated throughout elementary school and that make high school so tedious for any student who is not in a frantic mood to read David Copperfield. That’s the part that Professor X leaves out. The writing from which he expects readers to internalize the rhythms of the written word is the kind of writing that he teaches from his liberal arts curriculum.

What the beneficiaries of Theory 2 and Theory 3 need (and this would seem to be everyone who doesn’t attend a liberal arts college) is a kind of reading material — let’s not call it “literature” yet — that is aimed away from the abstractions and the assumptions of liberal arts prose. I have no idea, really, what this writing would look like, or — most intriguingly — if liberal arts readers would like to read it with enthusiasm. Maybe it wouldn’t be reading at all — it might be visual (the dichotomy between “reading” and “seeing” never ceases to surprise me). The one thing I do know is that this new material would put an end to the twin complaints that Theory 1 people have about the alternatives, which are that Theory 2 and Theory 3 offer watered-down versions of Theory 1 education, and that they thereby threaten the integrity of Theory 1’s all-important standards. 

We need to know a lot more about why most people don’t enjoy reading. It may have a lot to do with what they have been offered.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 at 7:45 pm.