But at the post-secondary level, this lack of clarity about education’s function, for the individual or for society as a whole, can be a significant obstacle to intellectual development.
Consider the case of one college graduate who briefly captured the attention of the national media. She had obtained a degree from Boston University, majoring both in international relations and in economics. When elected to Congress, she deflected questions about these two topics with phrases like “I am not the expert on geopolitics,” and “Middle Eastern politics is not exactly at my kitchen table every night.”
Yet someone who holds degrees in economics and international relations is precisely the type of person who would be conversant with geopolitics. What did that person do for four years on campus? What does it mean, in a university setting, to “major” in an academic discipline, if not to obtain some level of expertise?
To be sure, there are still departments within some universities which have, and pass on to their students, competence in critical thinking and intellectual skills.
But the original mission of a college education was both to provide skills (“know how”) and to master a body of knowledge (“know that”). It seems that, in some cases, the mission has stead become providing some vague and personal social experience, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:
At its best, college should aim to produce graduates with a reasonable background in a subject, a willingness to continue learning for the rest of their lives, and an ability to assume roles as capable citizens. Instead, for many people college has become, in the words of a graduate of a well-known party school in California, “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.” College is no longer a passage to educated maturity and instead is only a delaying tactic against the onset of adulthood — in some cases, for the faculty as well as for the students.
This change in the university’s mission took place gradually in some cases, suddenly in others, and for a variety of reasons. One factor was the substitution of ‘egalitarianism’ for ‘equal opportunity’ in the ideological statements which shape some college administrations.
While both words are used with a variety of overlapping definitions, the shift described here was part of an attempt to provide everyone with a sort of sameness: the same experiences, the same diplomas, the same social status.
While the notion of equal opportunity was put in place to make sure that everyone had a chance in the educational system, there is also the reality that some aspects of education are inherently competitive. Some students will outperform others.
The goal of people of all cultures, ethnicities, races, nationalities, and income levels competing on an equal footing was replaced by the goal of giving a college experience, and a university diploma, to nearly everyone who wanted it, as scholar Robert Bork writes:
Egalitarianism led Americans gradually to extend education to all youths, which was admirable, but egalitarianism also led to the notion that the education must be pretty much the same for all levels of ability. Those with higher levels of academic talent were no longer pressed to achieve as they once were. Not long ago a newspaper printed an examination that all high school graduates were once expected to be able to pass if they intended to go on to college. The test, if I recall correctly, was given between the turn of the century and World War I. I could not begin to answer most of the questions, nor could most of the educated people I discussed it with.
The vocabulary of higher education was founded on words like ‘rigor, challenge, critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, comprehension’ and others. These words pointed students toward the activity of intellectually wrestling with complex texts and concepts.
The abandonment of that vision of education can be seen, e.g., in economics, where classes centered on equations and graphs are yielding territory to classes focused on policies and partisan proposals and movements.
What is at stake is the life of the mind. Will current and future universities be able to encourage women and men to write, not about social experiences, but at the highest levels of intellectual engagement? Will books to be written in the coming decades, by authors who are currently still university students, be challenging minds in the coming centuries?
