Ihave been emphasizing the importance of a liberal arts college education for a long time. I had such an education back in the late 1950s, and I’ve been thankful ever since. Back then when I attended Cincinnati’s Xavier University (a Jesuit institution), almost all students had to take the equivalent of a minor in philosophy. How things have changed! Not that all of the changes have been bad. At that time the undergraduate program was limited to males. Admitting women to it has been a positive development, and some reduction in the required philosophy courses was also needed. In addition, an argument can be made that required courses have less motivational appeal to students than those taken by choice.
But, as historian Richard Hofstader noted on the twentieth-century decades before the publication of his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), “On two matters there was almost no disagreement: education should be more ‘practical’; and higher education, as least as it was conceived in the old-time American classical college, was useless as a background for business. Business waged a long, and on the whole successful, campaign for vocational and trade education at the high-school level and did much to undermine the high school as a center of liberal education.”
The central questions come down to the following: “Who should education be structured for—the student, him or her self, or U. S. business?” And if it is primarily for the student, then “Who should decide, the student—typically in one’s late teens—or the higher education institution?”
Last week the History News Network (HNN) reported that “Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a questionnaire to colleges and universities across the country, demanding that each provide a public statement of the institution’s core principles by the end of the calendar year.” And HNN also provided links to about a dozen essays from the past decade that discussed the purpose of higher education.
Having taught at the college/university level for over four decades, I’ve also developed my own ideas about the purpose of such education.
First, we should understand that the answer is complex. One of the linked HNN essays—”Whose Side Are College Administrators On?”—states that “When universities are beholden to the federal government for research funding, they often value their bottom lines over their students’ academic freedom.” Thus, in addition to the question of “Who should education be structured for?” there are also financial considerations, as well as societal and moral ones to be considered. And note that the title of the present essay is “What Type of Education Do We Need?” Not the more practical one, “For whom should education be structured?”
My purpose is more one of persuasion. First, of college students themselves, and only secondly, of college and university personnel—administrators and faculty. A little over a decade and a half ago, The Wisdom Page posted my “Goals, Values, and Wisdom: Unsolicited Advice to Young College Students.” As the title indicates, it was a persuasive essay aimed at college students.
In it I quoted the 1977 book, A Guide for the Perplexed, of economist and environmentalist E. F. Schumacher. On the first page of it, he wrote: “All through school and university [in Europe and the USA] I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life.” These “maps” he referred to were those furnished by the modern capitalistic culture in which he grew up, which left “all of the questions that really matter unanswered.” He added that the situation was “even worse” by 1977, and that it was difficult for humans to learn how to live properly.
My essay also quoted Copthorne Macdonald, founder and editor of The Wisdom Page, who wrote that “values are at the heart of the matter.” And it cited Yale University’s Robert Sternberg, who wrote that “people are wise to the extent that they use their intelligence to seek a common good. They do so by balancing, in their courses of action, their own interests with those of others and those of larger entities, like their school, their community, their country, even God.”
Most of the rest of my essay discussed two literary works that could help students gain more wisdom: Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman.”
In the succeeding decade and a half since my “Unsolicted Advice” essay, I have often written of values and wisdom, frequently citing Barack Obama’s pre-presidential The Audacity of Hope. In it he devoted a whole chapter to values and wrote that “Democrats are wrong to run away from a debate about values,” and that the question of values should be at “the heart of our politics, the cornerstone of any meaningful debate about budgets and projects, regulations and policies.”
Yet, despite Obama’s admonition, “with rare exceptions thoughtful debates about competing values, which ones to prioritize and why, seldom occur among politicians or even in various media’s political commentary.” About a year ago, the world lost a “greart moral voice” with the death of Pope Francis, who especially stated with great moral authority on three important topics—capitalism, climate change, and immigrants.
What the world needs now is not so much debates about MAGA, the wars in the Middle East, or capitalism vs. socialism, but the morality of any of these developments. As Sternberg wrote, “our goal is not to teach values but to help children develop positive values of their own that promote social welfare.” As Pope Francis stated a decade ago, promoting social welfare means advancing the common good. Not, as President Trump seems to think, making the most profit, either for U. S. corporations or for himself, his family, and his supporters.
In recent years, we have seen too much of putting profits—or political goals—before human life. One example, but far from the only one, being Purdue Pharma’s marketing of Oxycontin, which killed tens of thousands of people in the early 2020s.
In addition, the number of lives lost in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and Ukraine seem way out of proportion to any possible political gain pursued by the perpetrators of those wars.
Thus, the main thing our educational systems should do, as Sternberg correctly perceived, is to help students develop positive values of their own that will help promote the common good. Exactly how higher education undertakes this goal is a complex question.
Earlier this year I wrote of the closing of Massachusetts’ Hampshire College due to “declining enrollment, rising costs, fiscal instability and the financial headwinds affecting many small liberal arts colleges.” And I also mentioned a prediction that “more than a quarter of private, nonprofit, four-year colleges and universities are at risk of closing in the next decade.”
Clearly, higher education cannot ignore the desires of students, even if we commentators think their emphasis on preparing for jobs in our present and predicted future is misguided. All we can do is urge consideration that earning a lot of money is not enough, not enough for life satisfaction, not enough of a contribution to the common good, and not enough so that upon retirement we can look back at our working life with a deep sense of satisfaction.
