Don’t you love spending quality time with family and friends eating and drinking lots of things you don’t need? You gotta love those conversations around the dinner table and if you’re anything like me, you’re thankful that Christmas comes but once a year. I had a number of interesting conversations this holiday, but I’m only going to share one of them.
This conversation happened at the dinner table and was initiated by one of my “in-laws.” I won’t say which one to protect the guilty. Now that I think of it, it wasn’t much of a conversation – more like a diatribe. “Higher education is a complete waste of time and money. All they do is indoctrinate your kids and teach them a bunch of radical ideology. Nobody should go to college. Anything you need to know, you can teach yourself for free. You just have to love learning, that’s the key.” It was an interesting topic to broach when you’re sitting next to two college professors.
Except for that last part, you can guess that I disagreed with just about all of it. But it was unsettling on a number of levels. For one, this type of argument against higher education used to be the exclusive purview of liberal-minded folks, but I’m hearing it more and more frequently from conservative types such as those at the Daily Wire. Matt Walsh is especially venomous in his attacks of “liberal college professors.”
While there is some truth in the “irrelevance” argument against higher education, I believe that we have a lot to offer students, if we can remember what higher education is really about. But poor leadership, a decline in the classic liberal arts education, and a rash of institutions in the news lately for behaving badly have fueled the fire. Higher ed is not making a good value proposition anymore. Steeply rising costs mainly as a result of falling state and federal support over the last 35 years coupled with the explosion of the administrative university have hindered our ability to provide value. We’ve allowed others to define the goal of higher education solely as skill development. This is why for-profit, online, nimble educational corporations are beating us, at least for the moment.
So what is education really about? I believe that colleges should re-focus on teaching the classic liberal arts education which, by definition, develops a student’s intellectual and moral character, rather than simply teaching them a set of skills. This type of education is designed to provide students with a broad understanding of the world and its history, as well as to teach them how to think critically and communicate effectively. It includes subjects such as literature, philosophy, history, and the fine arts.
And this is important: we need to educate students in these things in addition to teaching them skills that are useful to employers. After all, skills help us succeed in the workplace, but virtue helps us succeed in life.
What makes me sad is that our colleges seem to have lost this vision. Colleges of liberal arts are under attack and being cut at every turn. While part of this result is self-inflicted, it seems that not many college professors are interested in mentoring our students to pursue truth and virtue.
Higher education needs to rediscover what made it great in the first place.