The meaning of education

With regard to tradition in education, Wilfrid McClay writes:

The prevailing view is that no one can really know for sure what is true, pure, and just—that such judgments are strictly individual in nature, and that it therefore would be an arrogant imposition of one’s values or tastes to assume otherwise. Therefore the only really fair and honest way to educate young people is to “expose” them to many things, as many things as possible, respect their “feelings,” and leave it to them to sort it all out.

It is an approach to education that appears on the surface to be generous and liberatory, but is in fact far from being either. For it is an approach whose liberality is really only a veil for its lack of conviction, and for its indifference to the fate of the very ones consigned to its care. Not indifference to their physical fates, of which we are now perhaps excessively solicitous, with our growing mania for physical health and safety. But indifference to their intellectual and spiritual fates, about which an attitude of neutrality is in fact an attitude of abdication.

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This is, I repeat, not the dominant philosophy of education on offer in contemporary America. Instead, training in self-esteem, group dynamics, adjustment, social usefulness, civic engagement, vocational skills, money-making, test-taking, or citizenship, are all cited as the most desirable and reasonable goals for education. And many of them are worthy things. But none compares with the goal of bringing us into possession of ourselves, and helping us catch a glimpse of the full range of our humanity. By that standard, all the other goals seem timid and useless—notwithstanding their panting eagerness to be serviceable and profitable.

Meanwhile, here's Tom Hibbs on the meaning of Catholic education in a time when many Catholic universities want to be less distinctively Catholic:

Another painful irony is that this is precisely the wrong time for Catholic universities to slavishly mimic top-ranked secular schools. Former Harvard dean Harry Lewis, author of Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, contends that at elite universities the “ideal of liberal education lives on in name only.” The libertarianism of the faculty who want to be left alone to do their research complements the laissez-faire attitude of students. Instead of being "immersed in the life of the mind," students act like the good consumers universities increasingly conceive them to be — maximizing upscale pleasures and opportunities for career advancement. Complaints like these, for which Allan Bloom was once reviled, are now common in secular higher education. The failure to offer an integrated liberal education, to raise big questions about the common good and to foster a genuine community of learning among students and faculty are matters on which religious universities ought to have a distinct advantage.

We are better served in these matters by diversity, rather than homogeneity, in institutions of higher education. But to set out on a different path will mean a willingness to buck the purportedly self-evident claims about what academic excellence means. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have made us acutely aware that many Catholic universities are in trouble not simply because they are no longer Catholic, but because they are no longer universities — arenas for the communal pursuit of truth in a range of disciplines.

In a book published not long before he died, Truth and Truthfulness, the stridently secular British philosopher Bernard Williams noted that we live in a time when the demand for truth has never been greater. But, he added, we have never been more doubtful about our ability to reach the truth or even whether there is truth to be had. Williams saw the cultural, and particularly academic, despair over truth as a troubling sign. He criticized the ironic distance from which many academics, particularly in the humanities, approached truth. If we lose our hold on the truth, he observed, we risk losing everything. Benedict would no doubt concur. His recalling of the Church’s universities to a recovery of their Catholicity is simultaneously a reminder of what makes them universities.