Higher Education: The Solution—Or Part of the Problem?

My title may strike you as odd, whimsical, even wrong-headed. Surely education is a “good thing.” It is by its very nature beneficial, not harmful; promethean, not mephistophelean; our saviour, not our destroyer. The more of it the better.

But every one of these popular beliefs is doubtful. It all depends on what kind of education we are talking about, and what kind of people receive the education.

Let me say at once, therefore, that I am speaking of that kind of education which is secular, largely technological, and chiefly aimed at teaching people how to do things. This is, I believe, the public image. Every member of a liberal-arts college has at one time or another confronted bewildered or irate parents who demand to know what, after an expensive liberal-arts education, their newly furnished offspring are trained to do—what kind of a job can they get? It is difficult to convince them that the purpose of a liberal education is to develop mental powers, to sensitize one’s response to beauty and goodness, to expand and lengthen one’s outlook, to teach civilized emotions, and the rest. (It is particularly difficult because, in all conscience, these jobs have often not been done by the liberal-arts college. But that is another story.)

The menace of modern education is quite easy to define: Never have so many people, groups, and nations been able, because of education, to do so many things—and we are all afraid that they will now start doing them. To narrow it a bit: The menace is that of incalculable power (the product of knowledge) in the hands of bad or foolish men. The agonizing question now is not whether we can possibly learn how to do this or that, but which of the things we have the tools to do we should, by an act of will, choose to do. The question, in short, is one of conduct, not of knowledge. With this, education, to its own peril, has little to do.

And yet it is the most anciently recognized of problems. Adam faced it, and chose wrong. His problem, like ours, was not knowing how but knowing what. And the corrective was early stated: “Thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the LORD: that it may be well with thee …” (Deut. 6:18). With the spirit of this commandment, modern education has even less to do. Education’s answer to man’s problems is more education—as if Hitler would have been made a better man if he had taken a couple of degrees from some good university.

I submit that modern education presents increasingly the fearful aspects of Frankenstein’s monster because of the prevalence of five fallacies or myths.

1. The myth of automatic human progress. The general tendency of ancient thought was that man had fallen from high estate, whether from some Golden Age or from the bliss of Eden. Not until the eighteenth century and the rise of that strangely irrational epoch called the Age of Reason were doctrines of inevitable human progress widely disseminated. Partly, this was the result of a sort of provincial complacency, and partly ignorance of history. How easily in eighteenth-century writing flow the condescending remarks about the barbarism of the ancient world, the primitive grotesqueness of gothic cathedrals, the ignorance and ineptitude of Shakespeare!

But it remained for the nineteenth century and the rise of theories of evolution for the views to become the dogma that all environments tend inevitably toward perfection. Why this is so was never clearly stated. There simply is faith that the universe is so constituted. “Chance” will see to it. But chance is simply a non-term, identifying the absence of reason, purpose, intention, and will; it is odd that reason should put its faith in that which is, by definition, non-reason.

Reasonably or not, however, the cult of inevitable progress has, in education, placed improper emphasis on novelty, change for its own sake, the gimmick. True, in the world of technology the view that the latest is the best is usually sound—we properly prefer the up-to-date typewriter, automobile, washing machine. But technology advances automatically, so long as we do not forget the practical lessons of past experimenters. Every engineer begins at the point where the last one left off. Advancement is due not to any improvement in the human brain, but to the mere accumulation of experience. The ancient brains that measured the diameter of the earth, that worked out the basic principles of force, leverage, hydraulics, and construction, were almost undoubtedly greater brains than our age possesses. But the modern technologist stands at the topmost height of achievement of all previous craftsmen. He may himself be a dwarf, but he can see farther than they, for he sits on their shoulders.

Not so in the area of human conduct. Here it is not technology but wisdom that governs. No man becomes virtuous because of the virtue of another. He may be inspired by the wisdom and virtue of others, but he must make that wisdom his own possession. He cannot start out as wise as they simply because they have recorded their wisdom. Every human being, as a moral creature, begins from scratch. Not the novel but the true controls here.

Julian Huxley once observed that evolution seemingly has not worked in recorded history. Even within the view of evolutionary progress, therefore, there is no ground for believing that the wisdom residing in the most ancient minds was not as great as that held by the latest recipient of a Ph.D. Indeed, in all honesty, most of us would agree that there probably is not alive this day any human being whose wisdom can match that of a Moses, a Job, a Paul, a Marcus Aurelius, an Aristotle, a John—make the list as long as you wish.

And it is precisely this storehouse of ancient wisdom that the Cult of the New denies to the student. How they flock to the latest course presenting results of “an unstructured learning experience bearing upon upward mobility desires in terms of motivational elements in adjustment to a work situation”—but how few choose a course in the ethical teachings of Jesus.

And yet, as we have seen, it is precisely in the matter of choosing wisely what we should do, not in mastering more tools of power, that our future security—if any—consists. Bertrand Russell has written: “If human life is to continue in spite of science, mankind will have to learn a discipline of the passions which, in the past, has not been necessary …” In other words, the upward curve of virtue must parallel that of knowledge.

Professor Ginsberg of the University of London in his book The Idea of Progress correctly states that progress cannot be defined in terms independent of ethics. One can scarcely call it progress if a murderous maniac is progressively handed a stick, a club, a sword, a pistol, a cannon, and finally an H-bomb.

Education must deal with that which has never changed: the human heart, its passions and ideals. There are the wellsprings of human well-being or human catastrophe. In an address to the Royal Society, Laurence Oliphant, Australia’s top atomic scientist, declared: “I can find no evidence whatever that the morality of mankind has improved over the 5,000 years or so of recorded history.”

2. The myth of the natural goodness of man. This is a delicate subject. One sometimes feels that this dogma is simply a corrective to the reverse obnoxious doctrines of extreme puritanism (the sort seen in medieval asceticism and seventeenth-century extremism) that every impulse of man is totally and inherently evil. (In passing, some even conceive this to be the Presbyterian doctrine of total depravity. Actually, of course, the view declares that the total man was touched by sin, that no part of his being remained unaffected. It does not attribute total evil to every impulse.)

But the cult of sensibility, as the eighteenth century termed it, is not a corrective; it is an extreme, untenable, and unreasonable dogma that shows up in modern education all the way from first grade to graduate school.

Simply, it may be called the philosophy of “doing what comes naturally.” At the intellectual level, for example, it is held that there is some magic value in the uninhibited and uninformed opinion if freely expressed. And so discussion groups are held in the grade schools and the high schools on such subjects as “What do you think about the atom bomb?” or “teen-age morality” or “banning Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “implementing freedom among underprivileged nations” or what not. The poor little dears have scarcely a fact to use as ballast. But no matter. The cult of sensibility believes that continuing, free, uninhibited discussion will ultimately release the inherent goodness of natural instincts and impulses. The fad for “brainstorming” has passed, but not the philosophy behind it.

Now, of course we must encourage discussion. The young need to be encouraged to think and to speak—the former, anyway. But the deadly assumption underlying this sort of thing is that goodness is not a difficult matter of study, discipline, learning, mastery of tough masses of fact, but just a kind of game. It’s fun to do what comes naturally. (On reading about the uninhibited conduct of certain grade-school classes, with free discussion, finger painting, group games, or whatever the youngsters want to do, an older man said: “That’s not a new feature of education. They had that when I was a boy. They called it ‘recess.’ ”)

Ultimately, this view of ethics believes that there is no objective standard of morality or ethics. If there were, then what one wanted to do would be either right or wrong according to whether it reflected or violated the absolute standard. Rather, it is the view of the cult that society determines morality. The vote of the majority determines the ethical value. To refer to Bertrand Russell again, one remembers his assertion that there is no rational basis for determining ethics. Man, as the random product of an eternal flux of atoms, feels certain things—chiefly, that he exists; or rather, he experiences an experience he arbitrarily names “existence.” Thus what are “ethical standards” to one may be unacceptable to another. There is no objective basis for deciding between them. One can only hope, therefore, that he lives in a society in which the majority of the people happen to like the same ethical standards one does oneself.

The idea that man is basically good and infinitely capable of self-improvement has ramifications in every area of modern life. It is ardently preached by Freudian psychologists, to whom restraint of any natural desire is bad; by dreamy-eyed social and political theorists who believe that “freedom” is the sovereign remedy for the ills of every primitive tribe and nation; by aesthetic theorists who teach that art is an unplanned eruption occurring when the “artist’s biography makes contact with the medium of the art”; and by educationists who teach that what Johnny wants to do is what he must be permitted to do. No concept is more widespread, more taken for granted by millions who have never troubled really to think about it.

It is important to realize that members of the cult of natural goodness believe primarily in the goodness of the non-rational faculties—instinct, emotion, impulse, sub-rational urges. They are not so strong on the natural goodness of the intellect. (The high priest of the cult is D. H. Lawrence.)

There is, consequently, a prevalence of anti-intellectualism in educational circles that manifests itself in a marvelous jargon largely incomprehensible to the rational intelligence. Jacques Barzun gives a fine analysis of this malady in The House of Intellect.

3. The myth of egalitarianism. This is an even more delicate subject. To seem to question the equality of men is to raise questions about one’s attitude toward home and mother and the American way of life. Actually, of course, the situation is not hopelessly complicated. It is simply a matter of identifying those areas in which all men are equal and those in which they are not.

To the Christian, every soul is equal before God. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God; all need grace; none is good before God. None can claim social status, investments, political office, or ecclesiastical affiliation to separate him from his absolute equality with all other human souls.

To the believer in the Western tradition of rule by law, every man is also equal before the law. The protection of the law, the responsibility for obeying the law, and the duty of understanding the law are equal in distribution and force, without regard to any circumstances save legal age.

But to declare that all men are equally gifted, equal in force of character, equal in abilities and talents, equally deserving of a share of the world’s goods, equally deserving of esteem, respect, and admiration, equally deserving of rewards, equal in cultural heritage and contribution—this is irrational nonsense.

No concept has had a deadlier effect upon modern education than this. It has hindered the identification and encouragement of the exceptionally gifted; it has lowered educational standards to a point where no one, no matter how dull, can fail to hurdle them; it has confused the right of every man to seek an education with the fallacious belief that every man has a right to receive a degree. It has stifled initiative by refusing to grant exceptional reward to exceptional effort. It has encouraged mediocrity by withholding the penalty of mediocrity.

An illustration: A university with which I am very familiar undertook a program to encourage better English in the high schools of the city. The basic idea was competition—the best writers, the most skilled in grammar, the clearest thinkers would be singled out through public contests for reward.

The professional secondary-school counselors were horrified. This clearly amounted to “discrimination”—it discriminated between the able and the unable student! In the modern doctrine this is the deadly sin. In sum, the university was permitted to put into effect only a watered-down plan that carefully provided rewards for everyone. Needless to say the program was of only modest effectiveness. Needless to say, too, that high-school graduates come to us scarcely sure whether writing is the white or the black part of a page.

I was recently told by a professional-educator colleague that the terrible alternative to belief in complete equality in all dimensions is the inculcation of an inferiority complex. From that, he told me, come resentment, insecurity, antagonism, maladjustment, psychoses of various kinds, rebellion—in short, a wrecked society.

This, too, is nonsense. The thing works both ways. Almost everyone has some talent or ability that could be developed beyond the average level. If he properly receives acknowledgment for this superiority, he will be willing to grant superiority in other fields to other people. Is this not inherent in life itself? Do we feel resentful or guilty because we have not the mental equipment of a Pascal or an Einstein? Physically inferior because we cannot bat home runs like Mickey Mantle? Artistically inferior because we cannot play the piano like Rubinstein or Richter?

On the contrary, one of the keenest pleasures of life is to be in the presence of a superior person—and to be very still.

That sort of pride which cannot, without infinite anguish, acknowledge the superiority of any other living being is quite literally Satanic. From it flowed all our woes.

4. The cult of scientism. Again, careful qualification is needed. No one can, in the first place, be other than grateful for the marvelous strides science has made in increasing human comfort, controlling disease, providing relief from soul-killing labor. Nor, in the second place, can anyone doubt the validity and effectiveness of the scientific method—in its proper place. What I refer to is the religion of scientism, complete with dogma, faith, ethical system, and ritual.

“Science” is a wonderful word. It means “knowledge.” Thus the old term for what we today call “science” was “natural philosophy.” The study of nature—physical; perceived by the senses; capable of instrumentation. Indeed, modern science may be called the application of instruments to matter for the purpose of gaining understanding of material forces and thus of gaining control over them for our own purposes.

The cultic aspect arises when (1) science is viewed not as one way man has of knowing things (and a sharply limited one) but as the way that embraces everything man can, at least respectably, come to know; and (2) when the teachings of its priests are accepted without question by a faithful congregation.

These cultic aspects are perhaps most perceptible in the development of “mysteries” of the faith, open only to the initiated, not to be comprehended by non-scientists. Writes the great Norbert Wiener: “The present age of specialization has gone an unbelievable distance. Not only are we developing physicists who know no chemistry, physiologists who know no biology, but we are beginning to get the physicist who does not know physics.” As a consequence, the mysteries known only to the specialists are accepted without question by those without the necessary knowledge to judge for themselves.

Anthony Standen, distinguished British chemist who is editor of a huge encyclopedia of chemistry, writes: “What with scientists who are so deep in science that they cannot see it, and non-scientists who are too over-awed to express an opinion, hardly anyone is able to recognize science for what it is, the great Sacred Cow of our time” (Science Is a Sacred Cow, Dutton, 1950).

“Is the universe,” he continues, “to be thought of in terms of electrons and protons? Or … in terms of Good and Evil? Merely to ask the question is to realize at least one very important limitation of [science].”

The biologists, he says, try to define “life,” with ludicrous results. “They define stimulus and response in terms of one another. No biologist can define a species. And as for a genus—all attempts come to this: ‘A genus is a grouping of species that some recognized taxonomic specialist has called a genus.…’ ”

The scientist, says Standen, has substituted is for ought. “That is why,” he concludes, “we must never allow ourselves to be ruled by scientists. They must be our servants, not our masters.”

The cult has many imitators, all of them injurious to true education. The ritual words of the worship services have been adopted by areas of knowledge where no physical instrumentation is possible: psychology, sociology, aesthetics, morality. When the modern psychologist asks, “What motivational elements predominated in this behavioral manifestation?,” he is still simply asking, “Why did he do it?” And the real answer lies far beyond the reach of the cleverest electronic computer or microscope.

In general, the attitude fostered in modern education toward science is unthinking worship. As a consequence, as Martin Gardner states in his recent book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, “The national level of credulity is almost unbelievably high.”

The menace of this scientific gullibility obviously goes far beyond the classroom. It is the malady of our age, and one of which we may perish. But my immediate point is simply that an environment of anti-intellectual materialism has seriously hampered the development of students’ awareness of the moral and spiritual stature of man, by which alone he stands erect.

Writes René Dubos, a world-famous bacteriologist:

Most paradoxical is the cult’s dogma that there is no room for faith in any true search for truth. The notion is palpably false. Let me quote Warren Weaver, vice-president for the natural and medical sciences of the Rockefeller Foundation: “I believe that faith plays an essential role in science just as it clearly does in religion.” He goes on to list six basic faiths of the scientist, including the faith that nature is orderly, that the order of nature is discoverable to man, that logic is to be trusted as a mental tool, that quantitative probability statements reflect something true about nature, and so on (“A Scientist Ponders Faith,” Saturday Review, January 3, 1959). In sum, he says: “Where the scientist has faith that nature is orderly, the religionist has faith that God is good. Where the scientist believes that the order of nature is discoverable to man, the religionist believes that the moral nature of the universe is discoverable to man.” Dr. Weaver rejects the well-known aphorism of Sir Richard Gregory:

My grandfather preached the Gospel of Christ,

My father preached the Gospel of Socialism,

I preach the Gospel of Science.

But many others accept it with fervor. “God has ceased to be a useful hypothesis,” writes Julian Huxley. The problem of the nineteenth century, says another, was the death of God; that of the twentieth, the death of man.

Any humanist who speaks in these terms must be extremely careful, lest he fall into mere carping, deeply tinged by envy of the prominence and prosperity of science. Nothing could be more foolish—or more ungrateful. The lament over the low estate of the humanities in the public mind would be more touching if those responsible for the preservation and dissemination of humanistic studies had something of positive value to say, if they had a Path, a Way of Truth to declare.

5. The cult of biologism. I admit that this is a poor term, and perhaps the topic itself were better considered a subheading of the previous one. Essentially, this cult is an outgrowth of materialism, the faith that man is only biology, that he not only has glands but is glands.

As a consequence, whole segments of educational theory consider man precisely as a physicist considers an atom—one purely objective item among others of its kind, clothed with identity only as it is part of a group, the properties and motions of which are to be determined statistically, in terms of average behavior. (Years ago, Irving Langmuir, speaking of the “burden of irrationality” in science, pointed out that the laws, say, of the expansion of gases tell us how a mass of molecules behave under certain conditions of heat and pressure, but that no one can predict how a single one of the molecules will behave.)

To treat man merely as a capacity for response to stimuli, as totally the product of the forces that impinge upon him, without will or conscience, is to divest him of personality, individuality, and dignity. But the whole science of human engineering is based, more or less, on this concept. The only variation is the difference of opinion among the practitioners as to whether there remains in man some slight indeterminate center of being, inviolate to stimulus or statistical confinement, or whether he is totally susceptible to manipulation.

Among the many ramifications of this cult let me mention only two. First, the dogma that all human actions are social in their implications, to be judged purely by their effect on society. And, second, the dogma that emotions, feelings, are not essentially moral in their nature, nor the product of individual, unique, and sovereign personality, but are merely the conditioned reflexes of quivering biology.

The first, the social dogma, conceives of the individual as the physician thinks of the cells of the body—part of an organic whole, subject totally to the welfare of the organic unit (the state, in the social and political parallel), and to be excised through surgery if a cell rebels.

It is within this belief that a nationally prominent psychologist has defined education as “the engraving of desirable behavior patterns.” Through conditioning, teaching machines, Pavlovian devices of various kinds, the individual is created in the desired image. Undesirable behavior patterns are to be eradicated by a form of brainwashing and a new engraving superimposed. Dismissed as utterly outmoded is the view of each human being as a living soul, created in the image of God, with primary responsibilities as an individual to the God of his creation.

And who is to determine what kind of behavior pattern is “desirable”? That’s the hitch. The persons who most ardently would like to impose their own behavior patterns on me are the very ones whose patterns I would least like to have engraved.

At worst, this view of human existence is both irrational and evil. It is irrational because it must believe that those who impose the patterns of desirable behavior must be as totally the product of external influence, as completely a consciousness-produced-by-environment, as those who are to be manipulated. It is evil because it denies human dignity and reduces the individual to a cipher.

The second menacing product of the cult of biologism is the belief that emotions and feelings are as purely biological as the purely physiological activities of man. In other words this view denies that the quality of a person’s feelings is a measure of his moral stature, of his culture, of his civilization. It denies that the teaching of right feelings is a vital part of true education.

The “natural” emotions of a child are pretty fearful, until they have been civilized, associated with moral values, enriched with culture. Most notably, the child—and the savage—is instinctively delighted by cruelty. A child will pull the wings off a fly. A recent account of life among certain savage South American Indians describes the pleasure of the community at the antics of chickens plucked alive, with perhaps a leg or wing pulled off for good measure.

This may be the “natural” feeling of sin, and it may be an instinctive expression of the savage as biology. But it is the work of civilization, of culture, and above all of religion, to eradicate it. “Natural” man must learn the right emotions—what to laugh at, what to smile at, what to frown at.

Show me what makes a man laugh, what makes him weep, and I know the man. It is ultimately a matter of morality, not biology. Education divorced from moral values cannot teach right feeling.

The deepest and most significant emotion of all, the one this world most desperately needs to be taught, is compassion—the emotion most readily associated with the love of God for sinful man. “The tender mercies of the heathen are cruel,” says the Bible. Commandments that we deal gently, forgivingly, tenderly with each other are “unnatural” in biology. They are natural only to the regenerated spirit.

Now, this is a broad indictment. I do not pretend that I have said anything new, or that these problems are peculiar to education. They are maladies of our age. They break into dozens of major subheadings, scores of topics, hundreds of subject headings, thousands of instances.

But the correction is magnificently simple: True education, as Milton said three centuries ago, is to relearn to know God aright. Education divorced from God is capable of infinite and endless complexities and confusions. He alone is the motionless Center that gives meaning to all motion. What he is, not what man is, determines what should be and shall be.

Let me end with a quotation from that rough-mannered philosopher Carlyle (Sartor Resartus, Chapter IX):

“Cease, my much respected Herr von Voltaire,” thus apostrophizes the Professor: “shut thy sweet voice; for the task appointed thee seems finished. Sufficiently hast thou demonstrated this proposition, considerable or otherwise: That the Mythus of the Christian Religion looks not in the eighteenth century as it did in the eighth. Alas, were thy six-and-thirty quartos, and the six-and-thirty thousand other quartos and folios, all flying sheets or reams, printed before and since on the same subject, all needed to convince us of so little! But what next? Wilt thou help us to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live? What! thou hast no faculty in that kind? Only a torch for burning, no hammer for building? Take our thanks, then, and—thyself away.”

Somewhat modified, these words might be addressed to the kind of dangerous education I have been describing.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

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