WHAT IS education, and what is it good for? Education is one of those lofty things we are all supposed to be in favor of, but no one really seems to know what it is. What can justify spending many thousands of dollars and four of the best years of our short lives? Some may think the question is naïve or beside the point: We're here because we get better-paying jobs with a college degree. In a few cases, we may even learn some skills useful to our jobs. Besides that, we're having a good time, free from parents and cares -- and that tends to mean loud parties with alcohol, as well as what tends to occur afterwards.
But is that all we want from the time in our lives in which, above all other times, we are able to discover and become what we are? Are we missing something that a university, above all other institutions, is meant to provide? I think many of us feel a vague dissatisfaction with what the University offers -- and we're right to feel that way. Of course this problem is not limited to the University, but is typical of so-called higher education in America today.
Compared with the past, we have an explosion of fields and majors, and an ever more narrow and specialized training of the intellect. But as far as any education of our hearts and souls, any education in the highest or most interesting sense, there we are left to our own devices -- except for the stern admonishment to be non-judgmental. We receive no education, except the negative education to condemn, as prudish or intolerant, any small impulses against coarseness or vulgarity that we may detect in ourselves.
To take a recent news example, involving sexual contraception in middle schools, a right-thinking person will want the schools to distribute rubbers to 12-year olds, and perhaps even provide them with (non-smoking) rooms in which to copulate, but only an unenlightened yahoo would feel that anything had been lost in so doing. There is a steady and humorless moralizing against those who dare to express any awareness of higher or more subtle concerns in the sexual education of children than facilitating their disease- and guilt-free copulation.
The closest we come to getting a liberal education is in the first two years, with the distribution or "area" requirements. As in other major universities, that proves to be little more than a requirement that one choose courses from different areas; as Richard Handler, associate dean for undergraduate academic programs, observed, "The area requirements provide breadth of exposure to a range of fields.., as well as help students to choose their majors." There is not even an attempt to claim liberal education should have a specific goal or content: some essential knowledge that all should learn.
It would already be a kind of education -- and by no means a trivial one -- to see our lack of education for what it is. Liberal arts education is, as the name suggests, a "freeing," and the desire to make the arduous effort to free oneself requires that one first discover that one is not free. As the current confrontation with radical Islam reminds us, it is possible to be physically free, but believe in a good so much at odds with what one is by nature that it leads one to sacrifice one's very life as much as any slave does. And whether it is Islam that would be the true sacrifice of one's life -- that is precisely what we don't know. Perhaps it is living as a white-collar professional, say an investment banker or lawyer or social worker, that turns out to be the inhuman sacrifice of one's life -- and not least in the self-forgetting that such a life implies by the smallness of its vision.
To decide, we would have to know what it means to have a good life or to be good. That is why self-knowledge is the true goal of a liberal education, and why for much of our tradition, a liberal education has meant a shared education in the finest political and moral works, such as those of Plato, Plutarch, Tacitus and Shakespeare.
We do not turn to them to learn the history of their nations or cultures or times, though they teach us that in passing, but instead to discover what human beings are when seen without the prejudices of our nation or culture or times. We turn to them to see ourselves for the first time. And that is education.
Manuel Lopez's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at mlopez@cavalierdaily.com.
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