Speaking of higher education
So someone is investing in colleges and extending the opportunity for young people to advance in higher learning.
What is higher education these days?
Higher education exposes ingratiating talk as the counterfeit of teaching; rote learning as the counterfeit of thought; mere opinion as the counterfeit of judgment; enthusiasm as the counterfeit of principle.
So that’s what it’s not.
If the term “higher education†is to be distinguished from other forms of learning or training, surely the distinguishing feature cannot simply be the number of years students have devoted to the cultivation of one or another specific ability…
No, what the term refers to is the study of things that are themselves higher; higher in the order of abstraction, higher in that plane of thought and of action on which the examined life is lived. Understood in these terms, higher education found itself a century and a half ago on a collision course with what the general public was equally pleased to call “the real world,†the world of commerce, careers and popular estimations of success.
Socrates said, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. And he didn’t accept the Sophists’ clever spin on what comprised worth or truth.
From the first, the very atmosphere of higher education was alive with criticism, with the “Sic et non†that conduces not to skepticism but to inquiry; with the viva voce that every aspiring don must endure as more seasoned minds test and taunt for the purpose of cleansing and empowering. G. K. Chesterton’s great “Dumb Ox,†Thomas Aquinas, single-handedly and carefully examined some ten-thousand objections to positions he would oppose or defend.
Brilliantly. That’s the purest form of reasoning and leads to the liveliest debates. We’ve lost that in modern academia, at least in most places.
It is a higher education that pulls us up out of the distractions of the moment and allows us to see further, to see more clearly where we’ve been, what we’ve done, who we are, who we might become…
Perhaps under prevailing conditions such an education is simply beyond the resources—material, personal, even moral resources—of our colleges and universities. Perhaps the now universal practice of counting publications and tracking grant revenue as the means by which to establish and reward members of a faculty is so deeply entrenched that there can be no genuine community of scholars, no systematic and disciplined examination of the moral dimensions of life.
But perhaps…..just maybe…..there are more benefactors out there like the anonymous donors below, who can shore up any remnants we still have of classical liberal education, with gifts. Given on condition of intellectual honesty. Start with schools of education, and teach it to the teachers.
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Talk about the higher things is definitely a hard sell these days when it is generally accepted that the only really actionable information comes from a lab or a statistician. The point of higher education and the 7 liberal arts was to equip men and women with skill sets they’d need to answer questions now considered inconsequential. One was to graduate with the math needed to machine propellers AND the rhetoric and music needed to wax poetical about the miracle of human flight.
There’s hope, though. There are those pockets of people who still talk about real things both “seen and unseen” (like Christians), or get concerned about how their food is grown or why their sneakers are so cheap (like social activists). They may not all talk to each other all the time, but they all testify to the relevance of higher questions that higher education seeks to address. They all, in their own way, give testimony to those things that often seem impossible to the modern, heavily materialist worldview of scientific naturalism.