But the four-year experience at a college or university is not supposed to be training - it’s supposed to be an education. It’s supposed to instill self-discipline, the habits of rigorous thought, and a respect for specialized bodies of knowledge.
How well are our colleges and universities achieving this goal? According to scholar Tom Nichols, not so well:
Higher education is supposed to cure us of the false belief that everyone is as smart as everyone else. Unfortunately, in the twenty-first century the effect of widespread college attendance is just the opposite: the great number of people who have been in or near a college think of themselves as the educated peers of even the most accomplished scholars and experts. College is no longer a time devoted to learning and personal maturation; instead, the stampede of young Americans into college and the consequent competition for their tuition dollars have produced a consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right.
Colleges and universities are entrusted with society’s two greatest treasures: ideas and young people. The task for educational institutions is to bring the ‘ideas’ and the ‘young people’ into contact, and into engagement, with each other.
The continued existence of civilization and culture depend on this task. If young people are to eventually have meaningful debates and disagreements about foundational ideas, they must first have explored those ideas and the authors who put them onto paper.
For young people to think consequentially about liberty, for example, they will have had to explore the writings of John Locke, Thomas Paine, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and others. The educators should not, and do not, expect that the students will automatically agree or disagree with these texts. But the students should wrestle with these texts.
Someone who has not read widely and extensively is not able to analyze civilization or contribute much to it. As scholar Robert Bork writes,
If, as Brigette Berger has quite plausibly asserted, “the fate of the modern university and the fate of Western civilization are inextricably intertwined,” our prospects at the moment do not seem bright. Universities are central cultural institutions. Their preservation of the great works and traditions of Western civilization, including the traditions of rationality and skepticism, have been crucial to the growth of individual freedom, respect for the rule of law, and scientific progress.
An honest critique of current colleges and universities reveals that some of them offer mere training instead of education; others offer a pleasant social experience; a few offer credentials which help their graduate find jobs; and there are those which encourage passionate but sadly uninformed socio-political engagement.
It is still possible to get an education - instead of training - but it requires a students to carefully navigate a college or university, to challenge the mind, to find the courses and classes which wrestle with ideas and texts. But this type of education is not encouraged by the institutions themselves, nor by a student’s peers, nor by the general impressions given by the media and by those segments of society which have already lost the penchant for contemplative and reflective thought.
