The Boston Globe has this great essay, by Yale Professor Anthony Kronman, about the teaching of the meaning of life in US colleges and universities. It’s long, but an excellent read.
Link: Why are we here? Colleges ignore life’s biggest questions, and we all pay the price (registration may be required)
The essay was prompted in part by the start of the school season in the US. The author ponders the history of the teaching of the meaning of life, tracing the history of upper education in the US in the process.
“In a shift of historic importance, America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom.”
The author goes on to describe how the focus on research, while bringing great benefits, also seemed to give the humanities short shrift. I was once part of this focused research world. But, as one may be able to guess after being with me for a bit, or reading my stuff, it wasn’t enough for me – there was always a part of me that had questions outside my domain. In college, I tried hard to get as much exposure to things like philosophy, art, history, often with more interest than my major subject (of which I took the minimum requirements).
The author makes a great comment:
“In the humanities, however, the legacy of the research ideal has been mixed. We know vastly more today than we did even 50 years ago about the order of Plato’s dialogues, the accuracy of Gibbon’s citations, and how Benjamin Franklin spent his time in Paris. But the research ideal has excluded the question of life’s meaning from serious academic concern as a question too large, too unformed, too personal, to be a subject of specialized research. A tenure-minded junior professor studying Shakespeare or Freud or Spinoza might re-inspect every scrap of his subject’s work with the hope of making some small but novel discovery – but would be either very brave or very foolish to write a book about Spinoza’s suggestion that a free man thinks only of life, never of death; or about Freud’s appealing, if enigmatic, statement that the meaning of life is to be found in work and love.”
Heh, that’s something I can sink my teeth into.
It was interesting to learn that in the 20s, the president of Amherst College, Alexander Meiklejohn, “defended the idea of spiritual seriousness in a nonreligious age, and thought it could be studied without dogmatic commitments”. I agree with the author that we need more programs that do this, and the author lists a few. Indeed, my freshman year (the one year I was at Allegheny College), I was fortunate to take a humanities course that I can say significantly shaped the way I think, learn, and interpret the world.
And the author makes no bones about the complexity of the question. But it is the complexity that enriches the student:
“The first is that there is more than one good answer to the question of what living is for. A second is that the number of such answers is limited, making it possible to study them in an organized way. A third is that the answers are irreconcilably different, necessitating a choice among them. A fourth is that the best way to explore these answers is to study the great works of philosophy, literature, and art in which they are presented with lasting beauty and strength. And a fifth is that their study should introduce students to the great conversation in which these works are engaged – Augustine warily admiring Plato, Hobbes reworking Aristotle, Paine condemning Burke, Eliot recalling Dante, recalling Virgil, recalling Homer – and help students find their own authentic voice as participants in the conversation.”
The author points out that in many ways, education has split long dogmatic lines, such as race and gender, and all that comes with political correctness. But my feeling is summed up as in the essay:
“There is an increasing demand among undergraduates for courses that address the big questions of life, in all their sprawling grandeur, without reticence or embarrassment.”
Complexity and honesty are critical here. And this is about spiritual direction, a spiritual direction that the simplification of religion and belief have usurped.
“What it needs is an alternative to religion, for colleges and universities to become again the places they once were – spiritually serious but nondogmatic, concerned with the soul but agnostic about God.”
And my thoughts echo what the author thinks, that this kind of education could go far in fixing the dogmatic thinking that now pervades the US.
“A richer and more open debate about ultimate values; an electorate less likely to be cowed into thinking that only the faithful have the right to invoke them; a humbler regard for the mystery of life in a world increasingly dominated by technocratic reason.”
It’s long, but a good read.
Incidentally, the author has also written a book (drink!) on the subject: “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.”
