5.
The religious perspective on morality suggests that it is in the end a sign of immaturity to object too strenuously to being treated like a child. The libertarian obsession with freedom ignores how much of our original childhood need for constraint and guidance endures within us, and therefore how much we stand to learn from paternalistic strategies. It is not very kind, nor ultimately even very freeing, to be deemed so grown up that one is left alone to do entirely as one pleases.
Even the greatest atheists may benefit from role models. Above: Sigmund Freud’s desk in London, covered in Assyrian, Egyptian, Chinese and Roman figurines. Top: Or one might prefer Virginia Woolf. (illustration credit 3.8)
IV
Education
‘The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings’—John Stuart Mill. (illustration credit 4.1)
i. What We Get Taught
1.
A busy high street in north London. In a neighbourhood studded with Cypriot bakeries, Jamaican hairdressers and Bengali takeaways, stands the campus of one of Britain’s newest universities. It is dominated by a twelve-storey asymmetrical steel tower which houses, along a series of corridors painted a vivid purple and yellow, the lecture theatres and seminar rooms of the Department of the Humanities.
Across the university, 200,000 undergraduates are enrolled on 400 different degree programmes. This particular department was inaugurated just a few months ago by a minister for education and a cousin of the Queen, in a ceremony now commemorated on an engraved granite block embedded in a wall near the toilets.
‘A home for “The best that has been said and thought in the world” ’, reads the plaque, borrowing Matthew Arnold’s famous definition of culture. The quote must have struck a chord with the university, for it reappears in the undergraduate admissions handbook and in a mural by the drinks dispenser in the basement cafeteria.
There are few things that secular society believes in as fervently as education. Since the Enlightenment, education — from primary level through to university — has been presented as the most effective answer to a range of society’s gravest ills; the conduit to fashioning a civilized, prosperous and rational citizenry.
A look at the degree courses offered by the new university reveals that over half are intended to equip undergraduates with practical skills, the sort required for successful careers in mercantile, technological societies: courses in chemistry, business, microbiology, law, marketing and public health.
But the grander claims made on behalf of education, the sort one reads of in prospectuses or hears about in graduation ceremonies, tend to imply that colleges and universities are more than mere factories for turning out technocrats and industrialists. The suggestion is that they have a yet higher task to fulficlass="underline" they may turn us into better, wiser and happier people.
As John Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: ‘The object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.’ Or, to go back to Matthew Arnold, a proper cultural education should inspire in us ‘a love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery’. At its most ambitious, he added, it should engender nothing less than the ‘noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it’.
2.
What unites such ambitious and beguiling claims is their passion — and their vagueness. It is seldom clear how education could turn students towards generosity and truth and away from sin and error, though it is typically hard to do anything other than passively lend one’s assent to this inspiring notion, given its familiarity and its sheer beauty.
Nevertheless, it would be no injustice to examine the high-flown rhetoric in the light of certain realities on the ground, as revealed by an ordinary Monday afternoon in the Faculty of the Humanities in the modern university in north London.
The choice of department is not coincidental, for the transformative and lyrical claims made on behalf of education have almost always been connected to the humanities rather than endocrinology or biostatistics. It is the study of philosophy, history, art, the classics, languages and literature that has been thought to yield the most complex, subtle and therapeutic dimensions of the educational experience.
In a corner classroom on the seventh floor, a group of second-year history students are following a lecture about agricultural reform in eighteenth-century France. The argument made by their professor, who has spent twenty years researching the subject, is that the cause of declining crop yields between 1742 and 1798 had less to do with bad harvests than with the relatively low price of agricultural land, which encouraged landlords to invest their money in trade rather than farming.
On the floor below, in the classics department, fifteen students are comparing the use of natural imagery in the works of the Roman poets Horace and Petronius. The professor is pointing out that while Horace identifies nature with lawlessness and decay, Petronius, in many ways the more pessimistic of the two poets, reveres it for precisely the opposite qualities. Perhaps because the air ventilation system has broken down and the windows have jammed shut, the atmosphere is a little sluggish. Few students seem to be following the argument with the intent the professor might have hoped for when he was awarded his PhD in Oxford twenty years ago (‘Patterns of Meta-narrative in Euripides’ Ion’).
(illustration credit 4.2)
The application of the university’s academics to their tasks is intense and moving. And yet it is hard to see how the content of their courses and the direction of their examination questions bear any significant relationship to Arnold’s and Mill’s ideals. Whatever rhetoric may be rehearsed in its prospectuses, the modern university appears to have precious little interest in teaching its students any emotional or ethical life skills, much less how to love their neighbours and leave the world happier than they found it.
The prerequisites for a BA in philosophy, for example, are limited to a familiarity with the central topics of metaphysics (substance, individuation, universals) and the completion of a thesis on concepts of intentionality in Quine, Frege or Putnam. An equivalent degree in English literature will be awarded to those who can successfully tackle The Waste Land on allegorical and anagogic levels and trace the influence of Seneca’s dramatic theories on the development of Jacobean theatre.
Graduation speeches stereotypically identify liberal education with the acquisition of wisdom and self-knowledge, but these goals have little bearing on the day-to-day methods of departmental instruction and examination. To judge by what they do rather than what they airily declaim, universities are in the business of turning out a majority of tightly focused professionals (lawyers, physicians, engineers) and a minority of culturally well-informed but ethically confused arts graduates aptly panicked about how they might remuneratively occupy the rest of their lives.