Flourishing

Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con links to a fascinating article by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar. Read the article here.

Sometimes I wonder whether (and to what extent) the university aids or inhibits human flourishing. Deresiewicz wonders too. His article, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” raises at least five ways that elite universities inhibit their students:

1. They make their students unable to talk with people different from themselves.
2. They inculcate their students with a false sense of self-worth.
3. They tempt their students to mediocrity (the Gentleman’s B).
4. They rob their students of the chance to not be rich.
5. They are profoundly anti-intellectual in that they value achievement over ideas.

Here’s a quote:

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, perhaps we ought to question the ways we are forming students (both undergraduate, graduate, and post docs) to live their lives?