Job Training No Substitute for Liberal Education
Real liberal education frees the mind and equips self-governing people to question the cultural norms of their own time. The cultural norms in our postmodern America should be questioned.
Many Americans today—likely a large majority—assume the purpose of higher education is job training. Many cannot imagine the purpose of higher education to be anything other than job training.
As memory of liberal education fades from the postmodern American mind, the distinction between colleges and universities on the one hand, and vocational or votech schools on the other, has nearly disappeared. A college education, today—including most graduate programs and terminal degrees—for all intents and purposes—is votech training.
This fact reveals much about the crisis of our age, which ultimately is an intellectual or philosophic crisis.
It might sound odd at first to suggest the biggest problem we face is a crisis of philosophy, yet it is true. Our postmodern way of life—including the regime that now commands and controls virtually every aspect of our lives and recognizes no principled limit to its own power, as well as the popular rejection of reality and basic laws of nature—reflects ideas about how we should live. Those ideas were produced by philosophic thought.
Moreover, most Americans lack the intellectual and philosophic equipment to think through these important human questions because they approached college career as mere job training and they received what they wanted: A narrow set of technical, professional skills.
What we used to call liberal education had little to do with skills training. If you wanted to learn how to be a blacksmith, for example, you worked as an apprentice with a blacksmith until you could do the work on your own.
Liberal education is different. It emerged from the closed societies of the ancient world for the purpose of freeing the human mind. The premise was that the freedom of the human mind to think, discover, discuss, debate, question, and challenge, is important because knowing truth is more important than knowing the prejudices most popular in one’s own time and place.
The paradigmatic model of liberal education was the tragic life and death of Socrates. That famous ancient Greek lived within a closed society in the sense that every Athenian was surrounded from birth until death with Athenian laws, Athenian stories, Athenian gods, Athenian ceremonies, Athenian honors and punishments, Athenian codes of morality, Athenian views about what is shameful and what is not, Athenian assertions of truth. Every Athenian was surrounded from birth until death with the conventional, constructed Athenian way of life.
Socrates questioned all of it. Or, rather, Socrates questioned the most important parts of it.
Socrates thought the philosophic pursuit of truth—which requires free thought—is more important and nobler than cheerleading for authoritative Athenian orthodoxy. In this way, Socrates was radical even among radicals. Eventually his fellow citizens executed him, lawfully, for his unending questioning of dominant, authoritative Athenian opinions and the doubts he raised regarding the most important Athenian beliefs.
Had Socrates not challenged the dominant, authoritative opinions of his day, our world today would likely be strikingly different: There likely would not be two thousand years of the philosophy and science we now take for granted.
That freedom of the mind exemplified by Socrates is, for most Americans today, not the kind of educational experience they want or expect from college. Yet, it should be.
There are few studies of higher education in the United States more insightful than Allan Bloom’s chapter on “The Student and the University” in The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argues, persuasively, that genuine liberal education—in which a student confronts thoughtful, intelligent discussions about the highest and permanent human questions—should be a life-transforming experience:
True liberal education requires that the student’s whole life be radically changed by it, that what he learns may affect his actions, his tastes, his choices, that no previous attachment be immune to examination and hence re-evaluation.
This is why, Bloom argues,
[T]he students who have any chance of getting a liberal education are those who do not have a fixed career goal, or at least those for whom the university is not merely a training ground for a profession. Those who do have such a goal go through the university with blinders on, studying what the chosen discipline imposes on them while occasionally diverting themselves with an elective course that attracts them.
A typical university education, which used to be philosophically deep because its aim was morally high—freeing the mind so that an individual could think for himself—has become shallow. As a model of shallow modern technical training common to the modern America university, Bloom focuses on the MBA, which he calls “a great disaster.”
It is the establishment…of the MBA as the moral equivalent of the MD or JD degree, meaning a way of insuring a lucrative living by the mere fact of a diploma that is not the mark of scholarly achievement. The effect of the MBA is to corral a horde of students who want to get into business school and to put blinders on them, to legislate an illiberal, officially approved program for them at the outset, like premeds who usually disappear into their required courses and are never heard from again. Premed, prelaw, and probusiness students are distinctively tourists in the liberal arts.
These are students who take a few courses in the liberal arts only because they are required to do so, in order to graduate, not because they think those courses will genuinely challenge them to question deeply the right or best way of living.
Bloom is not wrong.
Education—real liberal education—should prepare an individual human being to think through fundamental human questions: What is the true, the good, and the beautiful? What is magnanimity? Is there any purpose to being, and if so, what is it? Is freedom real or an illusion? Is there a reason besides punishment to refrain from injustice? Can knowledge be certain? What is God?
Truth should the ultimate goal of education, toward which all parts of education should aim. Our English word “education” comes from the Latin root ēdūcere (ay-dook-er-ay) which means to lead or take out. The roots of education are connected to Plato’s famous allegory in which the philosopher leaves the cave, attracted to the allure of the sun and the prospect of seeing things in the light of day, as they truly are.
Education, in the most serious meaning of the word, in the classical and highest meaning, is a dangerous undertaking. It is about turning away from the shadows of one’s own cave toward the light of truth.
Our cave today is a postmodern, progressive United States where freshmen college students insist there is no objective right or wrong while also insisting it’s wrong to call a human male “he” (and are deeply insulted by being called “freshmen”); where the many assume government bureaucrats should think about any important human questions that remain unanswered; where discovery and understanding of truth has been replaced with expressions of subjective feelings, narratives, and cultural prejudices.
Helping young Americans to think about and question the idols of our postmodern cave today requires much more than mere job training. It’s a challenge that requires liberal education. Liberal education, arguably, is more needed now than ever before precisely because Americans have traded liberal education for job and skills training.