As Higher Education Loses the War on Anti-Intellectualism and Greed, Aesthetics Are the Forgotten Casualty

When I was a high school senior choosing a college, one of my main criteria was aesthetics. I demanded a beautiful campus, with historic, ivy-covered buildings, with wood-framed chalkboards in the classrooms that hadn’t been replaced by ugly, modern whiteboards. I wanted formality, ideally academic robes, and the ability to live in a dormitory on a leafy, idyllic campus for all four years. I wanted to feel my place in a long line of scholars, going back to ancient Greece, soaking up knowledge from venerable library books that had served generations of learners. If Harry Potter had existed then, I would have said I wanted a university version of Hogwarts. Oxford or Cambridge clearly would have suited me best but, as an American, I sought out the most aesthetically-suitable of the New World options. Luckily, the U.S. does have a wide selection of historic colleges. But it might not have them for much longer. Higher education was already under threat in the United States before COVID-19, and it appears that the pandemic will serve as the final nail in the coffin, relegating the United States to the Third World status that its lack of an adequate social safety net has revealed it deserves.

Anti-intellectualism, manifested as a belief that your ignorance is as good as my knowledge, to paraphrase Asimov, has led to widespread denigration of the value of higher education. The Internet, potentially a way to equalise the dissemination of knowledge, has led to a devaluation of experts. “Why do I need to go to college when I have Google?” is the new excuse of the undereducated. Colleges are complicit in their own demise by offering not just individual courses online but entire online degree programs, up to and including doctoral level. Institutions saw online education as a way to increase revenue because online students don’t require campus facilities or staff, and courses can be taught by grossly underpaid adjuncts, who can be hired on a per-course basis, without the expense of benefits. A college can charge the same tuition for an online course as for the in-person version, but its costs are exponentially less.

The third fatal blow to higher education, after anti-intellectualism and online education, is the vocational attitude adopted by potential students and their parents in response to the outrageous costs of tuition and fees for a four-year undergraduate degree. A college education used to be the ticket to a white-collar job, and higher earnings than your high school-educated peers. But the 6-figure price tag of college, coupled with the lifelong indentured servitude of student loans, has driven students to think of themselves as customers, buying a degree that will lead to a job that pays enough to justify the expense of student loans. There is no intellectual curiosity, no learning for its own sake. Students go through the motions of taking classes, insistent that the money they’ve paid entitles them to passing grades in each course, and a degree, regardless of whether they have done any work or learned anything. They also require that degree to lead to a specific job. The result of this attitude is a drastic decline in the number of students majoring in the social sciences and humanities, and an increase in students choosing majors like nursing. When I went to college, I was told that what I majored in as an undergrad was largely irrelevant. The point was to receive a good liberal arts education that would imbue me with the writing, analytical, and critical thinking skills to embark on the career of my choice. Specialisation, I was told, should come in grad school. It’s impossible to imagine any high school senior being given that advice today.

This attitude of four years of college being an idyll of reading and intellectual discussions on a leafy campus harkens back to the days when higher education was the exclusive purview of the wealthy. Only those who did not need to make a living, who came from family money, had the leisure to study and learn. Indeed, no matter how intelligent you were, like poor Jude, you could not gain entry to a university in the UK unless you had the fortune to be born into the higher classes. I wasn’t; I was the child of a poor single mother, and female, both of which would have precluded my receiving any education at all in previous eras. 

So, I am not waxing nostalgic about a time when most people were excluded from university education. But there was a golden age in both Europe and the United States, after World War II, and the GI Bill, when higher education was opened to all, based on merit rather than money, sex, or class. That was a time when you could afford to go to college regardless of your background, and you could devote yourself to getting a liberal arts education rather than viewing higher education as vocational. Technical and vocational schools were for the non-college-bound, the electricians and hair dressers, a grey area between blue- and white-collar work that requires some training beyond high school. They serve as a modern replacement for apprenticeship.

Now, the pandemic has caused most colleges and universities in the United States to send students home to finish out the spring semester via online learning. Graduation ceremonies have been cancelled, and whether in-person learning will resume in the autumn is as yet undecided. Some high school seniors are choosing to take a gap year, attend school online or closer to home, or forego college altogether. Schools have been pressed to partially refund room and board money for the spring semester, and students are suing to recover a portion of their tuition, arguing that the hastily arranged online versions of their courses are not an equivalent learning experience. Federal aid has so far pumped $14 billion into schools that are haemorrhaging money, laying off staff and faculty, and facing potential closure, but it’s a drop in the proverbial bucket. Schools have requested $50 billion more,  just as an initial Band-Aid, with hundreds of billions more needed to keep them from closing if enrolment drops in the fall, as it is almost guaranteed to do.

That money will not be forthcoming from Congress so schools will close, and with their closure the traditional college experience will disappear forever. In a post-pandemic world, small colleges with quaint, picture-postcard campuses will have closed, and students will be stuck with dodgy online schools, community colleges, or big universities with ugly, modern buildings. The transfer of learning opportunities to new environments will deprive future students of the opportunity to spend four of their most formative years on the quad, learning purely for its own sake, enjoying an idyllic, transitional time between childhood and adulting, developing a moral compass, and a sense of their place in the history of learning. No online course can replicate having an engaging, intellectually-stimulating class in a historic building on a crisp autumn day, watching the leaves change outside the classroom windows. No more discussions spilling over into communal meals in the dining hall, followed by late night study sessions in the library, and deep conversations in the dormitory common rooms. These experiences are a vital part of the learning process; they cannot be replicated online nor in ugly, modern facilities.

I mourn the loss of the college campus and the traditional college experience. It's a vital part of growing up to be an intelligent, educated adult. I worry, from the perspective of historic preservation, what will happen to the campuses when so many schools close. But there isn't a damn thing I can do about it. The forces of anti-intellectualism and capitalist greed have won out over aesthetics and learning. Knowledge, as it turns out, isn't power. 

Crescat scientia; vita excolatur: U of C tells students where they can stick their safe spaces

It's that time of year, when helicopter parents alight on college campuses to deposit their precious snowflakes into a carefully-structured-and-scripted environment free of critical thinking, analytical debate, and intellectual rigour.  (Judging from my local state school, sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll are apparently still okay, though.)  Institutions around the country have bent over backwards to enact speech codes in response to student demands to ensure that their college education is free of any words and ideas that might hurt their widdle feelings and/or make them feel 'uncomfortable'.  So, it was a pleasant surprise this morning to see that, in a move sure to get the knickers of every SJW in a twist, the University of Chicago sent the following letter to incoming freshmen.  Go ahead and read the whole thing.  I'll wait.

Click photo to enlarge to readable size.  Or
get a magnifying glass, your choice.

Take particular note of this:

"You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion, and even disagreement.  At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort."

And this:

"Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called “trigger warnings,” we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual “safe spaces” where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own."

The letter links to a report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, which includes this statement:

“It is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.  Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”  (Emphasis added.)

Speech codes, in case you haven't been following the reductio ad absurdum of academic censorship, and their bastard offspring, trigger warnings and safe spaces, restrict speech that would be protected by the First Amendment outside of campus.  Public colleges and universities are prohibited from enacting unconstitutional restrictions on campus speech, although many of them remain blissfully oblivious to their illegality and do so anyway.  Private schools are free to do as they choose, although, as institutions of higher education, they have an inherent obligation to embrace and encourage the free exchange of ideas.

It should be prima facie obvious that all of these forms of censorship are antithetical to a free society, let alone a place of higher learning.  Speech control is tantamount to thought control.  The belief that these protections are warranted follows, in some cases, from a viewpoint that college isn't the real world:  College students may no longer be caterpillars but they are not yet butterflies and they need protection in this delicate chrysalis stage in order to be able to eventually spread their wings.  It's true that college is a unique transitional stage but fashioning it into a solipsistic cocoon is hardly preparation for the real world.  If students are so sensitive that they cannot learn outside of a safe space replete with trigger warnings and stripped of all inadvertent microaggressions, what the hell are they going to do when they graduate?

Even scarier, in other cases, justification for campus censorship lies in a fundamental lack of understanding of the value of free speech and the dangers of viewpoint discrimination.  We all agree that racism is wrong, the thinking goes, and racial minorities have suffered long enough, so by prohibiting any expression that may be interpreted as racist, whether intended that way or not, we are simply ensuring that minority students are shielded from any vestiges of racism that remain in the unenlightened.  We are taking our duty to provide education seriously: We are teaching students what they are allowed to think, just like in the USSR, Maoist China, and madrassas.  Oh, wait….. 

You thought schools were supposed to teach students how to think not what to think?  Yeah, you are a little behind the times.  Wake up and smell the Fair Trade decaf and don't be late for your course on how The Vagina Monologues is insensitive to transgender women.

So, seeing U of C buck the trend and stand up for free expression on college campuses made my day.  Hell, it might even have restored my faith in humanity.  But let's not get carried away – we still have to get through the election.

Homeschooling Should Be Illegal

As I read more about the latest back-to-the-land resurgence, I see certain features crop up repeatedly.  Making rather than buying, producing your own food organically, keeping chickens and bees, bartering, community involvement, and homeschooling.  All of these are positive developments except that last one.  Opting out of the corporate economy for environmental and health reasons, for quality of life and better use of limited time, those are all necessary directions we need to move in to repair the earth, our health, and our sanity.  But I draw the line at DIY and self-sufficiency when it comes to education.

I have two main objections to homeschooling.  The first is because most (before the flames rise, I am aware that this does not apply to all) homeschoolers are religious and they are not trying to educate their children so much as prevent their education.  They want them taught myth and superstition in place of fact in some areas, and they want them kept completely ignorant in others.  I just watched the movie "Tangled" for the first time this week.  The evil 'mother' keeps Rapunzel imprisoned in the tower by brainwashing her to believe that the outside world is too evil, selfish, and dangerous for Rapunzel to handle.  She keeps assuring her that what she is doing is for her own good.  When Rapunzel eventually escapes, she realizes she was being misled to serve the selfish ends of her kidnapper.  Religious homeschoolers are aware that their children will learn that the superstitions they are being forcefed to control them are bullshit if they are ever exposed to any competing information.  The brainwashing can only be effective if development of critical and analytical thinking skills is repressed, and if ignorance is maintained.  It is much harder to control people who are educated.  Think about it:  A girl being taught that she must remain at home until her father chooses a husband for her, that she must go from obeying her father to obeying her spouse, that she must have no ambition beyond being a SAHM, and that higher education and working outside the home are both wrong for women, must be kept away from girls who are being taught that men and women are equal, that she can marry whomever she chooses, or not marry at all, that she can go to college and graduate school and have any career under the sun.  If she is not kept isolated and ignorant, how can she be kept down?

We have all heard about the United States falling behind in math and science and no wonder when increasing numbers of kids are being taught that the earth is 6,000 years old.  The purpose of education is to dispel ignorance, to replace superstition with factual knowledge.  As a society, we require parents to keep their children in school until at least the age of 16.  Parents have some rights but forcing or allowing their children to remain ignorant (and possibly become liabilities to society) is not one of them.  There is a movement afoot to raise the age to 18 (or until a high school diploma is obtained) and about time, too.  But as long as homeschooling parents meet minimal state requirements for attendance, there is virtually no oversight of what, if anything, they are teaching their children.  This is appalling and completely unacceptable.  We cannot stop parents from indoctrinating their offspring into their religion of choice (although we should be able to prevent them from performing permanent mutilation on them), but we should be able to prevent religious indoctrination from taking the place of education.

My second objection to homeschooling is how it denigrates the value of knowledge and the role of educated, trained, and skilled teachers in imparting that knowledge.  No parent is qualified to teach every subject through the high school level.  I will concede that, at the elementary level, there are certainly some parents who could teach their children the very basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, and even some other subjects.  But no parent is equipped to teach all subjects at the high school or even middle school level.  The Internet is making it easier for parents to get around this problem.  If they do not speak a foreign language, they can sign the kid up for online classes, and the same for other subjects.  But online courses are no substitute for a proper classroom environment with a flesh-and-blood teacher in front of you, and other learners beside you struggling to master the same material.  By claiming that they can educate their children through high school at home, parents are showing disgusting arrogance, hubris, and ignorance of the importance of proper education.

Now, I am aware of the growing horror show that is our public education system.  I know that some parents have good reason to fear that their children would not learn anything at school because the teachers are too busy breaking up knife fights in the hallways.  Concerns about the quality of teachers, the unequal distribution of resources in wealthy and poor school districts, the length of the commute for some students to get to and from school, and the weakness of a curriculum that is increasingly dictated by sponsoring corporations and standardized tests are all legitimate.  But the solution to these problems is not to opt out of the education system.  Home schooling provides an escape valve that should not exist, so that parents can retreat from these problems instead of tackling them head on.  We need secular parents fighting the introduction of creationism into the curriculum, not withdrawing their children to avoid it.

Notice that I did not make the argument that homeschooled students are under-socialized.  On the contrary, since homeschooling has increased in popularity, there are many groups they can join, and local schools often let them participate in sports and extracurricular activities.  They can volunteer, hold part-time jobs, and otherwise get plenty of socialization.  My argument is with the curriculum itself, not extracurricular activities.

I don't believe that homeschooling will ever be outlawed.  As public schools deteriorate, and the Internet offers more curricular options, more parents, both secular and religious, are embracing it.  I am just recording here that I think this is a bad idea.  It is taking DIY a bit too far.  Fix the schools, don't abandon them.