Educational or Utilitarian?

That's a question I've posed to professors, students, experts, and radio hosts for years. Another construction might be, education or ignorance? If the health and well-being of a republic depends upon the ability of its citizens to make intelligent and informed choices, as the Founders and others asserted, then the quality of the education provided by our institutions of higher learning is crucial to a prosperous, free future.

Paul J. Cella poses an interesting question: does modern higher education make us more or less susceptible to propaganda? He defines propaganda as "malicious manipulation of the mind," and, after exploring the matter, answers that today higher education is likely as not to enable the propagandist as to arm the citizen subjected to manipulation.

Years ago I taught in the great books program at Michigan, and I used to tell students that reading the Greeks and Romans, the medieval and Renaissance writers, made them less susceptible to being suckered by every con man they encountered. Absent expanding their mental horizons into the past, they would have to rely only on what they learned in their own lives, and none of us lives so fully as to make our story very interesting or helpful.

It's that last part -- the helpful or utilitarian part of learning -- that often marks the great divide between advocates of the liberal arts and those who see college as a training ground for careers. Paul Cella takes the position most articulately advanced by John Henry Newman, namely that a university should seek to impart that which is good, true, and aims toward a higher end than mere career choice. I'm certainly sympathetic to that, inasmuch as the presence of significant numbers or successful, smart, industrious, and innovative businessmen who regularly vote against their own interests or voice opinions antithetical to the health of a free society shows how easily misled some are when faced with a world beyond their expertise.

And yet, it can't be denied that those same people add immeasurably to the richness of our society. Here I mean not simply wealth, although affluence is a great blessing to any society that achieves it. (Few affectations are more absurd than that struck by some whose sympathies for Newman's ideas lead them to condemn the very means by which they learned of the great man's books -- college education as a middle class expectation.) The grayness of life in developing countries results from a poverty not just of material goods, but of the mind as well. Ignorance, lack of opportunity and hope, political oppression -- these are common in lands where no entrepreneurial, bourgeois class can form.

I'll have more to say on this matter in the weeks ahead, but I'll leave you with a thought derived from Rush Limbaugh. One of Rush's truisms is that many people are susceptible to bad economic news of the doom and gloom variety emanating from a partisan media anxious to oust any tax-cutter. They believe that things are bad not because they're suffering, but in spite of their own well-being. It's the other guy, either down the street or across the country, who's suffering and for whom they're concerned.

To some degree, I think, the same can be said for those who believe we've become a nation of vulgar illiterates. Not that their aren't plenty of such people around -- look out the window if you don't believe me. But I reject the notion that the people doing most of the working, living, fighting, and dying in and for America are so awful, nor can I accept that their critics are quite so clever or sophisticated themselves. Proximity to the punditocracy will reduce anyone's reliance on them for ready-made explanations of all creation.

More to come.