Sins of Education

Dad29 sends an essay by Russell Kirk on the failings of our system of higher education as he encountered it during WWII. Let's run through his chief complaints and see how things stack up today.
There are four sins of public education: equalitarianism, technicalism, progressivism, and egotism. ...We have long been tending to reduce our educational problem to the lowest common denominator. In our anxiety to make equal those whom God created unequal, we have been as industrious, although not as successful, as was Colonel Colt. ...It does no harm for a teacher to lecture in a tone somewhat lofty for his average pupil; the dull student gains something, the average student is stirred to curiosity, and the intelligent student is pleased. This soldier never learned anything from men who came down to his level; admiration of knowledge, followed by emulation, is more effective. We talk of education for leadership; but actually we educate for mediocrity.
On the first count, things may be somewhat better at state colleges and universities than they are in the private schools. The four-year graduation rate at Harvard is 87%. At the University of Georgia, it is 54%, and at Georgia Tech it is 33%. I suppose Harvard might claim that its more selective nature means that it obtains better students, but in fact Harvard has an elaborate legacy program to permit admittance to the underqualified (especially the children of major donors). The better state schools are willing to see you fail, which means they aren't talking down to you. You'd better keep up.
...Our second curse, the popular acclaim of “practical” knowledge, of technical skills, the training of young people to minister to our comforts, is harmful not so much per se as it is incidentally; it occupies precious hours that once were given to literature, languages, and the story of the past... For manual and domestic acquirements, apprenticeship and practical experience still are the schools of greatest worth.
We are quite guilty on this point. If you look at the top degree fields in the three universities mentioned above, they are all technical skills or "ministering to our comforts," with the sole exception of Harvard's history program. Do we really need so many psychology majors? Is there really a benefit to an education degree, or a business administration degree? I've known many people with education degrees who would have been better served with a liberal arts degree in the field they were going to be teaching.
...The doctrines of the “progressive” movement in education are interestingly varied; but the assumption at the foundation of the progressivist system is that there is an easy way to learning.... Who heeds Aristotle and the Greek view of education: namely, that its object is to make man the master of his soul? John Dewey and the lesser gods that sport about him, composing the pantheon of the progressivists, ask, why exercise compulsion upon the school child? There is a very simple way to avoid compulsion: if the child doesn't like the multiplication table, let him scribble with crayons. The line of least resistance is the road to education, it is held; in consequence, the alphabet is flouted as much as possible, resulting in a splendid disregard of orthography; history and politics are metamorphosed into community civics; if a child finds Pilgrim's Progress a bit hard to read at first, give him something simpler. The notion that a student must learn by doing (act A Midsummer’s Night's Dream and not read Hamlet; play with numbered blocks, not stoop to old-fashioned tables of calculation)' is carried to such an extreme that even Bertrand Russell is alarmed...
This is very good advice, and a point on which we are quite guilty. It is possible to find teachers and a program that will carry you in the right direction, but you have to know to look for it. Most students will not know.
That egotism which is the fourth curse of our schools lies in the' unjustifiable conceit of a great many teachers. They call themselves liberal, and yet they shut their ears and eyes to all opinion but that which comes from “modern” and “progressive” sources; they prate of freedom, and yet make a closed corporation of their profession....
I haven't encountered this aspect myself, though I hear it often. It is true that almost every professor I have had has been a man or a woman of the left; it is certainly true that the numbers appear to prove that the academy is strongly leftist across the board. Nevertheless, I have not felt that any of them were close-minded, nor that I would be punished for holding different views. Perhaps I have been fortunate, but I must speak kindly of these men and women, who have done me much good.

I hope I have done them some good as well, by challenging their basic assumptions about reality -- assumptions which very much need challenging, on just the points Kirk raises. In fact it is probably time to re-examine the whole concept of the Enlightenment and the modern era, because many of our fundamental assumptions inherited from that period are simply wrong. It is not true, as John Locke taught us to believe, that equality is a pre-political, natural feature of the human condition: if equality exists, it exists only after the state is formed, within the space won by those who defend the walls. It exists only because people choose to believe in it and fight for it: those extraordinary people, who could have made themselves masters of that space, and instead used their power to make the weak their equals.

I do agree with another of Kirk's sentiments:

...If there be sacred cows in modern education, they are named psychology and sociology. It has become almost blasphemy to assail them. But any soldier who has been a year or two in barracks knows how little information psychology, that muddle of physiology and metaphysics, can give him concerning his fellow man or himself; and the man who has met the Japanese can laugh, if he lives, at the glib phrases of sociology, that jumble of history, economics, and sentiment.
It is distressing to realize that we are graduating so many people with degrees in just these worthless fields. Psychology is apparently the top field for UGA, and Sociology one of Harvard's top five. Still, the wheels of justice grind fine in their time. These things may not pass in a generation or two, but they will pass.