"Purpose of Education"

Sydney M. Williams

Essays from Essex.

“Purpose of Education”

August 17, 2018

“Education is the movement from darkness to light.”

                                                                                                Allan Bloom (1930-1992)

                                                                                                The Closing of the American Mind, 1987

With ten grandchildren, the two oldest of whom will be off to college in the fall of 2019 and the youngest only eight years behind, the state of higher education has been on my mind. Much has been written about the need for greater emphasis on STEM classes – that China and India outstrip us in graduates each year in those fields. We read of cryptocurrencies and cyber theft and recognize the need to understand the former and thwart the second. There are students talented in these fields, and they should be encouraged. Less, however, has been written and said about the decline in humanities and the concomitant attenuation of morals, values and character that are their progeny. When a student at Morehouse College in 1947, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote for the college newspaper: “The function of education is to think intensively and critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

No country in the world has colleges and universities so well endowed, and so highly regarded as does the United States. Yet, too often, university administrators see their job as letting students design faddish majors that reflect a cultural-relevancy, advocating diversity in all ways, excepting ideas and preparing students for what is their view of a multi-cultural and globally-competitive world. There have been consequences.

One is the politically-correct model they follow. Students are deprived of needed contrary and, at times, uncomfortable, speech and opinions. Thus, there is no open and free debate. Insularity in a world of seven billion people, awash with myriad philosophies and political system, does little to encourage curiosity, increase understanding, reduce arrogance and hone rhetoric. Another consequence is an emphasis on STEM that supersedes humanities. Certainly, we need students to use their creative talents to invent new products and services, but we also must consider the consequences, the “whats” and “whys” of their creations. Why is it needed and what might be its longer-term effects? Much of life is learning to balance and temper the proven versus the unproven, dreams from reality. Humanities help. History teaches perspective. Literature provides insights. Philosophy allows for nuances. Religion makes us think beyond ourselves. Students need to consider all sides of an argument, even to question the wisdom and motives of their instructors and professors. When 90% of the teaching and administrative staff is of one political mind-set, prejudice sets in. And, as Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in National Review, “…bias is a force multiplier of ignorance.” Why, for example, should trigger warnings and safe rooms be necessary if the cloistered student is to become an unsheltered working woman or man? Do such actions prepare them for the world, or do they only offer cocoon-like protection for the duration of their time at university?

There is a fundamental purpose (and need) for education that stretches beyond math and science, which are subjects more germane for graduate and trade schools. Students should first read and learn classics that have stood the test of time. They are the threads that bind generations. Students should study philosophy and learn economics. They must read history to understand how governments have evolved, to learn from other’s mistakes and successes. They should read poetry to appreciate the beauty of words. They must think independently and communicate effectively. The world is in constant flux, but basic principles of morals, ethics and character do not change. Even vivid imaginations cannot predict the positives and negatives of artificial intelligence: which jobs will be created and which replaced. In a recent issue of National Review, Justin Dyer and Ryan Streeter recently wrote, “As artificial intelligence increasingly performs STEM-specific tasks, greater expectations should be placed on the liberal arts to cultivate the creativity and curiosity that robots cannot do.” Minds must be prepared for an unknowable future.

As well, a good education allows people to live rich and rewarding lives – not only in the material sense – but ones in which literature, art and music can be appreciated; to understand other cultures and people; to know one’s heritage and to recognize there are religions whose values do not match ours; and that a moral sense, while not universal, does exist. C.S. Lewis once wrote: “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” Theodore Roosevelt went further: “To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, David Books referred to a metaphor I have used – that the purpose of life is the journey, not the destination. While agreeably reminiscent of Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, The Places You’ll Go,” Mr. Brooks raises the question that such attitudes lead to narcissism and away from social connections. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute wrote an article, “The Origins of Our Second Civil War,” in which he laments the role of higher education that has fostered debt, radicalism and intolerance, and an absence of shared knowledge, of works like the Bible, Shakespeare, writers during the Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers. He concludes that religious and spiritual reawakening are crucial to reforming the university. He suggests that we confuse technological advancement with improvements in the human condition. “…technology,” he writes, “is simply the delivery pump…That water can be delivered ever more rapidly does not mean it ever changes its essence.”

Albert Einstein allegedly once said, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”  A liberal education should cultivate curiosity. It is the fuel that fires the brain. A good education should make one less certain they have all the answers and more eager to question, to debate and to learn. My father, sitting at the dining room table, would talk to my brother and me. There were times when we would find his ambivalence unsettling: “on the one hand, on the other.” However, we were being taught to question our conclusions. Aristotle allegedly said: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” You hold a thought or an opinion in your mind, weigh it, view it from different angles, challenge it and either accept or reject it. The university should urge its students to question assumptions, and debate assertions, no matter their ubiquity, popularity and province. The university should encourage and sate curiosity. Doing so, the student will satisfy Socrates’ admonition to know thyself. Shakespeare has Polonius say something similar to Laertes in Hamlet: “This above all: To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst then be false to any man.”

The papers are filled with myriad examples of graduates of our best universities confusing fiction with fact, praising their elite education, while making outrageous and erroneous statements. Should not colleges, before graduation, require students pass an exam, demonstrating proficiency in history, literature, geography and government, showing to the world and future employers they will be valued citizens and workers, and to their parents that four years on campus was worth the $200,000 to $300,000 expended?

In his book, 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson writes of the struggle between order and chaos. We require rules, values and standards, but “Order can become excessive, {while] chaos can swamp us.” It is the search for balance, for the dividing line between the two, that should be the goal. A sound education helps. This is what I want for my grandchildren: An education that provides the tools for considered decisions, to take responsibility for their own lives, to live without bias, to understand that justice is blind, to be unafraid of contrary opinions, to appreciate beauty, to find meaning and to be content with who they are. That pathway blossoms with education, whose roots feed on the humanities. And that, in my opinion, is the purpose of education.

"The Joy of Grandchildren"

Sydney M. Williams

swtotd.blogspot.com

Essay from Essex

“The Joy of Grandchildren”

January 14, 2018

“I love music of all kinds, but there is no greater music

than the sound of my grandchildren laughing.”

                                                                                                Sylvia Earle (1935-)

                                                                                                American marine biologist and author

On a recent visit to the home of my youngest granddaughter, I noticed a hand-written sign posted on the door leading from the mudroom to the kitchen: “Manicure, one cent.” Feeling the least a grandfather could do was encourage entrepreneurship, I consented to having my nails painted. Despite pleas that my nails not be varnished in some garish color, and the offer of a dollar bribe, I soon found myself with ten fingernails decorated as though they were Joseph’s multi-colored coat. A few hours later, and a penny and a dollar short (the dollar was accepted, but not honored!), I walked into our home with my hands in my pockets, thinking of Ogden Nash: “when grandparents enter the door, discipline flies out the window.”

Not everyone is fortunate to have grandchildren, so we count ourselves among God’s chosen. As grandparents, we see in our grandchildren the promise and risks of the future – we dream of the places they will go, the people they will meet. We think of the loves and losses, joys and sadness, laughter and tears they will experience. We know they will learn from failure and that they will derive satisfaction from success. We know they will come to understand that work brings dignity and pride, and that they will have the chance to do those things we tried, or didn’t do at all.

While our lives lie in the past, theirs are the future. We have memories; they have the promise and mystery of the unknown. We look backward, sometimes cynically, through scrapbooks in the mind; and then we look forward, with hope, through the eyes of our grandchildren. In their genes they carry our DNA, which ensures that a part of us will live forever, or at least as long as they and their progeny procreate.

Caroline and I have ten grandchildren. They are the issue of three sets of parents – all of whom were married within a twelve-month period – June 14, 1997 to June 20, 1998. Grandchildren (six girls and four boys) began arriving in 2000 and the wave did not stop until 2008. There was only one year – 2007 – when the stork didn’t deliver a new package. Today, two of them are high school juniors and three high school sophomores. The rest scale down to the fourth grade.

Time goes by faster as we age, so the speed with which they left behind cribs, diapers and Santa Claus has been startling. One moment they looked up to me, as the fount of all wisdom. Now, they look down at me, and kindly ask if they might help me with my iPhone. It seems only yesterday I was pushing them in a stroller. Now, I hurry to keep up. Was it only a decade ago, I was reading bed-time stories? Now, they want to discuss quantitative physics, the New York Giants offensive line and the situation in Ukraine.

Like all grandchildren, mine like to hear stories – what it was like in the “olden” days. Former Poet Laurette (and New Hampshire resident) Donald Hall wrote about haying with his grandfather in the 1930s: “Even more I loved the slower plod back to the barn. My grandfather told story after story with affection and humor.”[1] Mine like to hear what it was like to grow up in the 1950s – music we listened to, books we read, games we played, clothes we wore, food we ate, schools we attended. They want to understand what it was like to live without computers, fast-food restaurants, iPhones, or Amazon. They ask questions, as I did of my grandparents, trying to understand what it was like to live in a different time. While attention spans can be short – perhaps because of boring and interminable responses! – I know they hear me, just as I heard my grandparents sixty and seventy years ago. What is difficult to comprehend is trying to foresee the stories they will tell their grandchildren, seventy years hence. Will their childhoods seem as primitive to their grandchildren as mine is to them, and my grandparents were to me?

Their activities reflect the eternality of sports, the enduring appeal of extra-curricular programs and the timelessness of youth: playing on the beach, swing-sets and Little League when young. And now a multiplicity of sports and activities: squash, tennis, lacrosse, horseback riding, soccer, cross-country, track, skiing and swimming. One grandson tutors students whose first language is not English. A granddaughter is an Irish dancer. A grandson plays the cello and a granddaughter the violin. Two are in school choirs. Two are accomplished artists, and one has written a yet-unpublished novel. Another volunteers at a riding academy for children with physical disabilities, and one participates in Amnesty International. Two have had summer jobs as camp counselors. We have watched our oldest granddaughter play in a New England squash tournament in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and her cousin play Lacrosse for Darien, Connecticut’s high school. I have taken two granddaughters to riding lessons, and witnessed their improving horsemanship. We have watched two grandsons wallop tennis balls, and others swim, play soccer, lacrosse, squash and run cross-country. They all enjoy being young and are beginning to experience the emotional traumas of the teen years. All ten are fortunate to be living with loving parents in stable families. All ten live relatively close to their needy grandparents.

I live vicariously through them, feeling the ball hit my racquet, the muscles of the horse beneath the saddle, the splash of water in my face, and the sliding of my skis across the snow. I think, this is why we are here.

Having grandchildren recalls time I spent with my grandparents. Mine were born between 1873 and 1888. They grew up before cars or telephones – something improbable to my grandchildren who will ride around in driver-less cars and speak into wrist-watch phones. I remember thinking my grandparents were from another age – gas street lamps, electricity-free homes, horse-drawn street cars – real-life figures that leapt from dusty text books. I knew I would learn from them, and I instinctively knew I was special to them. I loved to hear stories of cows driven down Boston’s Beacon Street, carriages on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, and life on a tobacco farm in Tennessee. Grandparenthood is to be treasured. It is a joy.

My youngest grandson made a disparaging comment about Communism. He was asked, condescendingly, by his well-read older brother: “You don’t even know what Communism is?” “Yes, I do. It’s when two people work, one for two hours and the other for ten hours, and they both get paid the same.” There was enough truth in his answer that I don’t worry about their generation. They know how the world works. As I think about my grandchildren, the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song come to mind:

“May your heart always be joyful;

May your song always be sung;

And, may you stay forever young.”

My message to my grandchildren: You will encounter storms; you will be becalmed, but, with eyes on the horizon, you will reach shore. And, take comfort in the fact that your grandparents – your perfectly correct grandmother and your politically incorrect grandfather – love you unconditionally.

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[1] “Physical Malfitness,” Essays After Eighty, 2014