While reading Education's End, I was reminded of a story (frequently attributed to Steven Covey) involving a one-gallon, wide-mouthed Mason jar set on a table, about a dozen fist-sized rocks, a bucket of gravel, a bucket of sand, and a pitcher of water. The speaker carefully places the rocks, one at a time, into the jar. When the jar is filled to the top and no more rocks will fit inside, he asks, "Is this jar full?" Usually, an audience says yes, but then the speaker successively adds buckets of gravel, sand, and water, each time impressing upon his audience the jar is not full. Finally, he explains the lesson from the demonstration: if you don't put in the big rocks first, you'll never fit them in.
Education's End by Anthony Kronman, former Dean of Yale Law School, is an excellent analysis--I highly recommend it--of a critical issue that affects the framework of American society. A thoughtfully planned and carefully balanced argument about the role of the humanities in education, Education's End exposes the current shortcomings in higher education. For Kronman, the big rocks--the things of value--in education are the questions: What is the meaning of life? How should we spend our time? How can we succeed in the art of living? For much of our history U.S. education included the big rocks; they were part of a college education. Today, this is no longer true.
Kronman reviews what he believes to be an unfortunate path traveled by higher education in the U.S., breaking down the regrettable history into three eras. First, during the antebellum era beginning with the opening of Harvard University, there was a focus on God, a Christian perspective, and an emphasis on "the ancient model of virtue and order." Second, during the era of secular humanism following the Civil War, there was a focus on family and country, and an emphasis on "modern ideas of individuality and creative freedom." And third, during our modern era, there is a focus on political correctness and the research ideal. The research ideal places an emphasis on research that restricts scholarship to a narrow field of specialization, and it requires publishing something new with the understanding that any contribution will be superseded.
Chapter 3 (The Research Ideal) is excellent, but Kronman is really just beginning his critique. In Chapter 4 (Political Correctness), he skillfully, but tactfully, slays the three-headed monster of modern political correctness: diversity, multiculturalism, and constructivism (post modernism). After explaining why the natural and social sciences are better able to survive in the current environment, he peels away the layers of misguided intentions that appear to support political correctness exposing the problems for the humanities. For example, discussing why multiculturalism is unacceptable, he explains how "an internal dialogue" carried on by each succeeding generation of thinkers and authors throughout western history offered a unique teaching opportunity that is unavailable in other cultures. Highlighting the weaknesses with each aspect of political correctness, Dean Kronman argues that the status quo short-changes teachers, denies students, and deprives society of a value previously enjoyed during the era of secular humanism.
Kronman's arguments are frequently understated, but this book is nothing less than an indictment of how the humanities are taught today: we prepare students for careers, but not for life. Also, he does more than just lament this failure today to ask the big questions. He blames the academy for abandoning a trust respected during the era of secular humanism that it carried forward until the 1960s, keeping alive a continuity--through the humanities--of teaching a curriculum that reached back to the classical era. He explains that this tradition of arts and letters continued a legacy that allowed students to see themselves as a participant in the "great conversation." As part of that squandered inheritance, Kronman notes the diminished role of the humanities in education today. In the past, humanity teachers felt qualified and confident enough to guide their students through questions about the meaning of life and about how to spend their lives. Unfortunately today few, if any, humanities professors feel it appropriate to ask or instruct on the big question.
Product Description:The question of what living is for—of what one should care about and why—is the most important question a person can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this eloquent and carefully considered book, Tony Kronman explores why this has happened and calls for the restoration of life’s most important question to an honored place in higher education.
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The author contrasts an earlier era in American education, when the question of the meaning of life was at the center of instruction, with our own times, when this question has been largely abandoned by college and university teachers. In particular, teachers of the humanities, who once felt a special responsibility to guide their students in exploring the question of what living is for, have lost confidence in their authority to do so. And they have lost sight of the question itself in the blinding fog of political correctness that has dominated their disciplines for the past forty years.
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Yet Kronman sees a readiness for change--a longing among teachers as well as students to engage questions of ultimate meaning. He urges a revival of the humanities’ lost tradition of studying the meaning of life through the careful but critical reading of great works of literary and philosophical imagination. And he offers here the charter document of that revival.
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