The Price of a Pricey Major

According to the New York Times, some lucrative degrees now cost more at public universities than others, because the universities are charging higher tuition for these degrees (HT: Educated Nation).

This trend is bad for education. It discourages breadth of learning that enables consistently deep thought that can extend into multiple realms of knowledge. It creates hyper-professionalized professionals. Do we really want engineers to have little to no formally studied knowledge of history, philosophy and the classics beyond what they learned (and often forgot) from high school? Or the same for businesspeople?

Inquiry, Applicable but Underappreciated

Some have no problem with it. Apparently engineers just have to know how to make whatever they’re supposed to make to be “productive” citizens, and businesspeople… just have to know how to increase money and use it ethically? I would remind technocrats that efficiency and productivity are not everything, that the piece of paper you get at graduation is not what you’re worth and that being learned is not just for academics and the leisurely class. A fragmented world where the job is viewed only very nebulously as something remotely related to God is one where the job becomes—dare I say it?—a suboptimal component.

There are perhaps many who believe it ridiculous to wish to get a classical education that really teaches its students about people and culture and humanity and that by cultivating the mind can really change that way they think. They are perhaps the same who insist that an undergraduate degree must be narrowly, narrowly targeted for a specific kind of job. There is a place for intellectual inquiry outside of its applications to the goals dictated by the modernist worldview of “progress, progress, progress” to an unknown destination, either for an unspecified reason or under the delusion that technology can solve all our problems.

Science does not exist in the service of technology. As important as technology is, the intellectual inquiry of science is far from worthless. For on the surface, what does it matter for the most part whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or the Sun revolves around the Earth? Whatever people may say about living on the Moon or on Mars, I am unconvinced that that is a compelling reason to have astronomy at all.

In the same vein, scholarship is not valuable only inasmuch as it affects (or sometimes infects) society by the fiat of its orthodoxies. The papyrologist, however arcane his profession, is not serving no useful function. There are things we can learn about life from the academy, even if for the student it is only that learning and thinking is worth it even when the results appear the same with or without. For is it the same if a man votes for another in support of the principles he upholds as if he casts the same vote for corrupt hope of patronage? I hope most people say the two are different. But the results of his vote were externally identical!

Why be Educated?

What is the purpose of education? Do not tell me that the point of becoming learned (academically and extra-academically) is to amass more money. I don’t buy it. By educated I mean educated, not credentialed. No, education is not just for the material benefits of social mobility, nor is it just for the acclaim of relatives and friends. Otherwise, it would be absolutely senseless for someone to apply to a physics Ph.D. program if he had the ability to successfully perform the function of a neurosurgeon. Money? The neurosurgeon gets more. Prestige? The neurosurgeon still has more. But this does not render useless the work of pure physics research.

Or is there any point in devoting more time to studying classical languages and literature than to accounting if one is equally capable of both? It is not enough to say, “Oh, he wants to do it, so for him it is good, though for me and my world I see no value in it.” Either an activity is worthwhile or it is not, if we ignore for the moment appropriate amounts of time to devote to different things. There is such a thing as wasting time, as anyone knows who has wasted any amount of time. I have belaboured this point enough, I believe.

When degrees are population-inflated and devalued the masses do not become freer. They make more money, attain a higher socioeconomic status and fancy themselves more educated than their predecessors, because obviously the people who have more occupationally-driven degrees are better equipped to think than those who do not. They then proceed to spew asinine slogans and cast votes in much the same manner.

Personal Development and Responsibility

What kind of person is more qualified to speak on a randomly chosen topic immediately relevant to life, one who can think and has done so with reference to a broader swath of the human experience, or one who has become an investment banker and has not given a coherent thought to anything else? Oh, I’m sorry, I cannot be allowed to ask such questions. The magisterium of politically correct postmodernism tells me that all views of truth, which are all ultimately opinions and social constructs, are equally valid and that there is no objective truth. Oh, who am I to say that there is a transcendent truth?

Nevertheless, any citizen of a republic has the responsibility to think as thoroughly as conditions allow him about issues that affect his civic participation and his general behaviour. There is no excuse for laziness. People did this even in the Roman Empire with an autocratic state. Classical education went on, republic or not, as it continued to do so through the times of Augustine of Hippo, of John Calvin, of Galileo Galilei, of Isaac Newton, of Isaac Watts, of Alessandro Volta, of Louis Pasteur. Yes, there’s more knowledge to master within our fields too, but we need to know how to process knowledge too, inside and outside what we usually do, by sustained training and engagement of the mind.

But today’s world is not a world for polymaths. It has been made a hostile environment even for people who would naturally excel—and I do not use this word lightly—in multiple areas simultaneously. Even a polymath is pressured to specialize in one field, because somehow to be able to think well in one field one must do it to the exclusion of all else. Oh, with the exception of the drudgery of the required courses, of course. We are stifling the contributions of any Avicenna, Leibniz, Shen Kuo or even Jefferson that might emerge, and moreover we are crushing whatever natural faculties would otherwise have stimulated his thinking freely and to making connexions among apparently disparate fields.

But somehow—by magic, I suppose—one who has done one thing to the virtual exclusion of many other things is suddenly qualified to do totally unrelated things, e.g., voting and holding public office, despite the fact that his mind has not been trained to think outside of the field. But this does not have to be the case. Reach outside your field of study (or occupation). Train the mind to be able to think about a variety of intellectual matters, which need not be academic. Question presuppositions. Pursue the excellent and the beautiful and the right and not merely the expedient.