I just finished re-reading Alain de Botton’s book, “Religion for Atheists”. His discussion of secular education has confirmed my own suspicions concerning university education. He rightly points out that historically, society has charged universities with two important tasks. One task is give students the jobs skills they need to get a good paying job and to secure a successful career. The other task is to prepare students for life by giving them the ethical and emotional skills they need to face the inevitable difficulties of life. Nowadays, most universities focus on job training and have either disregarded or paid inadequate attention to the task of cultivating good human beings. Botton goes on to argue that universities should use some pedagogical practices that religions have developed over the centuries to nurture the life skills of their students.
His discussion is very good and worth a read. But I want to stop for a moment and discuss how universities in the US have been turned into job factories and how this leaves students lost and confused about how to live good lives. There are courageous people in academia, particularly in the liberal arts, that are fighting this trend, but they are under seige as well. They are being questioned about their own “production” and economic “usefulness.”
We all know that a university education in the US is ridiculously expensive. Some students graduate with upwards of $50,000-$100,000 in student debt. No one in their right mind would spend that kind of money earning degrees in such economically precarious fields as history, philosophy, and literature when they have a much higher chance to pay off their debts if they earn degrees in business or STEM fields. In fact, I’ve talked to students who privately confess that they hate business and wish they could major in art or music, but that they have to do it in order to pay off debt or pacify their parents who have taken out 2nd mortgages on their homes to pay for their education. Given this pressure, most students don’t have the time and money to take classes in the liberal arts or even think about how they are living or explore and develop who they are, and how they should be in the world. Their goal, reasonably enough, is to get a good job, not tend to their souls.
I see three reasons for why a university education is so expensive. (1) State funding for public universities has been cut over the years, (2) there’s been an “arms” race amongst universities to provide high-end amenities and accommodations for their students, and, more importantly, (3) the explosion of administrative staffs at universities. The most recent AAUP report shows that between 1970-2011 administrative staff at universities have increased by 369 percent. That is more than any other university segment, even faculty! Unfortunately, college administrators have tended to shift the focus of universities away from the task of cultivating good human beings to job training and economic concerns. They see education as a financial transaction between the professor and student. There are complex societal, political and economic factors behind all of this and a thorough discussion of these issues would lead us too far astray. But just know that things do not look good. Unsurprisingly, students are missing out on the most important part of their education: learning how to manage the difficult task of being human and living full, meaningful lives.
Traditionally it’s the liberal arts that have been given the task of forming good human beings. Their mission is to give students the opportunity to learn about and explore the human condition, through history, art, music, literature, politics, philosophy and cross cultural studies. But with more students earning business and STEM degrees, there has been a sharp decline in students majoring in the liberal arts. This has led to the reduction, and in some cases, the outright elimination of liberal arts programs, which in turn, has undermined the universities stated mission to prepare students for life. Without them, university students are given no substantive guidance on how live, which leave them unable to deal with the difficulties of life. With universities failing in their mission, there are few options to work on the most important part of our lives: living a full human life. This issue is just a symptom of a larger problem. The drive for economic and material success in our society has crowded out the desire to work on our inner lives and express that life in our actions.
Given the frantic pace of our lives, and all the rushing around to get “things” done, we push aside the task of living well and hope to get to it sometime in the future. Thinking about our lives is not a luxury, but a necessity if we really want to fully experience life. Being a good human being is hard to do. Believe me, I know! Living an emotionally mature and ethically directed life is no easy thing. It takes inner reflection, humility, courage, and the desire to eliminate false beliefs and bad habits. This requires knowledge and the acquisition and development of life skills. This is where philosophy, literature and arts come in. Philosophical inquiry gives you the ability to examine your beliefs and explore the different aspects of your character while helping you to place your life within a particular philosophical narrative and worldview. Literature, myth, and poetry provide us with different ways of understanding the world and our place in it, presenting us with people and life experiences by which we compare our own lives, and giving us the emotional and moral space to exercise our empathy and compassion. They also give us the language to articulate our deep inner needs and desires. The arts, through painting, music, and sculpture, help us experience our emotional and intellectual lives in different ways, inviting us to confront our desires, passions and fears. Philosophy is able to bring all of this together to provide a coherent understanding of our lives and how we can improve them. With the decline of the liberal arts and the failure of universities to uphold the mission that society has given them, we lose not only an important aspect of our education, we lose the art of living well.
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