Classical vs. Crass-ical

Victor Davis Hanson writes in City Journal about the yawning chasm between modern universities and classically-minded religious schools:

As classical education declined and new approaches arose to replace it, the university core curriculum turned into a restaurant menu that gave 18-year-olds dozens of classes to choose from, the easiest and most therapeutic usually garnering the heaviest attendance. The result, as many critics have noted, is that most of today’s students have no shared notion of education, whether fact-based, requisite knowledge or universal theoretical methodologies. They either do not know what the Parthenon is or, if they do, they do not understand how its role as the democratic civic treasury of the Athenians was any different from—much less any “better” than—what went on atop the monumental Great Temple of Tenochtitlán. Most likewise could not distinguish Corinthian from Doric columns on their venerable campuses, or a frieze from a pediment on their administration buildings. For a brief four-year period, students inherit a now-foreign vocabulary of archaic terms, such as “provost,” “summa cum laude,” and “honorarium,” which they employ but usually do not understand. While the public may not fully appreciate the role that classical education once played, it nonetheless understands that university graduates know ever less, even as the cost of their education rises ever more. Any common, shared notion of what it means to be either a Westerner or an American is increasingly rare.

The universities apparently believed that their traditional prestige, the financial resources of their alumni, and the fossilized cultural desideratum of “going to college” would allow them to postpone a reckoning. But by failing in their central mission to educate our youth, they have provoked the beginnings of an educational counterrevolution. Just as the arrogance and ideological biases of the mainstream media have made them slow to appreciate technological trends and the growing dissatisfaction of their audience, so, too, are universities beginning to fragment, their new multifaceted roles farmed out to others that can do them more cheaply and with less political sermonizing.

The situation today:

One can also see a growing cultural reaction to the modern university in the spread of conservative Christian colleges. According to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, enrollment in such schools increased 70.6 percent between 1990 and 2004, versus 12.8 percent for public universities and 28 percent for all private universities. The national news media have split into genres predicated on political partisanship: network news, public radio, and large newspapers for liberals; and talk radio, cable news, and Internet sites for conservatives. So, too, have our mainstream universities, promising free thought but in reality indoctrinating their students, become increasingly distinct from religious colleges and universities that take pride in a more classical curriculum.

The religious schools are recognizing their market advantage. What was once the old Bible school has now often become the popular conservative antidote to the liberal university. Liberty University and Oral Roberts University have seen endowments and enrollments soar as they have broadened their mandates to encompass general cultural conservatism rather than solely religious orthodoxy. Liberty University is no longer Jerry Falwell’s weird and tiny Liberty Baptist College of the 1970s but has swelled to more than 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students, with another 4,500 enrolled in online graduate programs alone. Thirty years ago, Fresno Pacific College was a small evangelical Mennonite campus; today, its successor, Fresno Pacific University, is a generic traditional campus that offers an alternative to the cumbersome bureaucracy and politically charged culture of nearby California State University, Fresno. The teacher-credential program at Fresno Pacific’s education school, for example, has earned regional acknowledgment for being more rigorous, better organized, and freer from therapeutic and political biases than its much larger counterpart at CSU, Fresno.

The growth of classically minded religious colleges is not limited to the Protestant evangelical movement. Against-the-grain Catholic schools have flourished, too, offering an alternative not just to Berkeley, Wisconsin, and Amherst but also to increasingly liberal Notre Dame and Santa Clara, which have abandoned traditional Catholic themes and classical values. Thomas Aquinas College, founded in 1969, to take one example, has won recognition for its traditional curriculum. A few nonreligious schools, too, like Hillsdale College and St. John’s College, concentrate solely on the classical curriculum, offering Great Books–based courses whose very success serves as an effective critique of higher education elsewhere.

Read the entire piece.

Comments

[Dan]

I consider myself fairly well educated, but, although I knew at one time, I was a little hazy on what the Parthenon was (even though I visited it several decades ago), and I couldn't tell you the difference between Corinthian and Doric columns (although I do recall reading once about the differences and looking at pictures that illustrated the differences).

The point of the article though is well taken.

[Jackson]

This essay deserves wide, wide circulation.

[Stohn]

Ah! Good ole neo-con VDH... love the guy... but he should stick to military history. He seems to synonymise "conservative" and "classical". Just because conservative protestant universities offer a counter-culture to liberal (not liberal arts) universities, and just because they're enrolment is increasing, does not mean that they are offering a classical education nor that they're high enrolment signifies a trend toward a classical education - it simply means there is a trend away from the liberal culture and politics on university campuses. Libery, ORU, and FPU are NOT "classically minded religious colleges". There are very few classically-minded (though, not necessarily classical education) schools around: Thomas Aquinas, St. John's, Hillsdale (those three the mentioned), Grove City, U Dallas, and Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts are the one's that come to mind. The problem is we, as a society, have completely lost a sense of the purpose of education; we have made it into a 'universal human right' (from the marxists), and a means to a utilitarian end (from capitalists [division of labour]) - and we have separated it from its purist motive: to gain knowledge of God (see John Henry Cardinal Newman's Idea of a University).

[Gregorio]

Sure, an overtly religious curriculum is one countermeasure to the soft-headed leftist advocacy that passes as liberal arts curricula today. However, it's only one.

The delightful Camille Paglia recently suggested another:

"Practical training in hands-on vocational skills is desperately needed in this country, where liberal arts education has become a soggy boondoggle, obscenely expensive and diluted by propaganda and groupthink."

Can I hear a 'Amen!'?

I find it interesting that the lack of intellectual and moral integrity in universities coincides so neatly with the same kind of politically motivated dishonesty in journalism.

Maybe eventually a new generation of autodidacts will bring the university system to its knees in the same way web users have driven the daily noosepaper to the brink of extinction.

We can hope so anyway...

[Dom James M. Deschene]

Yes, yes, yes! to Gregorio and Camille Paglia. In fact, there would be a considerable benefit if college education were made unavailable to high-school graduates for a set period of time (say, two years) during which they should find work, discover skills, and generally mature and grow as responsible young persons. Then, after a taste of reality, choices for higher or further education (liberal arts or skills-oriented) can be faced and considered and evaluated from a wider and more realistic perspective. I expect many, having found a vocational niche, would happily remain there. In any case, further education would always be available to those who seek it. I myself, though going to college directly from high school, continued to enroll in programs and coursework, accumulating degrees,working in different careers (education, counseling, law, church) until my fifties. So nothing need be lost by postponing a college education. I expect many would find their happy niche without going to college. But perhaps the issue is becoming moot, as the cost of college education soars beyond reason and college endowments shrivel in recession. Valuable as a good college education is (and not every college provides this), many high-school graduates would be happier and more prosperous if encouraged to find another route and then consider college as an enhancement of an already established life and career -- rather than as the necessary condition for life and prosperity.