Jottings from the Granite Studio

Fascinating essay in the Boston Globe’s “Ideas” section this past Sunday written by Yale Professor Anthony Kronman. Professor Kronman argues that American universities have given up on teaching the big, fundamental questions to their students in favor of specialized, practical, subject-based curriculum in increasing vogue over the past century. What is the meaning of life or, to put it another way, what is the art of living? Professor Kronman suggests that empirical research in the sciences has served the world well with breathtaking new discoveries, but it has been an ill-fit in the humanities leading to a tightening spiral of minutiae.

In a shift of historic importance, America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. This abandonment has also helped create a society in which deeper questions of values are left in the hands of those motivated by religious conviction - a disturbing and dangerous development.

Over the past century and a half, our top universities have embraced a research-driven ideal that has squeezed the question of life’s meaning from the college curriculum, limiting the range of questions teachers feel they have the right and authority to teach. And in the process it has badly weakened the humanities, the disciplines with the oldest and deepest connection to this question, leaving them directionless and vulnerable to being hijacked for political ends.

I would tend to agree with Professor Kronman. I think the role of the teacher–especially in a university–is to help students acquire new information as well as the skills and insight to put what they have learned into a picture that goes beyond career prep and credential chasing.

Part of the problem is an excessive focus by university faculty search committees on research at the expense of teaching. Top universities seek to attract top researchers first and dedicated teachers second. The two are not mutually exclusive, but research in the humanities has become too narrowly focused and balkanized by theoretical specialty, research methodology, chronological moment, and cultural niche. It is often difficult for the teachers themselves to see the big picture, much less convey it in any meaningful sense to their students. Research is important to be sure, but as Albert Einstein once said, “I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.”

There is also always a place in academia and life for the learning of specialized skills. In the late 19th century, Chinese reformers lamented the disdain held by more orthodox scholars–steeped as they were in a centuries-old tradition of classical education in the humanities–for “training in clever techniques.”

That said, there must be a balance between the learning of skills and the learning of life and the two do not have to be mutually exclusive. How can one study the science of economics without learning of the human costs of unprincipled economic growth? What is the study of law without thinking deeply about the meaning of justice? How can somebody study history and not wonder at the ways history has often been chained in the service of nationalism, state building, and politics? Science has given the human race immense gifts and horrible curses, but what is engineering and technology without consideration of consequences? Robert Oppenheimer remarked, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

Or to put this discussion another way, in the words of Confucius, “學而不思則罔,思而不學則殆 Thinking without learning is unavailing, learning without thinking is dangerous.”