The Enstupidation that is a College Education

While I should probably be taking care of some homework, I felt compelled to make a quick post in light of a recent blurb I got from the Washington Times, courtesy of Vox Popoli:

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute recently tested 14,000 freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges with 60 questions on American history, government, market economies and U.S. foreign policy. The average "civic literacy" score for seniors was 53.2 percent, for freshman 54.7 percent. Failing grades all. The longer a student attends class, the dumber he gets. Students at the elite schools fared worse than students at some church and land-grant schools. The Ivy League school whose students ranked highest were those at Princeton, at No. 18. Harvard's students were 25th. The lowest scores were posted at such bastions of higher learning as Cornell, University of California at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. Go figure, as some unhappy parents will no doubt do.

I find this less than surprising, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the incessant anecdotal evidence offered by some of my college friends and colleagues. Recently, one of my house mates told me that he had never heard of the Divine Comedy; a quick perusal of the campus paper will confirm that if my fellow staff writers aren't wholly ignorant of history and economics, they do a marvelous job of pretending thusly. I also routinely receive comments telling me that a reader cannot make heads or tails of my columns. And while it is true that my style is less sophomoric than some of the talking heads in the punditry, I would suggest that one should be able to read writing which is more sophisticated than the incoherent babbling that is a Bill O'Reilly column, especially if one is college-educated.

The actual study reports four findings:

1. America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institutions.

2. Prestige doesn't pay off.

3. Students don't learn what colleges don't teach.

4. Greater civic learning goes hand-in-hand with more active citizenship.

I'd like to concentrate on points one and two; the latter two findings seem obvious and would render commentary trite.

America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institution for two reasons. First, an astounding portion of the faculty is wholly ignorant of the topics themselves. I can think of three professors, Noam Chomsky, Camille Paglia and Walter Williams, who seem to have a proficient grasp on the history and institutions of America. I have read too little of Chomsky to explain our differences, but whether or not he is wrong, he is not an ignoramus; thus I include him in the list.

Yet these should not be exceptions. Well, Camille Paglia is always an exception, but our institutions of higher education should regularly be producing scholars, if not of Paglian stature, scholars nonetheless. But they are not even approximately doing so. Paglia has much to say about the degradation of higher education--see "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders" for starters--but pseudo-intellectual hacks will never be able to produce scholars. It took Socrates to give us Plato who gave us Aristotle. Anything approaching a modern day Socrates is not likely to be found in the hallowed halls of higher ed.

Second, the object of college is not to bestow knowledge upon the students. There are simply far too many people attending college for any of this nonsense, many of them torpid fools. Since the those who are either ineducable or wish to be so cannot or will not learn, neither will the professor's pretend to teach. Those who love knowledge will seek it on their own; those who care nothing for her will prefer the modern college environment: a retirement home for the perpetual adolescents of the middle and upper classes. If college becomes a perpetual party, the pupils will be more likely to stay for five or six years, spending all kinds of mom and dad's hard earned money. Tough tests and true scholarship are sure to weed out those who neither deserve nor would be capable of appreciating a real education, and the soulless administrators are unlikely to bite off the hand that feeds them.

As for point number two, one simply needs to apply all of the previous babble to schools wherein the student body is far more likely to have a larger quantity of cash. If Yale becomes competitive, the students who do not wish to work hard shall go to Princeton--or perhaps it is the other way around; it makes precious little difference. I lost all respect for Harvard when I learned that 96% of their student body graduated with honors. I reckon that's a mighty tough place to "learn".

I applied to one school, a mid-sized, moderately priced, Midwestern engineering university. And while my time here has been mixed, I have learned a fair amount. It seems that engineers, unlike government bureaucrats, cannot be wholly incompetent. Moreover, I have learned a great deal of history, and more besides, from trips to the library or the secondhand bookstore.

A reading of de Tocqueville and Gibbon will afford one a far more extensive survey of history than a degree will now give. And the price is far less dear. While there are reasons to attend a university, an "education" is near the bottom of the list.