Education: Five Ways to Wisdom

As U.S. colleges open their doors, how can they also open minds?

Opening day! In front of the brick dormitory, the dust-streaked family car lurches to a halt with its load of indispensable college supplies: one Sony stereo with headphones, two gooseneck lamps, five pairs of blue jeans, two down parkas (one old, one new), one pair of Rossignol skis … and one nervous freshman wondering whether anybody will like him. The older students have an easier time of it, needing only to unpack what they left in storage over the summer: more lamps, more blue jeans, boots, bicycles, one unused thesaurus donated by an out-of-date uncle .. . And now, from any reopening dormitory window on any campus from Chapel Hill to Santa Cruz, can be heard the thrumming, insistent sound of the contemporary tent sound of the contemporary campus: Tattoo You . . . Vacation …Hold Me…

These are the rites of initiation. Orientation meetings on subjects like time management. Tryouts for the glee club or the football team. Beer bashes. Join the struggle to save Lebanon; join the struggle to save Israel. At Princeton the freshmen and sophomores meet each other in a traditional series of games and rope pulls known as Cane Spree, which custom decrees that the freshmen lose. At Gettysburg College, the rituals of getting acquainted are even more folksy: a “shoe scramble” determines who will dance with whom. At Carleton, there is a fried-chicken picnic and square dancing on the grassy area known as the Bald Spot.

Along with the social games, though, a lot of intellectual choices have to be made, courses picked, books bought. Will it be the class known as “Slums and Bums” (Urban Government) or “Nuts and Sluts” (Abnormal Psychology)? The students joke about these things because they know the choices are serious; their future lives depend on them, and so does much else besides. It has been said that every nation has only a few years in which to civilize an onrushing horde of barbarians, its own children.

The barbarian hordes beginning their classes this month may be the largest in U.S. history, a tribute to both parental prodigality and the ideal of universal education. Though the crest of the 1950s baby boom has passed the college years, a larger percentage of high school graduates now goes to college (61%, vs. 40% a generation ago), and the number of older and part-time students keeps increasing (34% of students are over 25). All in all, the number of Americans who are signing up for some form of higher education this fall totals a mind-boggling 12.5 million. Mind-boggling not only because of the quantity, but because there is very little agreement on what they are learning or should be learning.

Under the dappling elms of Harvard, which likes to think that it sets the national tone in such matters, President Derek Bok traditionally welcomes each graduating class into “the Bok traditionally welcomes each graduating class into “the company of educated men and women.” The phrase goes trippingly on the tongue, but what does it mean? Does any such community exist? Are the millions of people now engaged in earning diplomas really being educated?

The statistics of growth, unfortunately, are also the statistics of glut. When the 2.4 million college students of 1949 swelled into today’s 12.5 million, the educational system was all but overwhelmed. The most prestigious institutions took easy pride in the numbers they turned away, but the states, somewhat idealistically committed to a policy of open admissions, had to double the number of public colleges, from some 600 to more than 1,250. Most of the new schools were two-year community colleges that featured remedial and vocational classes.

The overall quality of education almost inevitably sank. “Every generation since Roman days has decried the weakening of educational standards,” sighs one Midwestern university dean, but the statistics provide sad evidence that there has been a genuine decline. Average scores in reading on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATS) have dropped from 466 out of a possible 800 in 1968 to 424 in 1981, when the decline leveled out; mathematics scores over the same period sank from 492 to 466. A study conducted at the University of Wisconsin reported that at least 20% of last year’s entering freshmen “lack the skill to write [acceptably] and 50% are not ready to succeed in college algebra.”

“They don’t know how to write, they don’t read, they have little contact with culture,” says Professor Norman Land, who teaches art history at the University of Missouri, in a typical complaint. “Every so often I give them a list of names, and they can identify Timothy Leary or the Who but not Dante or Vivaldi. They haven’t received an education; they’ve just had baby sitting.” Nor are the criticisms entirely about intellectual shortcomings. “I think students are becoming less reflective, less concerned about fellow human beings, more greedy, more materialistic,” says Alexander Astin, professor of higher education at U.C.L.A. “They’re interested in making money and in finding a job that gives them a lot of power and a lot of status.”

College officials tend to blame student shortcomings on the high schools, which undeniably need reform and renewal, but the high schools can blame the elementary schools, the elementary schools the family at home, and everybody blames TV. Wisconsin’s President Robert O’Neil, however, argues that the colleges are “in part to blame.” Says he: “Having diluted the requirements and expectations, they indicated that students could succeed in college with less rigorous preparation.” Mark H. Curtis, president of the Association of American Colleges, is more caustic: “We might begin to define the educated person as one who can overcome the deficiencies in our educational system.”

The traditional curriculum, such as it was, virtually disintegrated during the campus upheavals of the 1960s, when millions of students demanded and won the right to get academic credit for studying whatever they pleased. There were courses in soap opera and witchcraft. Even more fundamental, and even more damaging, was the spread of the “egalitarian” notion that everybody was entitled to a college degree, and that it was undemocratic to base that degree on any differentiations of intellect or learning. “The idea that cosmetology is just as important as physics is still with us but is being challenged,” says Curtis.

“Quality,” argues Chester E. Finn Jr., professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt, “is almost certainly going to turn out to be the foremost national education concern of the 1980s, much as equity was the premier issue of the 1960s and 1970s.” The counterrevolution has actually been well under way for some time. In 1978 Harvard announced with great fanfare a controversial new core curriculum, and in 1980 Stanford inaugurated an elaborate system of seven tracks that would carry every student through the basics of Western civilization. “A miracle has happened among Stanford undergraduates,” Charles Lyons, director of the Western-culture program, proudly told the faculty senate last spring. “They do talk about Plato at dinner and about Shakespeare on the lawns.”

Other colleges followed suit. Amherst now requires all freshmen to take an interdisciplinary program called Introduction to Liberal Studies. At Washington University in St. Louis, the science and math requirements, which were cut in half during the heady days of student power, have been restored to the old levels (four semester-long courses). “The students were evading the real purpose of their education,” says Associate Dean Harold Levin, adding, in the language of deans everywhere, “The product we were turning out was not what we wanted.” All told, according to a survey of 272 universities and colleges last spring, 88% are engaged in revising their curriculums, and 59% of these are increasing their programs of required courses in general education. That, presumably, will improve the “product.”

While the educators reorganize their methods, the fundamental goals of the process—truth, knowledge, the understanding of the world—remain somewhere just beyond the horizon. It was said of Goethe, after his death in 1832, that he was the last man to know everything worth knowing. Today’s cliche is that 90% of all scientists in the history of the world are alive now. Yet their knowledge has become hopelessly fragmented; the specialist in recombinant DNA feels no more obligation to understand laser surgery than to hear the latest composition by Pierre Boulez.

As scientific specialties spawn subspecialties, the rapidly growing mass of information has confused the arts and humanities as well. Historical research now presupposes a mastery of old tax records and population movements, and anyone who ventures into such popular fields as American literature or impressionist art must wade into a rising tide of studies, analyses, psychographic portraits and sheer verbiage. In addition, all the political trends of the past two decades have tended to multiply the demands for studies in fields once ignored: Chinese history, the languages of Africa, the traffic in slaves, the thwarted ambitions of women.

Not everyone is overawed by the so-called knowledge explosion. “What happens,” says Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum of M.I.T., “is that educators, all of us, are deluged by a flood of messages disguised as valuable information, most of which is trivial and irrelevant to any substantive concern. This is the elite’s equivalent of junk mail, but many educators can’t see through it because they are not sufficiently educated to deal with such random complexity.” To many experts, the computer seems a symbol of both the problem and its solution. “What the computer has done,” according to Stephen White of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, “is to provide scope for analytical skills that never before existed, and in so doing it has altered the world in which the student will live as well as the manner in which he will think about the world … No adult is truly civilized unless he is acquainted with the civilization of which he is a member, and the liberal arts curriculum of 50 years ago no longer provides that acquaintance.”

Acquaintance seems a bare minimum, and even that is difficult enough to attain in a world where millions cannot read and millions more read mainly falsehoods or formulas. Yet the basic questions of education still reach deep into every aspect of life: What is it essential to learn—to know—and why? Everyone seems to have his own answer, but there are interesting patterns among those answers. They can be organized into five main ideas:

I: Education Means Careers

Today’s most popular answer is the practical one, on which students are most likely to agree with parents virtually impoverished by tuition bills: an education should enable a student to get a better job than he would otherwise be able to find or fill. In a Carnegie Council poll, 67% of students cited this as an “essential” purpose of their education. A 9.8% unemployment rate makes this purpose seem all the more essential. Michael Adelson, 23, who studied psychology at U.C.L.A., has been unable to find a job in his field for a year and a half, and he now wishes he had chosen engineering. He calls his bachelor of arts degree “completely useless.”

The idea that education has a basically social purpose derives more or less from Plato. In his Republic, the philosopher portrayed a Utopia governed by an intellectual elite specially trained for that purpose. This form of education was both stern and profoundly conservative. Children who attempt innovations, warned Socrates, acting as Plato’s narrator, will desire a different sort of life when they grow up to be men, with other institutions and laws. And this “is full of danger to the whole state.” To prevent any innovations, Socrates forthrightly demanded censorship so that students could not “hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons.” When asked whose works he would ban, Socrates specifically named Homer. The poet’s crime, he said, was to provide “an erroneous representation of the nature of gods and heroes.”

Political pressure of this kind has never been far from the campus, but the overwhelming influence on U.S. education has been not politics but economics: the need for a technologically trained managerial caste. The very first Land Grant Act, in 1862, handed out 30,000 acres per Congressman for the building of state colleges at which “the leading object shall be … to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” These needs keep changing, of course, and over the decades the U.S. economy demanded of its universities not only chemists and engineers but lawyers and accountants and personnel analysts, and then, after Sputnik’s shocking revelation of the Soviet lead in space, yet more engineers.

Students naturally respond to the economy’s needs. The Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame, complained last year that “the most popular course on the American college campus is not literature or history but accounting.” This criticism reflects the fact that less than half the nation’s swarm of college students go to liberal arts colleges; the rest are seeking not just jobs but entry into the middle class.

There are now thousands of Ph.D.s unable to find anyone willing to pay them for their hard-earned knowledge of Renaissance painting or the history of French monasticism, but any Sunday newspaper overflows with ads appealing for experts in electromagnetic capability, integrated logistics support or laser electro-optics. Says George W. Valsa, supervisor of the college-recruiting section at Ford: “We are not ready to sign a petition to burn down liberal arts colleges, but don’t expect us to go out and hire many liberal arts graduates.” Ford does hire nearly 1,000 graduates a year, and most of them are engineers or M.B.A.s.

This is not the old argument between the “two cultures” of science and the humanities, for science too is often forced to defer to technical and vocational training. In 1979, according to one Carnegie study, 58% of all undergraduates pursued “professional” majors (up from 38% a decade earlier), in contrast to 11% in social sciences, 7% in biological sciences, 6% in the arts and 4% in physical sciences. Rich and prestigious private universities can resist this rush toward vocational training, but public and smaller private colleges are more vulnerable. “The bulk of the institutions will have to give in to a form of consumerism,” says U.C.L.A.’s Astin, “in that they need applicants and will therefore have to offer students what they want.”

Says Paul Ginsberg, dean of students at Wisconsin: “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to persuade a student to take courses that will contribute to his intellectual development in addition to those that will make him a good accountant.” Quite apart from the pros and cons of professional training, the idea of educating oneself hi order to rise in the world is a perfectly legitimate goal. But Ginsberg has been receiving letters from high school freshmen asking about the prospects for professional schools and job opportunities when they graduate from college seven years hence. Says he: “I don’t know at what point foresight ends and panic sets in.”

II: Education Transmits Civilization

Jill Ker Conway, president of Smith, echoes the prevailing view of contemporary technology when she says that “anyone in today’s world who doesn’t understand data processing is not educated.” But she insists that the increasing emphasis on these matters leaves certain gaps. Says she: “The very strongly utilitarian emphasis in education, which is an effect of Sputnik and the cold war, has really removed from this culture something that was very profound in its 18th and 19th century roots, which was a sense that literacy and learning were ends in themselves for a democratic republic.”

In contrast to Plato’s claim for the social value of education, a quite different idea of intellectual purposes was propounded by the Renaissance humanists. Intoxicated with their rediscovery of the classical learning that was thought to have disappeared during the Dark Ages, they argued that the imparting of knowledge needs no justification—religious, social, economic or political. Its purpose, to the extent that it has one, is to pass on from generation to generation the corpus of knowledge that constitutes civilization. “What could man” acquire, by virtuous striving, that is more valuable than knowledge?” asked Erasmus, perhaps the greatest scholar of the early 16th century. That idea has acquired a tradition of its own. “The educational process has no end beyond itself,” said John Dewey. “It is its own end.”

But what exactly is the corpus of knowledge to be passed on? In simpler times, it was all included in the medieval universities’ quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music) and trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic). As recently as the last century, when less than 5% of Americans went to college at all, students in New England establishments were compelled mainly to memorize and recite various Latin texts, and crusty professors angrily opposed the introduction of any new scientific discoveries or modern European languages. “They felt,” said Charles Francis Adams Jr., the Union Pacific Railroad president who devoted his later years to writing history, “that a classical education was the important distinction between a man who had been to college and a man who had not been to college, and that anything that diminished the importance of this distinction was essentially revolutionary and tended to anarchy.”

Such a view was eventually overcome by the practical demands of both students and society, yet it does not die. In academia, where every professor is accustomed to drawing up lists of required reading, it can even be played as a game (see box). Must an educated man have read Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, Tacitus, Kafka? (Yes.) Must he know both Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder? (Perhaps.) Must he know the Carnot Cycle and Boole’s Inequality? (Well …) And then languages—can someone who reads only Constance Garnett’s rather wooden version of Anna Karenina really know Tolstoy’s masterpiece any better than some Frenchman can know Shakespeare by reading Andre Gide’s translation of Hamlet? Every scholar likes to defend his own specialty as a cornerstone of Western civilization, and any restraints can seem philistine. George Steiner approvingly quotes, in Language and Silence, a suggestion that “an acquaintance with a Chinese novel or a Persian lyric is almost indispensable to contemporary literacy.” On a slightly more practical level, intellectual codifiers like to draw up lists of masterworks that will educate any reader who is strong enough to survive them—thus Charles Eliot’s famous five-foot shelf of Harvard Classics and all its weighty sequels.

It was the immensely influential Eliot, deeply impressed with the specialized scholarly and scientific research performed at German universities, who proclaimed in 1869, upon becoming president of Harvard, the abolition of its rigid traditional curriculum. Basic education should be performed by the high schools, Eliot declared; anyone who went on to college should be free to make his own choice among myriad elective courses. The students chose the practical. “In the end, it was the sciences that triumphed, guided by the hidden hand of capitalism and legitimated by the binding ideology of positivism,” Ernest Boyer and Martin Kaplan observe in Educating for Survival. Before long, however, the inevitable counterrevolution against the elective system began; there was a “core” of certain things that every student must learn. Columbia established required courses in contemporary civilization; the University of Chicago and St. John’s College duly followed with programs solidly based on required readings of classic texts.

St. John’s, which is based in Annapolis, Md., and has a smaller campus in Santa Fe, N. Mex., is a remarkable example of an institution resolutely taking this approach. Ever since 1937, all of St. John’s students (683 this fall on both campuses) have been required to read and discuss a list of 130 great books, drawn heavily from the classics and philosophy but also from the ranks of modern novelists like Faulkner and Conrad. The students must take four years of math, three of a laboratory science, two of music and two years each of Greek and French. That is just about it. This modern liberal arts version of the trivium and quadrivium includes no such novelties as psychology (except what can be learned in the works of Freud and William James) and no sociology (except perhaps Jane Austen).

St. John’s is aware of the obvious criticism that its approach is “elitist” and even “irrelevant” to the real world. But President Edwin DeLattre’s mild voice turns a bit sharp when he retorts, “If knowing the foundations of one’s country—the foundations of one’s civilization—if understanding and learning how to gain access to the engines of political and economic power in the world—if knowing how to learn in mathematics and the sciences, the languages, the humanities—if having access to the methods that have advanced civilizations since the dawn of human intelligence … if all those things are irrelevant, then boy, are we irrelevant!” DeLattre is a philosopher by training, and he offers one definition that has an ominous but compelling reverberation in the thermonuclear age: “Don’t forget the notion of an educated person as someone who would understand how to refound his or her own civilization.”

Ill: Education Teaches How to Think

Aristotle was one of those who could found a civilization, and while he thought of education as both a social value and an end in itself, he ascribed its chief importance to what might be considered a third basic concept of education: to train the mind to think, regardless of what it is thinking about. The key is not what it knows but how it evaluates any new fact or argument. “An Aristotle educated man, wrote in On the Parts of Animals, “should be able to form a fair offhand judgment as to the goodness or badness of the method used by a professor in his exposition. To be educated is in fact to be able to do this.”

The Aristotelian view of education as a process has become the conventionally worthy answer today whenever college presidents and other academic leaders are asked what an education should be. An educated man, says Harvard President Bok, taking a deep breath, must have a “curiosity in exploring the unfamiliar and unexpected, an open-minded-ness in entertaining opposing points of view, tolerance for the ambiguity that surrounds so many important issues, and a willingness to make the best decisions he can in the face of uncertainty and doubt…” .

“The educated person,” says University of Chicago President Hanna Holborn Gray, taking an equally deep breath, “is a person who has a respect for rationality, and who understands some of the limits of rationality as well, who has acquired independent critical intelligence, and a sense not only for the complexity of the world and different points of view but of the standards he or she would thoughtfully want to be pursuing in making judgments.”

This is an approach that appears to attach more importance to the process of learning than to the substance of what is learned but it does provide a way of coping with the vast increase of knowledge. “The old notion of the generalist who could comprehend all subjects is an impossibility, and it was even in past ages,” says Chicago’s Gray. “Renaissance humanism concentrated on social living and aesthetic engagement but left out most of science. To know all about today’s physics, biology and mathematics, or even the general principles of all these fields would be impossible.” To make matters still more difficult, the fields of knowledge keep changing. Says Harvard s Henry Rosovsky, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences: We can’t prepare students for an explosion of knowledge because we don’t know what is going to explode next. The best we can do is to make students capable of gaining new knowledge.”

The old Aristotelian idea, combined with a contemporary sense of desperation about coping with the knowledge explosion helped inspire a complete reorganization—yet again—of Harvard’s curriculum. At the end of World War II, Harvard had curtailed Eliot’s electives and launched a senes of general education courses that were supposed to teach everyone the rudiments of science and the humanities. But by the 1960s, when rebellious students seized an administration building, that whole system had broken down. “At the moment,” a saddened Dean Rosovsky later wrote to his colleagues, “to be an educated man or woman doesn’t mean anything … The world has become a Tower of Babel.”

Out of Rosovsky’s unhappiness came what Harvard somewhat misleadingly calls its core curriculum. Inaugurated in 1979, after much faculty debate and amid considerable press attention, this core turned out to be a rather sprawling collection of 122 different courses, ranging from Abstraction in Modern Art to Microbial and Molecular Biology. Students are required to select eight of their 32 courses from five general areas of knowledge (science, history, the arts, ethics and foreign cultures).

Harvard’s eminence exerts a wide influence, but other first-rate institutions, like Columbia, Chicago and Princeton, point out that they have taught a more concentrated core and steadfastly continued doing so throughout the 1960s. “It makes me unhappy when people think that Harvard has done some innovative curriculum work,” says Columbia College Associate Dean Michael Rosenthal (a Harvard graduate). “They have millions of courses, none of which, you could argue, represents any fundamental effort to introduce people to a kind of thinking or to a discipline.”

But that is exactly what Harvard does claim to be doing. “The student should have an understanding of the major ways mankind organizes knowledge,” says Rosovsky. “That is done in identifiable ways: in sciences by experiment, conducted essentially in mathematics; in social science through quantitative and historical analysis; in the humanities by studying the great traditions We are not ignoring content but simply recognizing that because of the knowledge explosion, it makes sense to emphasize the gaining of knowledge.”

If anyone objects that it is still perfectly possible to graduate from Harvard without having read a word of Shakespeare, Rosovsky is totally unfazed. Says he: “That’s not necessary.”

IV: Education Liberates the Individual

The current trend toward required subjects—a kind of intellectual law-and-order—reflects contemporary political conservatism. It implies not only that there is a basic body of knowledge to be learned but also that there is a right way to think. It implies that a certain amount of uniformity is both socially and intellectually desirable.

Perhaps, but the excesses of the 1960s should not be used to besmirch reforms that were valuable. They too derived from a distinguished intellectual tradition. Its founding father was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued in his novel Emile that children are not miniature adults and should not be drilled into becoming full-grown robots. “Everything is good as it comes from the hand of the Creator,” said Rousseau; “everything degenerates in the hands of man.”

Isolated from the corrupting world, Rousseau’s young Emile was given no books but encouraged to educate himself by observing the workings of nature. Not until the age of twelve, the age of reason, was he provided with explanations in the form of astronomy or chemistry, and not until the social age of 15 was he introduced to aesthetics, religion and, eventually, female company. That was how Emile met Sophie and lived happily ever after. It is a silly tale, and yet there is considerable power to the idea that a student should be primarily educated not to hold a job or to memorize literary monuments or even to think like Aristotle, but simply to develop the potentialities of his own self—and that everyone’s self is different.

While there is probably not a single university that has not retreated somewhat from the experimentation of the 1960s, and while the rhetoric of that decade is now wildly out of fashion, a few small institutions have tried to keep the faith. For them, education is, in a sense, liberation, personal liberation. At Evergreen State College in Washington, which has no course requirements of any kind and no letter grades, a college spokesman describes a class on democracy and tyranny by saying, “We will try to find out who we are, and what kind of human beings we should become.” At Hampshire College, founded in Massachusetts in 1970 as a resolutely experimental school, students still design their own curriculums, take no exams and talk of changing the world. “I don’t see myself as giving a body of knowledge or even ‘a way of learning,’ ” says Physics Professor Herbert Bernstein, “but as involved in something beyond that—to help people find their own path and the fullness of who they are.”

The times have not been easy for such colleges. Not only do costs keep rising, but many students now prefer conventional courses and grades that will look impressive on job applications. Antioch, which expanded into an unmanageable national network of 32 experimental institutions, stumbled to the verge of bankruptcy in the 1970s, and is drastically cutting costs to survive. But the spirit of Rousseau flickers on. Rollins, which has sometimes been dismissed as a Florida tennis school, is trying to organize a conference for such like-minded colleges as Bard, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence and Scripps on how best to pursue the goal of “making higher education more personal and developmental rather than formalistic.”

Even when these enthusiasts do bend to the current pressures for law-and-order, they tend to do it in their own dreamy way. At Bard, where President Leon Botstein decided last year that all students should attend an intensive three-week workshop on how to think and write, the students pondered such questions as the nature of justice. What color is justice? What shape is it? What sound does it make? What does it eat? “I can’t think of anything,” one student protested at the first such writing class. “Don’t worry about it,” the teacher soothingly answered. Among the students’ offerings: “Justice is navy blue, it’s square. It weaves in and out and backs up … Justice is black and white, round … It has the sound of the cracked Liberty Bell ringing.” Workshop Director Peter Elbow’s conclusion: “We’re trying an experiment here, and we’re not pretending that we have it under control or that we know how it works.”

V: Education Teaches Morals

The U.S. Supreme Court has forbidden prayers in public schools, but many Americans cling to the idea that then-educational system has a moral purpose. It is an idea common to both the Greeks and the medieval church (“O Lord my King,” St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions, “whatsoever I speak or write, or read, or number, let all serve Thee”). In a secular age, the moral purpose of education takes secular forms: racial integration, sex education, good citizenship. At the college level, the ambiguities become more complex. Should a morally objectionable person be allowed to teach? (Not Timothy Leary, said Harvard.) Should a morally objectionable doctrine be permitted? (Not Arthur Jensen’s claims of racial differences in intelligence, said student protesters at Berkeley.)

Many people are understandably dismayed by such censorship. But would they prefer ethical neutrality? Should engineers be trained to build highways without being taught any concern for the homes they displace? Should prospective corporate managers learn how to increase profits regardless of pollution or unemployment? Just the opposite, according to Beyond the Ivory Tower, a new book by Harvard’s Bok, which calls for increased emphasis on “applied ethics.” (Writes Bok: “A university that refuses to take ethical dilemmas seriously violates its basic obligations to society.”)

Religious colleges have always practiced a similar preaching. But some 500 schools now offer courses in the field. The Government supports such studies with a program known as EVIST, which stands for Ethics and Values in Science and Technology (and which sounds as though a computer had already taken charge of the matter). “The modern university is rooted in the scientific method, having essentially turned its back on religion,” says Steven Muller, president of Johns Hopkins. “The scientific method is a marvelous means of inquiry, but it really doesn’t provide a value system. The biggest failing in higher education today is that we fall short in exposing students to values.”

Charles Muscatine, a professor of English at Berkeley and member of a committee that is analyzing liberal arts curriculums for the Association of American Colleges, is even harsher. He calls today’s educational programs “a marvelous convenience for a mediocre society.” The key goal of education, says Muscatine, should be “informed decision making that recognizes there is a moral and ethical component to life.” Instead, he says, most universities are “propagating the dangerous myth that technical skills are more important than ethical reasoning.”

Psychiatrist Robert Coles, who teaches at both Harvard and Duke, is still more emphatic in summing up the need: “Reading, writing and arithmetic. That’s what we’ve got to start with, and all that implies, at every level. If people can’t use good, strong language, they can’t think clearly, and if they haven’t been trained to use good, strong language, they become vulnerable to all the junk that comes their way. They should be taught philosophy, moral philosophy and theology. They ought to be asked to think about moral issues, especially about what use is going to be made of knowledge, and why—a kind of moral reflection that I think has been supplanted by a more technological education. Replacing moral philosophy with psychology has been a disaster, an absolute disaster!”

Each of these five ways to wisdom has its strengths and weaknesses, of course. The idea that education provides better jobs promises practical rewards for both the student and the society that trains him, but it can leave him undernourished in the possibilities of life away from work. The idea that education means the acquisition of a cultural heritage does give the student some grasp of that heritage, but it can also turn into glib superficialities or sterile erudition. The idea that education consists mainly of training the mind does provide a method for further education, but it can also make method seem more important than knowledge. So can the idea that education is a form of self-development. And the teaching of ethics can unfortunately become a teaching of conventional pieties.

To define is to limit, as we all learned in school, and to categorize is to oversimplify. To some extent, the five ways to wisdom all overlap and blend, and though every educator has his own sense of priorities, none would admit that he does not aspire to all five goals. Thus the student who has mastered the riches of Western civilization has probably also learned to think for himself and to see the moral purposes of life. And surely such a paragon can find a good job even in the recession of 1982.

Are there specific ways to come nearer to achieving these goals? The most obvious is money. Good teachers cost money; libraries cost money; so do remedial classes for those who were short-changed in earlier years. Only mediocrity comes cheap. Those who groan at the rising price of college tuition (up as much as $7,000 since 1972) may not realize that overall, taking enrollment growth into account, college budgets have just barely kept up with inflation. Indeed, adjusted for inflation, four years of college today costs less than a decade ago, and faculty salaries in real dollars declined about 20% during the 1970s. Crocodile tears over the cost of higher education come in waves from the Federal Government, which has so far held spending to roughly 1981 levels, and proposes deep cuts (e.g., nearly 40% in basic grants) by 1985. This is an economy comparable to skimping on the maintenance of an expensive machine.

But money alone will not solve all problems, as is often said, and this is particularly true in the field of education. If improving the quality of American education is a matter of urgent national concern—and it should be—then what is required besides more dollars is more sense: a widespread rededication to a number of obvious but somewhat neglected principles. That probing research and hard thinking be demanded of students (and of teachers too). That academic results be tested and measured. That intellectual excellence be not just acknowledged but rewarded.

These principles admittedly did serve the system that educated primarily those few who were born into the governing classes, but the fact that elitist education once supported elitist politics does not mean that egalitarian politics requires egalitarian education. Neither minds nor ideas are all the same.

All that the schools can be asked to promise is that everyone will be educated to the limit of his capacities. Exactly what this means, everyone must discover for himself. At the community college minimum, it may have to mean teaching basic skills, at least until the weakened high schools begin doing their job properly, as Philosopher Mortimer Adler urges in his new Paideia Proposal. This calls for a standardized high school curriculum in three categories: fundamental knowledge such as history, science and arts; basic skills such as reading and mathematical computation; and critical understanding of ideas and values. These essentials must really be taught, not just certified with a passing grade. Beyond such practical benefits, though, and beyond the benefits that come from exercising the muscles of the mind, higher education must ultimately serve the higher purpose of perpetuating whatever it is in civilization that is worth perpetuating. Or as Ezra Pound once said of the craft that he later betrayed, “The function of literature is precisely that it does incite humanity to continue living.”

This is the core of the core idea, and surely it is by now indisputable that every college student improves by learning the fundamentals of science, literature, art, history. Harvard’s Rosovsky may be right in suggesting that it is “not necessary” to have read Shakespeare as part of the process of learning how to think, but he is probably wrong. Not because anyone really needs to have shared in Lear’s howling rage or because anyone can earn a better salary from having heard Macbeth declaim “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …” But he is enriched by knowing these things, impoverished by not knowing them. And The Marriage of Figaro enriches. The Cherry Orchard enriches. The City of God enriches. So does a mastery of Greek, or of subnuclear particles, or of Gödel’s theorem.

In a sense, there really is no core, except as a series of arbitrary choices, for there is no limit to the possibilities of learning. There are times when these possibilities seem overwhehning, and one hears echoes of Socrates’ confession, “All I know is that I know nothing.” Yet that too is a challenge. “We shall not cease from exploration,” as T.S. Eliot put it, “and the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” The seemingly momentous years of schooling, then, are only the beginning.

Henry Adams, who said m The Education of Henry Adams that Harvard “taught little, and that little ill,” was 37 when he took up the study of Saxon legal codes and 42 when he first turned to writing the history of the Jefferson and Madison Administrations, and 49 when he laboriously began on Chinese. In his 50s, a tiny, why figure with a graying beard, the future master of Gothic architecture solemnly learned to ride a bicycle. —By Otto Friedrich. Reported by

Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York and J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago