Posted on March 26, 2006
As we careen helplessly to the end of the semester (and, for some, the end of our undergraduate careers), many of us are acutely aware of how much, exactly, we have learned at JMU. What many of us are still grappling with, however, is why.
College is hardly inconsequential. It takes a large commitment of time, money and energy to walk out of an institution of higher learning with a diploma. And, to be honest, it is the diploma that we want. Our education, we are told, will lead us to great things; “great things,” however, usually means employment and paychecks.
It was not always like this. A long time ago, the world was young and the educated educators that populated the faculties at our universities were not afraid to dive head first into the pursuit of the questions that have fascinated the “human animal” since the dawn of civilization: who we are, why we are here, how we got here, where we are going?
As our society shifted away from religion into secularism — the appeal to reason — to post-secularism — the appeal to fashion — the goal of higher education has been diluted to the point of insignificance.
This shift has not gone unnoticed; scholars such as C. John Sommerville, professor emeritus of the University of Florida, and Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, have taken to the academic streets in protest. Sommerville especially, in “The Decline of the Secular University,” goes to great lengths to show the dangers inherent within a post-secular education.
Examples of such “fashionable moralizing” abound in our modern, post-secular society. A few years ago, when the late advice columnist Ann Landers was asked why, after years of opposing premarital sex, she now willingly condones it. In true ‘90s style, she responded with a bumbled answer about how “times have changed.”
Wellspring of wisdom though she may have been, Ann Landers was more a product of the culture than a producer of the culture. Such moral ambiguity hardly originated with her but is definitive of our post-secular society, and it is impossible to academically examine such ambiguity when it is free to change course with the wind.
Nowhere is this an endorsement of a particular moral code, nor a particular answer to the age-old questions that make humans human. But higher education once helped us answer those questions; now it helps us ignore them. As Stephen Carter argues in a review of Sommerville’s book, “We are questioning, wondering creatures, and Sommerville wants universities to help us question and wonder better.”
Instead, universities help us dismiss the questions themselves. These vital issues — issues that presented the original need for education and higher education — have been categorically dismissed. As Sommerville argues, “science instruction is becoming ever less philosophical, ever more technical, so that it no longer seems to suggest answers to the big questions.” Our trade and business departments make no pretension of seeking to do more than get us a job. Our liberal arts departments have embraced “criticism,” which often serves to evaluate human phenomenon without suggesting alternatives. Even our religion and philosophy departments operate like Jane Goodall studying her monkeys by teaching courses in the insulated method of “comparative religions.”
Knowledge, it is said, is what you know; wisdom is knowing what to do with what you know. Those of us graduating from the modern education system are woefully unprepared to grapple with the questions that have plagued mankind from time immaterial, chock-full of knowledge but thirsty for wisdom. We are merely designed to go out and make money, though we are equally unprepared to understand why we are making money, or what we are to do with our money. After four years of higher education, all we have learned is that he or she who dies with the most stuff “wins.” Ultimately, we have all lost.
Brian Goodman is a senior communications major.
