The Post-Education era: Academic
Institutions in the Age of Philistinism
Attitudes toward hierarchies shed light on fundamental
differences between the left and the right. The latter tends to be skeptical of
them and for this reason, leftists often rally around the ideal of equality. On
the other hand, the right views hierarchies as desirable because they promote
social order. Meritocracy is generally
the underlying premise behind the argument regarding the necessity of
hierarchy. It is often assumed that the elites deserve to be in power because
they are more qualified to govern than the ordinary people. Clearly, this
principle can be abused and in many cases, one becomes a member of the elite
simply by being born into the ruling class.
The elites aspired to remedy the intellectual weaknesses
of their youngsters by subjecting them to a rigorous education. That is why it
was quite common for nobles to be tutored by the leading scholars of their day
and age. When Diogenes the Cynic was sold into slavery, he was purchased by an
affluent estate owner in the capacity of a philosophy tutor for his son.
Alexander the Great was educated by Aristotle himself and Descartes taught
Queen Isabella of Sweden. In many cases, the children of the aristocrats simply
lack the intellectual ability to be well-educated and the upper-class routinely
import talent into their ranks. Edmund Burke is the case in point as he was not
born into the aristocracy, but proved worthy of joining them.
Throughout the history of the Western civilization, the
relationship between membership in the elite social class and education has
always seemed clear. The aristocrats always made a special effort to educate
their young to ensure that they would become worthy successors. As such, they
were expected to not only manage their parents’ estates competently, but to
also pursue political engagement in a manner that served the class interests of
the ruling families. This form of education has been unabashedly elitist and it
is because of rather than despite that, the students who received such
schooling achieved considerable intellectual growth. Those who were quite
gifted were expected to work hard at their studies and the less talented were
expected to work even harder.
Those who wished to make education available for the
general public were often forced to concede that educators can only offer
opportunities for intellectual self-enhancement. However, the onus was on the
students to take advantage of these opportunities by displaying hard-work and natural
talent. Yet the proponents of this position believed that when given such
chances to get ahead in life, they would undoubtedly take advantage of them and
positive social changes will occur as a result. It was even hoped that as more
people born into plebeian surroundings gained access to higher education,
society would become more egalitarian. At the core, those who agitated for
democracy insisted that a well-educated citizenry was basis of social
progress.
Yet,
the advent of the Industrial Revolution soon cast doubt upon the viability of
this strategy. As the advent of capitalism greatly contributed to the
prosperity of United Kingdom and the United States, these two countries began
entering the third stage of demographic transition. Therein, their population
increased because more children born to non-privileged families received the
basic necessities for survival well into adulthood. Perturbed by the hypothesis of a Malthusian
catastrophe, Francis Galton embarked upon a systematic study of heritability of
intelligence.
Galton’s
findings led him to believe that intellectual ability was heritable to a
significant degree and that the elites were more likely to be genetically
endowed with potential of this nature than their less privileged counterparts. Building on this premise, Charles Spearman
developed the theoretical framework known as the “g-factor” suggesting that one
is born with a certain degree of intellectual potential and one’s natural
talent tends to be spread out evenly throughout various cognitive tasks. In light of the troubling possibility that
the less talented greatly outnumbered the most talented and the offspring for
both groups could survive, the Malthusian catastrophe appeared to be a realistic
possibility. In effect, this posed a troubling question to progressive
activists wishing to “democratize knowledge” by making education available to
all Americans. Is the education system truly making the average person more
intelligent or is it unduly rewarding the least intelligent and the least
industrious members of society?
By the early 20th century, American
legislators have become preoccupied with the notion of dysgenics as those with
the most mal-adjusted genes seemed to reproduce the most. Following the
paradigm developed by Horace Mann, educators cherished very little hope in
empowering all children to become intellectuals. Instead, public schools have
mostly concerned themselves with creating a citizenry that was obedient,
orderly and suitable for work in a highly regimented factory environment where
conformity was deemed more important than intelligence or creativity. With
these developments, an eminent 20th century sociologist, David
Reisman chronicled a fundamental change in the American national character
featuring a shift away from the inner-directed mentality to the other-directed.
This shift emerged as the driving force behind the cultural revolution of the
1960s and its numerous implications for modern America.
Up
until the middle of the 20th century, few disputed the notion that
higher education was to be reserved for the few members of society who truly
were intellectually gifted. The incontrovertibility of this precept came into
question with the conclusion of World War II where the GI bill empowered
hundreds of war veterans to receive college education. Accompanying the shift
toward the other-directed perspective and the economic hardships of the Great
Depression, the egalitarian left made inroads into college campuses. As
students of limited academic potential changed the collegiate milieu, the
meritocratic right struggled to defend their belief that education was to be
reserved only for the gifted and the industrious. As the Red Diaper babies
reached college age by the 1960s, the era of campus radicalism took root and laid
down the foundation for doctrines that characterize the modern left including
Marxism, Radical Feminism, and Post-Modernism.
Despite the evident differences between these schools of
thought, their underlying assumptions were fundamentally egalitarian rather
than meritocratic. Marxism presupposed that there is no such thing as human
nature and psychological traits that people attribute to human nature are
merely a result of capitalist exploitation. Therefore, the purpose of education
is to divest the young minds of bourgeoisie
assumptions about genetic differences in ability between people and their
connections with positive life outcomes.
Building on the Marxist assumption about human nature, feminists
maintained that the subjugation of women was also a result of a “capitalist
false consciousness” and students should be educated to abandon the belief that
there are biological differences between men and women.
Many
post-modern theorists did not explicitly borrow the Marxist premise regarding
the negation of human-nature, yet they embraced the element of relativism
inherent in Marxism. Similarly to how their intellectual forebears maintained
that capitalism shaped the collective consciousness of society, post-modernists
maintained that the prevailing ethos also define human character and social
action. With this rationale, they argued that all human perceptions are shaped
by societal phenomena and therefore, all truth is relative. The position of
total relativism has been buttressed by the drastic change in the demographic
character which made the American society more multi-cultural. As the American
milieu became more diverse, it has become impolite for the majority group to
insist that newcomers assimilate to the American way of life and renounce all values
incompatible with the traditional American worldview.
The
proponents of multiculturalism naturally forged an alliance with the academic
left and together, they endeavored to achieve a profound transformation of the
American collective consciousness. Altogether repudiating the traditional
American values of individualism, inner-directedness and meritocracy, they
unabashedly set about to instill the ethic of equality into the American
collective consciousness. Almost uniformly, they were hostile to all theories
suggesting that groups or individuals differed with respect to talent, ability,
achievement or any other measure of merit. To them, the very idea of
distinguishing between people based on merit resembled systematic oppression.
By
their lights, Blacks scored lower on IQ tests than Whites because the Whites
have colonized and oppressed Africa. If a student belonging to a minority group
underperformed in school, the problem was never to be attributed to his lack of
intelligence or industriousness. Instead, it was to be attributed to his
circumstances such as domestic abuse or exposure to neighborhood violence. It
goes without saying that these factors were not to be imputed to moral failures
of his parents, neighbors or other individuals of minority status. Instead, it
was to be ascribed to systematic oppression that condemns all minorities to a
miserable existence. On the other hand, if a white student performs well
academically, he ought to “check his privileges” instead of feeling proud of
himself.
Conspicuously
absent from this analysis of life outcomes concerning race is that Asians tend
to outperform whites with respect to IQ, academic achievement, professional
success and socio-economic status. Even more glaringly missing is the superior
performance of high IQ minorities to whites with comparable IQs. What is furthermore problematic with the
academic left’s position is that despite the enormous government assistance
impoverished minorities received, a significant portion of them remain
penurious and dependent on the state (http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-Social-1950-1980/dp/0465065880/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448020445&sr=8-1&keywords=losing+ground).
Moreover, there is little evidence suggesting that merely preventing people
from discussing differences in life-outcomes by race bridges the gaps of
socioeconomic inequality. In other words, there is no reason to believe that
the mere ethic of equality ameliorates the plights of those whom the left
regards as the most disadvantaged.
Bounded
rationality typifies all ideological discourses and the left’s position is not
an exception to this rule. While they cannot address all of the aforementioned
objections to their position, they can try to prevent people from entertaining
such ideas. As the ideology of academia became more uniform and intransigent
toward the end of the 20th century, the left increasingly concerned
itself with controlling the scope of discourse on campuses. The escalation of
the hyper-PC environment across American campuses is the case in point and it
bears testament to why universities are becoming places of intellectual coercion
and behavioral prohibition (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/the-new-intolerance-of-student-activism-at-yale/414810/).
The
academic moral climate is not entirely relativist, relativism is merely one of
the two pillars of the modern left’s moral campus. According to Jonathan Haidt’s
findings, modern liberals base their morality on two maxims: that of care and
fairness http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/jonathan-haidt-the-moral-matrix-breaking-out-of-our-righteous-minds/)
. Relativism buttresses the ethic of care as such an orientation urges people
to regard all individuals and groups as deserving of their compassion,
regardless of how perverse and reprehensible they may seem. Fairness as the
left defines it, is merely a euphemism for the ethic of equality. The left
tends to maintain that because all people have “inherent worth” it is only fair
for everyone to live in roughly equal material comfort.
The
combination of fairness and care creates a peculiar synthesis of fervent
moralism and relativism which characterizes the mindset of the modern PC
leftist. With such missionary zeal, the academic establishment maintains that
if more people were to accept their point of view, a “better society” would be
created under the banner of pluralistic tolerance, multiculturalism and
equality of positive life outcome. Galvanized by these convictions, the Ivory
Tower bureaucrats feverishly lobby the Democratic Party for increased
government involvement in education. In light of the super-abundance of student
loans that any student can access with ease, the proliferation of degree mills
with over 90% admission rates and the rapid integration of degree mill
curricula into four year universities, they have clearly succeeded.
Post-modernism
heralds the end of the modern tradition in philosophy which was founded on
objectivity of truth. The modern academic PC movement represents the
integration of post-modernism not only into the scholarship of humanities, but
also the general academic milieu. Given that truth is now deemed to be specific
to cultural values all of which are deemed equally desirable under the ethic of
equality, there is no basis for preservation of rigorous academic standards.
Traditional education has always been founded on the concept of intellectual
merit and because this ideal can no longer be sustained, academia has entered
the post-educational era.
