On Education, Formation, Citizenship and the Lost Purpose of Learning

Joseph Clair

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501326172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

Reading Augustine presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religion scholars. The looming crisis in higher education appears to be a matter of soaring costs and crushing student debt, but the problem is actually much deeper. It is a crisis of soul; a question of the very purpose of learning and the type of people that our educational system produces. Today, in the age of academic hyper-specialization and professional knowledge, the moral and spiritual purposes of learning have been eclipsed by a shallow view of career and success. On Education, Formation, Citizenship, and the Lost Purpose of Learning turns to the influential figure Augustine of Hippo to explore how he saved the liberal arts at the end of the Roman Empire and how his inspiring vision can do the same for higher education today. It offers a roadmap for reviving the soul of education – presenting concrete ways that the intellectual practices and economic enterprise of learning can lead once more to a fulfilled life of knowing God and loving others.

1

The Lost Purpose of Learning

The apparent problem facing higher education

College is a rich part of the Western cultural imagination and a canonized plot line in the American middle-class mythos. Although it is costly and time-intensive, there are good reasons to be proud of this tradition and to go away for four years to become adults. After all, college leaves an indelible stamp on the soul: the formative lessons of newfound independence, hard work, and leisure in preparation for the business of life. Few institutions have more nostalgic and patriotic bonds of affection that last as long—and procure as many donations—as college and university alumni associations. Americans talk and think about college all the time. Americans eagerly read the U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings—despite criticisms about its validity—as a way of dreaming of the future and measuring oneself against the world. Many Americans begin saving when their children are born. Many stay up late worrying about their kindergartener’s grades and violin lessons. Many spend thousands of dollars on college prep tests and campus visits for their high schoolers.

But is it worth it? What is college? Contrary to the popular image of the exhausted student amidst a pile of books, recent reports by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that the average college student only spends 3.5 hours a day on educational activities (a combination of class and study hours) compared to the 4.0 hours of leisure and sports activities and 8.8 hours of sleep. Lest one think this is because all college students work three jobs and pay their own way through school, the study also reveals that students spend 2.3 hours a day on average at non-college-related jobs. Not only do students give significant fractions of time to a variety of endeavors, but they seem unsure about what to do with their primary purpose of being in college. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 80 percent of students change their major at least once; and for those who do change it, they do so, on average, at least three times.

After the recession of 2008, the value of college education itself seems to be hanging in the balance. For the fifth straight year college enrollment is down. Fall term enrollment this academic year (2016–17) in the United States dipped by 1.4 percent to 19.01 million students according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. This decline represents a 1.59-million student decrease from the 20.6-million enrollment peak in 2011. Part of this dip may represent a decline in adult students (over the age of 24) who are increasingly interested in ditching the degree in favor of a job. Yet in The Atlantic last year, Alia Wong pointed out that this trend also continues a widening gap between high school graduation and college enrollment in this country: In 2013–14, 82 percent of high school seniors made it to graduation (an all-time high), yet only 66 percent immediately enrolled in college (down from 69 percent in 2008).¹

One plausible explanation for the decline in enrollment is the skyrocketing cost of college tuition and the resulting student debt. The average cost of tuition at private colleges in 2016–17 was $33,480, and in 2015, 68 percent of college seniors graduated with an average of $30,100 in debt, a number that has been steadily climbing over the past ten years. The reasons for the cost spike are multiple—new student services, amenities, sports programs, etc.—many of which have to do with increasing competition for the sacred but slimming pool of applicants who are both academic high-achievers and well-to-do—in other words, excellent students whose families can pay their way. This contest and associated cost spike is what is referred to as the “brand new rock climbing wall in the student center” phenomenon in the new college admissions hustle.

Colleges and universities are increasingly sensitive to the cost spike and debt overload. In their effort to control costs, many schools have begun closing “ancillary” departments (mostly in the humanities) and focusing on professional programs (e.g., nursing, engineering, education)—those easiest to connect degree with salary. Some traditional liberal arts colleges have had to close their doors. It amounts to a veritable shake down of traditional liberal arts education in the United States. The causes underlying the maze of statistics are still unclear—a befuddling mix of data that leaves social scientists and educators to forever search for the real causes of the college enrollment decline. It is time to ask more incisive questions. What is a liberal arts education for? Has the traditional four-year liberal arts college or university experience become a rote cultural practice, emptied of significance and value—a ritual for which the original motivating reasons cannot be recalled? Why go to college at all?

The real problem facing higher education

The problem facing higher education is tied to the inability to provide an account of the value of a traditional liberal arts education—the value of college itself—apart from very narrowed economic considerations related to career success, expected incomes, and paychecks. When one asks the question of the value of a college education purely in economic terms—of cost in relation to financial return—the account of the overarching purposes of a college education is restricted to the singularly instrumental question: What will I make?

The liberal arts tradition, out of which American colleges and universities have grown, includes a robust set of answers to the question of the value of a college education that can be boiled down to four essential categories of purpose: intellectual, economic, moral, and spiritual. Today, the intellectual purpose of a college education—expressed in the question: What should I know?—is subordinate to the purely economic, perpetually trying to define and justify itself by its instrumental value, answering the question: What will I make? This approach gives the impression that if one can conceive a relationship between the intellectual purpose and the economic purpose, then college’s existence is justified and there is no longer any need to think about the second two purposes—the moral and spiritual—which are increasingly difficult to discuss in a secular and pluralistic society.

Yet today, just as the economic purpose has triumphed, the intellectual purpose of college and university life has been called into question. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa persuasively demonstrate in their landmark work, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago, 2010), a disproportionately large percentage of students (over 45 percent in their studies) demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of core skills for which they are ostensibly being trained (e.g., critical thinking, communication) across their four years of education. Their studies suggest that the intellectual purpose of a liberal arts education needs to be ordered toward something other, something higher—perhaps toward the noninstrumental values and goods traditionally associated with liberal arts education—in order to retain its vigor. If the intellectual is ordered solely toward the economic—that is, if education is reduced to utter instrumentality—it will die. The intellectual purpose of a liberal arts college requires a balance between the materially, instrumentally, and economically useful on the one hand and the morally and spiritually praiseworthy on the other. The intellectual purpose of college is unstable on its own. It needs an aim beyond itself to justify the costs of time and leisure necessary for study. And the economic purpose alone is insufficient to sustain the intellectual enterprise over the long haul. Or so the current cultural crisis over the values of a college education seems to suggest.

Studies generally support the idea that the economic purpose of college remains real—the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard Web site boasts that college graduates earn, on average, $1 million more than high school graduates over their lifetime. Such details and justifications are of course complex when one takes all the factors—tuition cost, student debt, university alumni salaries, etc.—into account. Take, for example, the 2015 study published by the Wall Street Journal that revealed that college graduates (ages 25–29) in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics related (STEM) disciplines earn on average $76,000 a year compared with humanities majors who earn only $51,000 a year. If the sense of the value of a college education is purely economic and it can be proven that one would be able to make more than $51,000 a year as a young adult, is this a good reason not to go to college and study philosophy? To let one’s sense of the value of a college education be exhausted by paychecks is to allow the economic (What will I make?) lead the intellectual (What should I know?). This cultural conversation reveals how deep the economic instrumentalization of education has gone, and it is not merely a matter of the modes by which one goes about justifying college tuition. It has to do with a culture’s deepest values—the ones that are implicitly inculcated in students long before they get to college. According to the traditional models of liberal arts education—the ones that gave rise to the modern college and university—to let the economic purpose lead the intellectual is to shape students who navigate knowledge without a North Star. It is to form students who have knowledge and technical mastery over the world without adequately training them in what to do and who to serve with that knowledge and mastery.

To answer the question of the value of a college degree purely in economic terms is to have already lost the battle. In the age of information delivery, online courses, flipped classrooms, and digital fluency, there are already cheaper and shorter routes for career preparation, especially in the lucrative STEM subjects—routes that do not require the onerous and lengthy residential requirements and core curricula found in traditional liberal arts colleges.

Take, for example, the Thiel Fellowship—founded by technology entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel in 2011. This two-year program offers young people willing to skip college a scholarship of $100,000, a broad professional network of supporters, and a chance to “build new things,” things they actually “care about.” This fellowship presupposes that, in general, eighteen-year-olds care about the right things and know what the world needs. The Thiel Fellowship should be applauded because it merely makes explicit the instrumentalist view of higher education prevalent today—a view aimed at practical efficiency and lucrative life outcomes. This approach to education dispatches once and for all the stuffy questions: What kinds of people ought colleges aim to form? Who or what ought to be worshiped as the culmination of true learning? These questions of moral and spiritual purpose feel increasingly irrelevant and out of date in liberal education.

The contemporary conversation about the value of a college education reveals all that one needs to know about the crisis—there is no shared language to speak about the moral or spiritual purposes of learning. Western culture is strangely mute about how these purposes relate to economic value and their relevance to the decision to attend, fund, or reform contemporary institutions. This silence about the moral and spiritual purposes of learning reveals a shared confusion about the true nature of education.

A brief history of the soul of education

As mentioned above, the liberal arts tradition out of which American colleges and universities have grown includes a fourfold set of purposes for education: intellectual, economic, moral, and spiritual. For the most significant thinkers in this tradition, the intellectual purpose (What should I know?) and the economic (What shall I make?) are only intelligible in light of, and should be guided by, the moral (What should I do?) and the spiritual (Who or what should I worship?). The latter two purposes—the moral and the spiritual—and their corresponding questions form what I call the soul of liberal arts education. A brief history of this soul reveals three distinct phases or stages—the Platonic in the classical period, the Augustinian Christian in the medieval and early modern periods, and the Romantic in the modern era. Each movement synthesizes the four purposes of learning and attempts to establish the moral and spiritual purposes as the signposts that guide the intellectual craft and economic outcomes of a liberal arts education in a specific historical moment and cultural context.

The moral and spiritual purpose of liberal arts education was born in ancient Greece in Socrates’ view of the human being as naturally ordered to pursue truth and to flourish in a learning community. This view was then extended and adapted by Plato and Aristotle in the formation of the liberal arts as a discrete set of disciplines or fields of inquiry to be pursued in formal schools. The seven classical liberal arts—forged in Rome and sharpened in the early Middle Ages—were divided between the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). The trivium focused on the language arts—the relationship between language and reality—and the quadrivium focused on quantity in all of its stunning diversity in the material world. These foundational subjects branch into the many disciplines or fields of inquiry systematized by ancients like Aristotle—including subjects such as philosophy and the natural sciences. Thus the liberal arts were seen as the foundation of the many disciplines that we now think of as the different departments in a college or university. Indeed, accrediting bodies for colleges and universities still require broad training in the seven liberal arts as partial requirements for graduation. These arts—not merely the fine arts—were labeled liberal in the ancient world because they were preparation for being a good citizen—a liber in Latin—a “free person” worthy to participate in a self-governing society. They stand in contrast to the servile or mechanical arts aimed solely at manual training in practical crafts. This view of education entails a substantive view of human nature, in which development in the “liberal” modes of learning accords with our essence as creatures and provides the intellectual and moral formation for a good life and a good society.

It is thus a teleological view of education—learning ordered both toward an overarching moral purpose or goal as well as a spiritual telos. (The term telos in Greek denotes a “purpose, aim, end, or goal”—terms that I will use interchangeably throughout this book.) For the Platonist, God appears as the final goal of all true learning. All of the liberal arts—and the more specific fields of inquiry—provide pathways by which our minds may travel to God by means of his creation. Liberal education becomes an exercise in ascending from the created world to the uncreated Cause, Source, and Origin of all that is.

St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD) was educated in and taught the classical liberal arts. He was the imperial professor of rhetoric in Milan before his conversion to Christianity. For Augustine, the Platonic view of liberal learning as ascent takes on special significance after his conversion to Christianity and his discovery of Jesus’ summary of the “law and the prophets” in the two “greatest” commandments: “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength,” and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:34-40). The moral and spiritual purposes of learning find their center in these high and lofty divine commands, and Augustine sets himself to the task of understanding how liberal arts education can lead simultaneously to obedience of these two divine commands and to fulfillment of the deepest teleological moral and spiritual purposes of intellectual beings.

How precisely does a liberal arts education help one to fulfill their ultimate calling to be a good lover of God and neighbor? It does so in two ways, for Augustine. First, learning about the world of nature and culture is an expression of the desire to love both God and neighbor. Careful and patient consideration of God’s world in all of its vibrant beauty and bewildering complexity is inherently reverent, worshipful, and honoring of both God and neighbor. By learning about creation, one learns about the Creator. By learning about human culture—and its many expressions throughout history and around the world today—one learns about one’s neighbors, and the Creator who created them in his image, calling them to be cocreators with him. Even confused, darkened expressions of human civilization contain rays of truth, goodness, and beauty.

Liberal arts education properly conceived, for Augustine, is not merely learning about the Creator, but, indeed, it is a learning toward God and neighbor. Learning consists in both intellectual capacity for knowing but also the will’s capacity for loving. Intellect and will (along with memory) are the preeminent powers of the human soul—they must be united for true learning to occur. The attention required to properly understand some feature of the world is thus an expression of desire—desire to understand, desire for God. Genuine learning unites proper knowing with proper loving. The soul possesses the inherent capacity to ascend from knowledge of any particular truth or facet of the world to love for he who is the Source of all that is. One can follow the traces of truth, goodness, and beauty scattered throughout nature and human culture (e.g., social arrangements, art, government, institutions, architecture, literature) to the Source itself. It is a lesson Augustine learned from Plato. By properly tracing these values to their Source in God, one is strengthened in the ability to discern and appreciate the relative value of these earthly things. In the same way, one’s knowledge of the world of human culture is an expression of loving, careful attention to one’s neighbors, living and dead. Even the capacity to form judgments about the relative value of human culture reveals inwardly a connection to God as the Source of all truth, goodness, and beauty. All truth, beauty, and goodness is God’s truth, beauty, and goodness. There is nothing of which one can learn that does not derive its ultimate existence from God.

Thus the second great phase in the soul of education is Augustine’s Christian baptism of the liberal arts and reinterpretation of their Platonic moral and spiritual purposes through the lens of the double commandments of love—a reinterpretation of the classical view of the human person that I will explore more fully in the next chapter. The Augustinian Christian vision held sway for over a millennium after Augustine’s death in 430 AD, giving rise to the university in the late Middle Ages and to the bir...