On Bill Maher’s show last week, Columbia professor John McWhorter made a crack about the huge chunk of time students waste in college. He described them as spending four years pretending to like Shakespeare. McWhorter is a smart guy and a professor of linguistics, so I’m not sure why he would disparage the value of a liberal arts education. But there it is.
His comment was part of a conversation joined in by Maher, the gist of which was that post-secondary education, when it is not preparing students for a specific job, is a pointless exercise.
This is not a new idea. Back in 1966, when I had just finished my freshman year, two of my parents’ friends asked me what I was majoring in. When I told them political science*, one of them smiled sarcastically at other and said, “What does a political scientist do besides teach other political scientists?”
My somewhat feeble answer was, “They teach other people too.” But if he had asked me that same question today, I would have had more to say. I might have started by pointing out that the more political science classes students take, the less likely they will be to storm the Capitol in an effort to destroy American democracy.
The truth is that education at the college level is supposed to teach people a number of things that are not job-related, one of them being how to support and protect democracy.
The mission statement of the liberal arts college where I taught for some 30 years starts like this: “Rollins College educates students for global citizenship and responsible leadership, empowering graduates to pursue meaningful lives and productive careers.”
Yeah. There it is:
Global citizenship
Responsible leadership
Meaningful lives
I think that last reference to “productive careers” is a relatively new addition, aimed at encouraging parents to understand that their kids will get a job after they graduate. And they do.
Two Rollins graduates of my acquaintance from the class of 2010 majored in Classics and English. They are now happily and productively employed as, respectively, a nurse and a children’s librarian. They are not only verifiably good at their jobs, they are also appreciative of the level of understanding about the world that their educations gave them. Their lives are rich and meaningful, and neither one of them participated in the violent assault on the Capitol last January.
One of the most dramatic social transitions of the last decade has been a shift of educated Americans toward the Democratic party and of the less well-educated toward the cult-like Trumpian GOP. It’s very clear that the better educated a person is, the less likely they will be to accept the wacky, self-serving ideas that Trump and his servile followers in Congress are dishing out. Education is a good thing, even (or especially) when it is not merely job-oriented. It’s weird that intelligent adults like Maher and McWhorter would sneer at it.
So let me end with a tidbit I gleaned from my education, a remark by H. G. Wells: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
Last January 6 should remind us that education is not necessarily winning this race.
*This was before I discovered the glories of anthropology in my junior year.
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