Education to Promote Public Reason in a Kinda-Sorta Free-ish Society
What would I do if I were Hum-Soc Sci nationwide General Education Czar?…
It is probably not going too far to say that Matthew Yglesias thinks that the purpose of humanities departments, insofar as their undergraduate-education mission in American universities is concerned, should be to teach at least semi-triumphalist versions of:
Hum 1 “Classics of Western Literature”
Soc Sci 2 “Western Thought and Institutions”
Plus other courses related to those two pillars, as they were set out by the post-WWII Harvard Red Book: Paul Buck & al.: General Education in a Free Society <https://archive.org/details/generaleducation032440mbp>.
To wit, here:
Matthew Yglesias: Thankful mailbag: ‘There’s just a big divergence between what most people see as potentially valuable in the liberal arts and what most humanities faculty think is valuable and important…. Educated professionals… it’s good for them to be inculcated with… values… the history of proto-constitutionalism in England and the classical republics… religious freedom… [which] develop[ed] out of the specific circumstances of the Protestant Reformation….
Historical events… Greece to Rome to “the Dark Ages” and the Renaissance and Reformation and the founding of America… philosophical lineage from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke and Mill and Rawls… literary and artistic cultures… informed by these… and that also informed them…. That kind of traditional broad liberal education would of course involve some exposure to radical critics of Anglo-American liberal capitalism….
[But] current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where the radical criticism predominates…. The critical theories themselves would tell you, there’s no way Anglo-American liberal capitalist society is going to sustain generous financial support for institutions whose self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society…
I substantially disagree.
For one thing, I do not think Matthew has Ground Truth as to what is going on in American universities.
I have said this before.
And I do believe I have receipts:
(I have a suspicion, perhaps unwarranted, that Matt is viewing modern American universities only through the eyes of young whippersnappers who went into journalism and were hired by <http://vox.com>, anZ.)61d not through the eyes of those who went to work after graduation for J.P. Morgan, Microsoft, McKinsey, Ford Motor Company, or A16Z.)
And I do not think that a Platonic guardian-education values-implantation program is proper for American universities—not least because I think we have no idea how to do it any better than Plato did, and that there is much more value in teaching people true things and how to accurately reason about the world than to try to inculcate them with whatever your personal preferred version of IngSoc happens to be.
Trying to teach people that there was a “‘good’ west… [different from] the actual one that had marched into the First World War and onward…”, as Judith Shklar once snarked, is likely to backfire because it is not true. For one thing, there was never any such thing as an “‘actual’ west”. There was not any entity of any sort that was at all like a “west” historical through-line starting in Uruk, stopping in Babylon, Memphis, Jerusalem, Athens, Sparta, Rome, Florence, and London before winding up in New York. What entities there were were not conspicuously good. The did set up a chain of historical contingency in which we have been conspicuously lucky. And after the fact we want to pretend that we are the legitimate heirs, by descent or adoption, of those in the past who created things we like.
But that we like to pretend it does not make it in any real sense true.