Barry's Blog

When John Harvard in 1638 bequeathed part of his fortune and 400 books to "the new college" in Cambridge, Mass., the intention of American higher education was to prepare men for the clergy and the kingdom of Heaven. Little changed until after the Civil War, when certainties about God began to fade and colleges started to incorporate new subjects and new ideas and offer students "choices," with specialized departments with subjects like English, philosophy, and modern languages, replacing the old fixed curriculum and its classical texts. This movement away from a classical education, and its implications, is the subject of Anthony Kronman's recently published book, Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. 

Kronman, a professor at Yale and formerly the dean of its law school, argues passionately that without a strong religious idea at the center of higher education, educators and their schools in fact lack a core mission. They seek to teach, as Woodrow Wilson once put it, "not so much learning as the spirit of learning." 

In Kronman's analysis, what followed was the century of "secular humanism," beginning with Charles Eliot's appointment as president of Harvard in 1869 to the campus revolts of 1968, with secular humanism attempting to find a middle ground between dogmatic belief in God and militant atheism. In many ways, this secular movement was illustrative of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's belief that the twentieth century world had "Come of Age," no longer considering belief in God as necessary to explain our world.

Kronman's comments on political correctness serve as a scathing indictment of what multiculturalism and misguided "diversity" have done to our universities' humanities departments: "The more a classroom resembles a gathering of delegates speaking on behalf of the groups they represent, the less congenial a place it becomes in which to explore questions of a personally meaningful kind including, above all, the questions of what ultimately matters in life and why. In such a classroom, students encounter each other not as individuals but as spokespersons instead. They accept or reject their teachers as role models more on account of the group to which they belong and less because of their individual qualities of character and intellect." 

While Education's End might seem a bit despairing when we consider the present state of affairs of higher education, Kronman does see a revival of traditional humanism, as he observes that there has been a revival of conservative orthodoxy which has "put spirituality and its ultimate questions at the center of the cultural debate."

Many of us rarely think of the purpose or role of education, largely because we, as a society, have not been taught to consider the concept of the summum bonum in education, the "greatest good." Most of us have gotten an education, and send our children to schools to get an education so that they can find a career that pays well. What else is there to live for other than bread and circuses? To modern sensibilities, there is no summum bonum, no telos (purpose), only thanatos (death). The modern answer to purpose for living is simply that there is no answer. Like the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, life is a "vanity, literally a "chasing after the wind," a wild goose chase, yet there is no wild goose in the end. Or to put it another way, when ultimate ends disappear, only toys remain (So why is Ecclesiastes in our Bible anyway?)

According to the British historian Arnold Toynbee, ours, the modern West, is the first of the twenty-one great civilizations that does not have or teach its citizens any answer to the question of Why they exist. Which is another way of saying that as our society becomes more pluralistic, it leaves us free to choose or create our own ultimate values. We know more about every thing, and less about Everything.

To this subject, Kronman makes a remarkable statement on the centrality of a purpose for living: "One cannot live a meaningful life unless there is something one is prepared to give it up for. People's lives are therefore meaningful in proportion to their acknowledgment that there is something more important than the lives they are leading: something worth caring about in an ultimate way. The question, of course, is what that something is or ought to be."

This, I believe, is where the mere Christian has something to offer. To provoke others on the journey of life, and not simply to offer glib, packaged answers. When Christ commanded us to be "as wise as serpents, and as harmless as doves," I think He was suggesting that He wants not only a child's heart, but a grown-up's head.

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow 

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