A Diversity of Ideas

The girls and I have begun looking at colleges.  Yikes.  Breathe, Autumn...

We've had some interesting experiences.  Claire and I visited a small liberal arts college.  She loved it.  It costs more than our annual income. 

Then the girls and I went to see a large state school.  Both girls gave it a thumbs-down.  Way too big and impersonal for them.  Makes sense I suppose: they've spent their whole lives in a school of three students.  Come to think of it, as homeschoolers, we have a reverse teacher-student ratio: instead of numbering "students per teacher", we number "teachers per student".  My kids have had a great many teachers over the years, but never more than a handful of students in a class.

As part of our college visits, we attended several classes at each school, an experience I found very eye-opening.  At the smaller school, all freshmen are required to take a year-long class in which they read and discuss a select literary canon, in order to form a common background for the remainder of their college years.  Claire attended a session of this class, which coincidentally was discussing the Holocaust, something she had covered in history only a few days before, so she felt right at home.

At the state school, we all attended an English class that was discussing Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, as well as criticism of it by Chinua Achebe, (best known for his novel Things Fall Apart.)  The teacher, with her cropped hair, black dress, coffee cup, and sardonic, slightly superior manner, was almost a caricature of a typical modern English professor.  She said something I found very interesting: she pointed out that if you read Heart of Darkness in the 70's (which I nearly did - early 80's), you probably discussed its symbolism and the characters' descent into madness (which I did.)  However, students reading the novel now read it as a racist tract, rather than a work of fiction by a writer even Achebe admits is "...undoubtedly one of the great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the bargain."  Achebe further states that "[Conrad's] contribution therefore falls automatically into a...class -- permanent literature -- read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of Darkness is indeed so secure today that a leading Conrad scholar has numbered it 'among the half-dozen greatest short novels in the English language.'"  But then Achebe goes on to say, "...the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot."  (Chinua Achebe quotes from: http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html) 

The professor of this class alluded to the "Great Books" (with an eyeroll) as an antiquated notion dating from the 1920's and 30's, and clearly rendered irrelevant by enlightened modern thought.  Enlightened modern thought of course, states that we must not only include great works by a diversity of women and people of color in our curriculum, but that we must denegrate and eliminate (racist, sexist, narrow-minded) works by dead white men.

The problem I have with this notion is not the inclusion of a broader array of fine literature.  I believe that the very notion of "great books" should include great works from any culture.  And in fact, this is what the freshman curriculum of the liberal arts college we visited sought to do: to introduce students to the greatest works from a broad array of cultures, covering the Bhagavad Gita as well as the Bible.  Great books should not be defined by any authorial criteria, either the necessity of being a European male with classical training, or of being anything but.  Rather, great literature should be defined by its own meritorious content -  Does it tackle the great questions of human experience?  Does it bear re-reading?  Is the language elegant, the syntax memorable?

In the class we attended, I saw only a snapshot moment of what may well have been a broad and multi-faceted discussion of Conrad's work, so I hasten to say that it is in no way fair of me to make a snap judgement about this class, or even about the state of the classics in modern education.  But the experience did bring up some troubling questions to me: to what extent is modern literature education devoted to the demolition of the literary canon, a body of work that has been read, discussed, analyzed and valued for centuries?  Who are we in this supposedly enlightened age to dismiss out of hand the greatest works of all humankind, simply because they were written by people who do not share our modern perpective?  I'm all for thoughtful analysis of literature from a variety of perspectives, including the post-colonial lens.  If the discussion centers around approaching a piece of writing from a number of viewpoints, that can only deepen a student's experience and analytical abilties.  But if, as I fear, some professors are teaching an agenda of indoctrination into a particular politically correct viewpoint, then education as a mind-expanding experience is lost.

Apparently I'm not the only person who sees a danger in this approach.  I just read this article today.

Academia's Unexamined Assumptions

The author, Thomas Sowell, writes in part:

Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination. Moreover, it is largely indoctrination based on the same set of underlying and unexamined assumptions among teachers and institutions.
If our educational institutions — from the schools to the universities — were as interested in a diversity of ideas as they are obsessed with racial diversity, students would at least gain experience in seeing the assumptions behind different visions and the role of logic and evidence in debating those differences.
Instead, a student can go all the way from elementary school to a Ph.D. without encountering any vision of the world that’s fundamentally different from the prevailing political correctness.
A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.

As I prepare to send my children off to college from our admittedly very insulated homeschool environment, one of the most important things I want for them is a diversity of ideas and angles from which to view the world.  I want them to have the opportunity to cut their teeth on discussions of substance and depth about a variety of topics.  It doesn't much matter to me what my children study, or where, if they come away learning to think, question, apply logic, debate, and deepen their understanding.  What a colossal waste of eighteen years of my life, (let alone theirs), pouring my heart and soul into providing them a variety of thoughtful experiences, only to have them spend four years being indoctinated into the party line.  Is anyone else disturbingly reminded of Nazi Germany by this trend?

I can only hope that my snapshot experience was just that: a snapshot, taken out of context and in no way representative of the real state of higher education today.  But I fear it might not be...