Education and its discontents

 

Education and its discontents (and contents)

Once upon a time, at least in my imagination, the buildings in which teaching and learning  occurred were designed to be beautiful and to last for centuries. The ideas taught in those buildings centered on logic, education, and the virtues and vices of humanity.

Today, institutions of higher learning are more "institutional" - not designed or built to last forever or inspire the viewer with their beauty. However, although they have lost the beauty element, they continue to teach what we call the humanities. Now it is left to community colleges to teach many of the skills such as plumbing and construction and car repair. 

When I studied drawing long ago in a university, the worst insult you could get from your professor was that your drawing was beautiful. Beautiful meant trite, unimaginative, pattern. If by mistake you did draw something "beautiful" you were asked to take a pencil, pen, knife, or eraser  and slash lines through your mistake.

When I studied literature in a university, our interpretations had to be, if not the interpretation of the professor (which was not always made clear), then a summary of the interpretation of some other scholar with whom the professor agreed. Despite the fact that any narrative can probably have a million possible interpretations, your interpretation if not repetitive was seen a faulty. Has it always been that way, even when the university campus was built to be beautiful and to last generations? Did the students of Socrates have to copy what Socrates said. Apparently so, as that is why we know about his thinking, just as that is the way we know what Confucius and many others have taught. 

However, what concerns me here is  the loss of beauty, which one might mourn as one mourns the loss of one's belief in the goodness of humankind. My real interest here is copying. We are a species know for copying. A first question is how did we get from beauty to practicality?  Did funding inspire the change?  Further, we may copy the virtues listed above or we may join others in rejecting them. By copying I do not mean plagiarism, although that is rampant, but the fact that many faculty and students seem to be expected to copy the ideas, words, postures...of those they accepted as role and thought models when they were graduate students. Where in this picture are the original thinkers, the ones who having learned the accepted models of thought, begin to forge their own way?  More importantly, where in the humanities are the original thinkers - not just those who change a few words or describe the thoughts using academic terms. 

The Liberal Arts include the sciences, which depend on hypotheses that are testable, not on how they fit with prior thinking (that that is there to some significant extent), but  on the falsifiability and strength of their hypotheses. Evolutionary biology is trying to lure the humanities into its realm. I have to wonder though, as despite the fact that they are  using - or reciting - modern Darwinian theory as a base -  they often propose non-testable hypotheses that are, however worded in complex academic terms -- terms not defined either in the paper or dictionaries. Further, to what extent are mistakes made and, worse yet, copied generation after generation? Do interesting hypotheses, albeit nontestable, ever correct themselves or does "science" continue along a path that takes humanities scholars ever more deeply into convoluted errors of thinking.

Don't get me wrong, copying is not necessarily a negative thing. Copying helps a students get As and helps us be seen as members of any particular community. Shibboleths.  As one example, young women who copy sorority girls are modeling behaviors known to be successful in attracting wealthy husbands. There are many possibly examples, but perhaps I am too skeptical. Can one be too skeptical when one lives in a social group created by humans?