For most of my life, indeed until a few years ago, I held a romantic, even exalted, view of academia. What could be more inspiring than a vocation and a community devoted to the life of the mind? One could see university life as a sort of secular monasticism, participation in a tradition unbroken from the High Middle Ages. I was convinced that this was still there underneath despite all the evident corruption, and this is not a belief a man relinquishes without a certain bitterness.
Universities exist to pursue truth. This is consistent with the university espousing a particular belief system–there have historically been Catholic and Marxist universities, for example–so the pursuit needn’t be entirely open-ended. However, I doubt a true university can exist under the DEI ideology because it is not even a comprehensive truth claim about the world, but the assertion of a status hierarchy, an exercise in messaging rather than literal speech.
In common usage, being “educated” means having gone to a Western-style secular school, and being “highly educated” means having gone to college. Thus, for example, it is said that America battled the Taliban so that “Afghan girls could be educated”, and it is said that, in America, all of the “educated” classes vote for the Democratic Party. This usage should be contested. It is false and insulting to so cavalierly assert that Afghan housewives and American plumbers are less knowledgeable in some absolute sense than those with four years of indoctrination in the Regime’s race and gender ideology, as if only Regime ideology counts as knowledge, and not what is picked up from parents, religious tradition, or on-the-job training and experience. From a properly neutral sociological point of view, nearly all human beings are deeply “educated” by their surrounding culture. Illiterate peasants have generally had vast amounts of practical knowledge, familiarity with their natural and social environment, folklore, and a profound inherited sense of their place in the cosmos. If it be contested that some of this knowledge is not scientific in the sense of empirical verifiability, I would say that a greater fraction of it is scientific by this measure than what is taught today in college outside the engineering and medical schools.
Much misunderstanding comes from the false belief that education is the sort of thing that can be acquired in four years. We imagine that we should become educated while young and then have our whole adult lives to apply this education to our work and civic participation. In order to accomplish this, we encourage students to either 1) learn only some narrow specialty, 2) get a general-survey smattering of many subjects, with a heavy dose only of propaganda, or 3) rush through the “great books” with necessarily too little time to digest them and too little maturity to appreciate them. Whatever the value such an expenditure of four years, it should not lead one to the complacent assurance of being educated. I now speak of “education” not in the sociological sense but in the eudaimonic sense of the flourishing of the intellectual aspect of human excellence. In this sense, becoming educated is the work of most of a lifetime. Formal schooling gives only the tools to begin the process of education. Only a minority have the calling to pursue education, and of these only the most gifted can hope to become educated before the age of sixty. By this standard, I am not educated, and though I feel a calling to it, I may never reach the goal. Fortunately, progress in education–like progress in health, wisdom, self-control, and holiness–is valuable in itself even when the full realization remains distant. We must fulfill our duties as workers and citizens–sometimes even as teachers–with partial education.
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