An enduring myth has taken hold among a lot of people who are concerned about the state of higher education. The myth is that universities are failing when it comes to the prime directive of teaching their students how to think. Actually the phrase “teaching students how to think” should be surrounded by quotation marks.
That is because the idea that teaching students how to think is not only fundamentally flawed, but as a practical matter it is also impossible. After all the students have already spent a good deal of time in their grammar and high schools being brainwashed. In some of the more progressive jurisdictions, high school students are allowed, if not encouraged to leave classes to attend the “right” demonstrations.
Just think about the latest outbreak of foolishness on the campuses of the nation’s elite colleges and universities. Many, if not most of their students are filled with what they consider to be righteous outrage at the behavior of both Israel and the US in the war between Hamas and Gaza.
While the students chant “…from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free…” try asking one of the protesters which river? which sea? and you are likely to get a blank stare in response. Surely that is at least partly due to ignorance of history. But there is much more to it than that.
If it were just about learning how to think, the students would at least know how to marshal elementary facts and make a coherent argument. But there is precious little evidence of that. Instead, the students simply recite ready-made bumper sticker slogans. Which is pretty much how they acted during the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests. So these and myriad other examples demonstrate that the universities fail the “learning how to think” bit when put to the test.
But it goes much deeper than that, and for several reasons. Among them is that the prime focus of the university is not to teach students how to think; instead the focus of the university should be to facilitate the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. That idea, commonly accepted until relatively recently, is, however, subversive of progressivism. For one thing, it implies that there is such a thing as truth, and that it is worth pursuing for its own sake. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the whole idea of truth is decidedly not “my truth”, but truth in some objective sense. Else, what is the point?
In turn that implies that universities should foster respect and gratitude for Western Civilization, and for the institutions of Western Liberalism on which it depends. Those institutions were founded on both Tradition and Reason. Among other things, the sine qua non of Western Liberalism is individual freedom. That freedom is granted through natural law and is inherent in each individual. Further, that individual freedom, discovered by the use of Reason, is protected by the rule of law, an independent judiciary, the maintenance of property rights and by limiting the size and scope of government power.
Limiting government power includes process rights guaranteed by positive law, for instance the right to a jury trial. It also includes fundamental natural rights that preclude certain government behaviors, especially with respect to freedom of speech and religion—e.g.—“Congress shall pass no law…”
That brings up the other reason why the learning to think bit is a fraud. It presupposes a standard to measure against. But that idea is at war with the modern secular religion known as progressivism, to which most universities and virtually all the elite ones, subscribe. Modern progressivism assumes that all knowledge is relative (my truth); that knowledge is divorced from nature (sex is not a biological reality) and that the Liberal institutions of Western Civilization including educational institutions are actually a means for enforcing white supremacy (for instance consider the move to “de-colonize” algebra or to halt “cultural appropriation”).
In a nutshell, the progressive notion that the university’s mission is, or ought to be, to teach students how to think is quite simply, a fraud. Modern progressive universities actually strive to teach students what they should think not how to think. Modern universities have become fad factories, fashion shows. How could it be otherwise?
If all knowledge is relative and an author’s work can be deconstructed to mean whatever the student wants it to mean, why bother reading the Great Books of the Western Canon at all? For that matter why should any particular book be “privileged” as one of the Great Books? And let’s face it, freshman at our elite universities, like freshman everywhere, are on average maybe 18 or 19 years old, which means they are children. Nevertheless they are designing their own curricula. Even if they aren’t old enough to legally buy a pack of cigarettes.
Further, magical thinking dominates the thinking of the modern progressive university. What I want to be true is true. All that is necessary for this sleight of hand to work is to misuse language. What else explains the routine use of terms like “pregnant people” or “chest feeding”. Or of specifying pronouns? Why else do university administrators work so hard to silence the voices of heterodoxy—those voices that are on the “wrong side” of history?
So it ought to be clear that the mission of the great American research universities is not to teach students how to think. Or to prepare them for a good job. For that, they can go to trade school or a get a professional degree. Law school, medical school, an accounting or architectural degree or an MBA would do just fine here.
The mission of research universities should be the discovery of and intergenerational transmission of knowledge. And that includes understanding the importance of Western Civilization and the immense benefits it has bestowed on mankind.
JFB
