One often hears liberal-arts professors, as well as college and K-12 administrators, advocating two ideas about academics in America: (a) the importance of a broad, well-rounded, liberal-arts education and (b) the equating of that education solely with the head, not the heart. In 1931, John Dewey chaired a national curriculum conference that declared the liberal arts important for “the organization, transmission, extension and application of knowledge” (emphasis added). That concept has given us the educational system we have today, and it is not what was promised.
A “Well-Rounded” Education
Don’t misunderstand my point; there is great value in a broad, liberal-arts education. It is just that, today, we do it in a way that is ineffective; time is wasted, and so is a lot of money. College should not be the venue where liberal-arts education begins. Instead, college is where students should start to specialize in a course of study, having already acquired general knowledge in K-12. The “12” does represent years, you know.
College should not be the venue where liberal-arts education begins. According to Dorothy Sayers, a noted 20th-century advocate of the liberal arts (and especially the classical liberal arts), much of modern education involves an “artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence.” It used to be that a well-educated person was deemed fit for higher education at about the age of 16 and specialization (either in the form of apprenticed work or more advanced learning) by the age of 18. With the advent of the modern era, however, the West moved away from serious education to the point that it has now collapsed.
Suffice it to say, in the West today (and especially in the U.S.), a type of schizophrenic malaise has crept into colleges, due primarily to an ineffective K-12 system, an overreliance on developmental college curricula, and “general course requirements” that essentially reiterate high-school learning.
The Failure of K-12
About half of U.S. adults (51 percent) say the country’s public K-12 educational system is generally going in the wrong direction. A far smaller share (16 percent) say it’s going in the right direction, and about a third (32 percent) are not sure, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2023.
According to Pew, about half or more of Americans identify the following major problems with K-12:
• Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69 percent);
• Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54 percent).
Most Americans (especially parents) are painfully aware that children are under-performing in school. It’s in the numbers. The so-called Nation’s Report Card notes astonishing declines in math and reading scores since Covid, with students posting the largest score declines ever recorded in math.
College readiness has declined for years, according to the ACT and SAT. For example, the former reports that “only one in five 2023 ACT test-taking graduates (21 percent) is ready to succeed in core college introductory classes.” Yet, somehow, college students are expected to move toward what secondary-education experts call “specialization” by selecting a major course of study (history, English, psychology, etc.). In the pursuit of any such degree, college undergraduates must also take a “core curriculum,” which, again, is comparable to a high-school course of study. Consequently, due to time constraints, students receive insufficient instruction in their “specialization” area, thereby creating a felt need to pursue further study at the graduate level.
College students receive insufficient instruction in their “specialization” area, thereby creating a felt need to pursue graduate study.Additional study entails more time and money to receive (in many respects) the level of training that should have been accomplished at the undergraduate level. Many people (parents, students, and educators alike) believe that this approach has more to do with protecting faculty jobs and generating revenue than with educating students.
The College Dropout Rate
The United States has a daunting 39-percent college dropout rate. Under-preparedness is surely to blame in large part. College undergraduates spend time and money taking “general-education courses” under the guise that these will make their education, and therefore them, more “well-rounded.” Yet these courses offer only a superficial treatment of subjects that should have been mastered in high school. Given the testing results and dismal college-completion rate cited above, the only things that truly get “well-rounded” are the coffers into which student tuition money flows, amounting to thousands of dollars’ worth of wasted time and effort.
Well-Rounded Educations Are About the Head and the Heart
Yet it is not only in regurgitating high-school learning that colleges fail. There is a persistent tendency among modern liberals to identify education with an ever-increasing flow of information (data). I suspect it makes them feel better, as though something important is happening in the classroom. Lots of people are hired, enormous sums are spent, and experts crank out yearly reports on how things are getting better, or at least aren’t as bad as they appear.
But does an education that is focused almost exclusively on numbers and facts guarantee an enlightened society? In fact, the opposite could be true.
When a society associates education almost solely with fact-based knowledge, methods, standards, grades, diplomas, and degrees, it runs the risk of producing what C.S. Lewis called, in his work The Abolition of Man, “men without chests.” Without a belief in, and the teaching of, universal moral laws, we fail to educate the heart and are left with “educated” (not enlightened) people who behave instinctually in their own self-interest.
Lewis admonishes us that a society should be cautious that its education system does not produce citizens without hearts. Considering society today, it appears that Lewis was prescient about the future.
Society should be cautious that its education system does not produce citizens without hearts.Allan Bloom said, in his critique of society and education The Closing of the American Mind, that “education is the movement from darkness to light.” By this he meant from “obfuscation” to “clarity.” Bloom criticizes modern liberal relativism in academia and society as leading to the great “closing” referenced in the book’s title. He offers a profound and compelling diagnosis of the common malady afflicting America and “the university.” The illness involves a crisis in the West, whereby reason is used to further an agenda of obscurantism, designed to denigrate the reality of objective truth and exalt instead the nihilistic relativism found in postmodernist thought. This relativism seeks to undermine society’s confidence in the use of reason.
Education cannot be the purely finite task of informing the mind only—with definitive end points like diplomas and degrees. Rather, as Lewis points out, it must be a lifelong pursuit (in and out of the classroom) of not only knowledge but objective truth through the pursuit of the virtues: prudence, courage, justice, and wisdom.
At some point in education, in other words, the value of the heart must at least equal that of the head.
F. Andrew Wolf, Jr., is director of the Fulcrum Institute, a new organization of current and former scholars in the humanities, foreign affairs, and philosophy. He has contributed essays to the American Spectator, the American Thinker, Academic Questions (National Association of Scholars), and other venues.
This article was originally published at www.jamesgmartin.center
