Education out, job training in.

The late James Cameron, a distinguished scholar who taught English and philosophy at St. Michael's College, published an article which began with a provocative statement: "I suppose there can't be any doubt that the golden age of liberal education was in Western Europe in the nineteenth century" (Commonweal, 1980).

Most moderns are convinced that the twentieth century has surpassed the nineteenth in almost every conceivable way; to say that something is "positively Victorian" is to consign it to the ashheap. But Cameron was sufficiently contrary to contend that liberal education, i.e., an education directed toward a general enlargement of the mind--the cultivation of the mind for its own sake--came to perfection in a society very different from our own, and that we have very little reason to pride ourselves on the state of "enlightenment" of our own time.

Cameron also asked whether Christianity could survive the vanishing of a culture that is in some way Biblical, that is, soaked in the stories and moral attitudes conveyed in Scripture. "Could Christianity survive a complete break with the past of our culture?" he asked, and he replied, "The answer to this question is plainly no; if the story of Israel and of the Crucified One were to drop out of human memory, then Christianity would obviously cease to exist..."

Even if this had not happened, he detected the signs of a fraying of our link with the past. Christianity does not depend upon a particular culture, but if people have forgotten what a good Samaritan is, who Job and Samson were, and what is meant by atonement for sins, then the context in which the Christian message can be heard and comprehended is missing. Two aspects of the loss of our connection with the past which Cameron stressed were the decline of literacy and the decline of morality.

Along with the decline in the practice of reading and writing has come a decline in the ability to write in plain and intelligible English, free of gobbledegook and jargon. Even those who have passed through high school and university use terms like input, parameters, meaningful relations, consciousnessraising, interface, and the like. Such language seemed to Cameron to be connected with deep confusion in politics, theology, and thought about human life.

The moral revolution of our time, he wrote, has made past morality not so much disliked or opposed as unintelligible. Their teachers deeply impress on the minds of the young that there are many different sets of "values" to be picked out by the individual ("true for me, "right for me") as from the counters of some vast moral cafeteria, and that growing up and becoming a mature person is confecting one's own style and set of "values." As long as society retains a minimum of health, it is important that certain sophistries and idiocies be recognized for what they are.

Cameron pointed out that there are certain things that an educated person ought to know, whether or not their usefulness is obvious: "A knowledge of literature; a sense of history; an acquaintance with some of the classics of philosophy; it seems reasonable that such things should be nourished as the core of a curriculum in the liberal arts." "Such knowledge," he continued, " is fundamental to the health of society, for without it we have no criteria for picking out who we are or what we are." He emphasized, however, as did John Henry Newman in Victorian times, that liberal knowledge is useful to a person and to society. Newman said that it should be sought for its own sake "as constituting the best and highest function of the intellect for social and political life." In fact, he considered that such an education was necessary if a person was to fulfil his duty to society as such.

Michael Harris 

To a hardnosed politician, discussion of education in terms such as Cameron and Newman use is simply incomprehensible; he wants to get down to practical matters, such as how to get "more scholar" per dollar.

In November 1997, Ontario Premier Mike Harris made a speech in which he declared that decisions must be made about ensuring "good value" for students and taxpayers for their investment in post-secondary education. He put special emphasis on three considerations--accountability, efficiency, and relevance--without giving any sense that he understood how such terms might have very different meanings in education from those they had in business.

Before he was premier, he made a speech on education which provoked a question from a listener: did he know that Ontario's spending on higher education was the second lowest of any Canadian province? In reply he asked, "Which is the lowest?" The answer was, "P.E.I." His answer: "Then they are more efficient than we are." As someone in the audience commented, he treated expenditure on education as if he were talking of a golf game--in which the lowest score wins.

John Snobelen 

As his first Minister of Education, Harris appointed John Snobelen, a man who saw education as a service organisation, to be run like any other business. He referred to students as "clients," to parents and taxpayers as "customers," and to teachers as "front-line service providers." Naturally these service providers had to be accountable to their clients and customers for results. "We must design the entire educational system as a service organisation," he said in a speech in 1995, "and we must continue to ask ourselves if we could be giving our customers better value for their tax dollars."

He was one of those advocating career counselling at a very early age--in grade school if possible--and who thought that the real aim of education was to contribute to the Gross National Product. It was surely very significant that, at the end of the twentieth century, discussion of education by ministers of the Crown could thus be reduced to the level of farce.

University of Calgary

The year before Snobelen's momentous address, Norm Wagner, former president of the University of Calgary. declared that universities do not resemble Wal-Marts as much as they should. He called retailers "a good model for how to deliver better service" in the universities. Wal-Mart claims to deliver good customer service cheaply; so should universities. Writing about this in the Globe and Mail, Calgary professor Harry Vandevlist described such talk as the pernicious effect of business-speak run wild. He recalled being a graduate student at McMaster University in Hamilton when a strategic planning process took place there. This exercise involved the use of flow charts of the sort corporations use to formulate their own strategic plans; clarification of the university's "core mission"; and agreement on who its customers were. All of the deans, vice-presidents, and other administrators began to ask, "Who are the university's customers?"--the wrong sort of question to ask about any university, which is not a Wal-M art, in the business of selling products cheaply.

How to be efficient

Accountability, relevance, and efficiency in education cannot be easily measured, and may become apparent only over a long period of time. Before India gained its independence, it was administered by British civil servants, about 40,000 of them--a remarkably small number to take care of so large and populous a country. (We would need that many to administer a province!) They qualified for positions in the Civil Service by getting good degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. What did they study? Psychology, sociology, man management, other useful and relevant subjects? Not at all. They took what Harris and Snobelen would consider completely useless subjects, the Greats--in other words, the Greek and Latin classics. So equipped, possessing the trained and cultivated minds to which Newman and Cameron referred, they became first-class administrators.

Frye and McLuhan

Two of Canada's best-known and most influential scholars in this century, Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, similarly trained themselves to make important contributions to twentieth-century intellectual history through studies which apparently had very little relevance to twentieth-century life. Some of Frye's writings demonstrated how the Bible had a continuing influence on contemporary literature, often without the authors themselves realizing how indebted they were to patterns of alienation and regeneration found in the Old Testament.

McLuhan wrote a thesis for Cambridge University on a rhetorical tradition coming down from Cicero and other Latin writers--about as seemingly irrelevant a subject as one could imagine. What it led him to do, however, was analyse first the effect on Western culture of Gutenberg and the invention of printing, which meant seeing characters in a linear sequence, and then of the effect of electronic media, which immersed a person in a whole mixture of sounds not arranged in a linear sequence but coming at him from all directions at once. In other words, study of the classics enabled him to bring a new understanding of the changes to our culture brought by inventions far beyond the ken of the classic writers or of Gutenberg.

Frye and McLuhan were both very relevant to our time, though they were certainly not "relevant" in ways which Harris and Snobelen could understand.

Market accountability

In April 1998 William Thorsell, editor of the Globe and Mail, stirred up a debate over contemporary university education with a column advocating "market accountability." He wrote that "Canada's best universities are embracing a much more dynamic operating environment and some are radically changing the way they operate and even their missions." "If he is right," commented Nobel Prize winner John C. Polanyi, "let this be a warning. Our best universities have as their mission the pursuit of excellence, building for the long term. Only stronger public support, and not market forces alone, can save them from having to change that mission."

In a long letter, James M. Estes, a retired University of Toronto History professor, gave what amounted to a magnificent defence of liberal education as over against market-driven learning. He too asked about relevancy:

"Is there any room in your world view for universities charged with cultivating, at public expense and in the public interest, fields of enquiry that are deemed to be important even though not currently popular with students or corporate managers? Is the French Revolution, for example, still an important subject, even though it does not currently attract the large enrolments of 40 or 50 years ago and even though studying it will never contribute directly to higher corporate efficiency?"

Like James Cameron, Estes complained about the growth of illiteracy and barbarity, partly attributable to bad teaching in the schools:

"Would you say that it is possible to teach anything at all to a student population that has been so badly served by the public-school system that 80 per cent of them cannot read, write, or think in any known language; know virtually nothing about history, geography, literature, or any other subject fundamental to significant discourse about human affairs; cannot make any coherent sense of what they read in books or hear in lectures; are unable either to follow a logical argument or construct one; cannot write essays or exams that make any sense at all; and believe (because they have been taught) that it is unfair to expect any of the above from them?"

The indictment is perhaps too strong; there are capable students in university; but it is certainly true that the "progressive" education which has been dominant in the twentieth century has left whole generations of students intellectually deprived. And market-driven forces are not going to provide a remedy, even though some universities greet them with enthusiasm.

Dalhousie, Halifax

One of these is Dalhousie, in Halifax. It is a fine old university, but if it accepts the proposals made in "Strategic Directions for Dalhousie University" (the draft copy I have is undated, but it probably came out in 1997) its whole nature will be changed. "Broad forces encompassing regulatory, technological, and market changes," the document says, "promise to transform the world of higher education in the years ahead." Apparently it is not only to be transformed, but to become unrecognizable. Throughout there is emphasis on assessing students' needs in a much more competitive environment for education providers":

* "like other former monopolists, we will have to pay much more explicit attention to the needs of those we serve."

* "intellectually, we will need to think about our curriculum in terms that relate more directly to our students' needs."

* "Competitive markets produce more demanding consumers."

What about the students' need for an education? That does not seem to come into the picture. Throughout, the language is that of the market place; in fact, market or marketing occurs again and again. There is emphasis on "focusing on new markets for innovative education programs," and "developing a strategic marketing plan for Dalhousie." The University can still provide an attractive opportunity for students, partly because, like soap, it enjoys "brand-name recognition": "To .put the qualities in marketing terms, we enjoy strong brand-name recognition and excellent product-testing results.... "The following goals and objectives," the document says, "try to establish identifiable targets. Ideally, we should be able to translate them into operational plans that include clear measures of success and failure and realistic timeframes for implementation."

Whether or not Dalhousie has put this ambitious plan in force, I do not know; but the "strategic plan" gives some indication of how university administrators are thinking these days. And Dalhousie is not alone.

Newman wrote that "education is a high word; it is the preparation for knowledge, and it is the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that preparation. We require intellectual eyes to know withal, as bodily eyes for sight.... We need both objects and organs intellectual; we cannot gain them without setting about it; we cannot gain them in our sleep, or by haphazard." He adds that "a University is, according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill." We could add, "or a supermarket."

In his brilliant little book Escape from Scepticism: Liberal Education as if Truth Mattered, Christopher Derrick pictures the academic world as very far from possessing a body of more or less certain knowledge; fashion is king: "We see any number of brilliant minds at work, but in radical conflict with one another; we see new approaches and methods being invented constantly and becoming extremely fashionable, but never reigning for long without radical change . . . . The idealism of Bradley was in, and then it was out; logical positivism rose and shone and fell; metaphysics was killed and people danced on its grave, but then it treacherously crept forth and started to show signs of life again." It is no rare thing, he concluded, to meet an erudite man who remains a total sceptic.

John Paul II 

In his encyclical on faith and reason, John Paul II addresses this very problem. He too is aware that recent experience has led many to believe that there are no answers to the fundamental questions which pervade human life, such as "Who am I?" and "Where have I come from and where am I going?" Such questions, the Pope says, are no longer asked in the university.

Nihilism, the conviction that there is nothing to believe in, is one response to what the Holy Father refers to as this century's experience of evil. The rationalism which prevailed in the 19th Century, belief in the triumphant progress of reason, has collapsed, and at the end of this century one of our greatest threats is the temptation to despair.

The Pope's encyclical, then, is a plea for education in faith and hope. The world needs to be reassured that truth is still possible. Reason and faith do give man answers to the fundamental questions: "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth," he says at the beginning of his encyclical. Reason needs faith to answer the fundamental questions of life, and faith needs reason to understand those answers.

Writing in the New Oxford Review in 1995, David Solomon said that nowadays "students need less to be liberated from narrow prejudice than to be given assistance in acquiring cultural resources. And no richer cultural resources are available than the broadly Christian intellectual tradition that informs Western culture." John Paul himself has said that "becoming a human being is precisely the main purpose of the whole process of education." There is no question that a major part of education is the preparation of a young man or a young woman for his or her future calling; but unless society has people who will ask and answer the main questions the Holy Father raises--Who am I? Where did I come from and where am I going? What is truth and where is it to be found?--society in any meaningful sense of the term can hardly exist.

In another New Oxford Review article (July/August 1998), J. A. Gray discusses Joseph Tussman's book entitled The Beleaguered College, which is partly a lament for the loss of cultural controls on hedonistic impulses: "The failure to provide this great context is to send our students, robbed of their proper clothing, of their proper minds, naked into the jabbering world."

Will computers save us?

It is worth observing that becoming a slave of the computer will not make a person a complete human being. In his 1995 speech John Snobelen regretted that Ontario schools were so slow to put the computer at the centre of the educational progress. The computer is a wonderful invention, but what it does is give information, sometimes in overwhelming quantities; the important thing is what the mind does with that information. In 1850 Newman scolded the university for encouraging the delusion that "what the steam engine does with matter, the printing press is to do with mind; it is to act mechanically, and the population is to be passively, almost unconsciously, enlightened, by the mere multiplication and dissemination of volumes." "Change printing press to personal computer, change volumes to information," writes J. A. Gray, "and we see how retrograde our pet novelty is."

The old American heresy, Gray continues, was that a university is a student sitting on one end of a log and his teacher on the other. The new, cool heresy is that a university is a student sitting alone with his computer. We and our children are subjected to a massive advertising campaign to persuade us that curricula don't exist and teachers are superfluous--that study is logging-on, learning is browsing, and wisdom is downloading. The dogma behind this heresy is that intellect is information and the mind is an information processor. But is modem calling unto modem the same as mind encountering mind? Is wisdom a variety of information?

David Dooley, professor emeritus of St Michael's College in Toronto, is an associate editor of Catholic Insight.