Product Description
The question of what living is for—of what one should care about and why—is the most important question a person can ask. Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this eloquent and carefully considered book, Tony Kronman explores why this has happened and calls for the restoration of life’s most important question to an honored… More >>
Kronman’s book is very much needed in today’s culturally- and spiritually-bereft age. He advances the argument that higher education has largely become a technical finishing school, where students are groomed for careers in their chosen profession like gears in a machine. Meanwhile their spiritual and emotional needs go un- or undernourished and the only forces that have moved in to take the place are science, to which many of the more educated types have a blind allegiance, and religious fundamentalism, which requires blind allegiance and a relinquishment of independent thought. Kronman advocates the humanities as they used to be taught, before the influx of 60s and post-60s revisionism and PC-curricula, as the answer. Furthermore, rather than apologizing for endorsing the allegedly “rigid, Eurocentric thinking” of Dead White Males, he demonstrates how the curricula of their works is actually more open and tolerant than much of the PC code of the last 30 years or so. It’s a well-crafted argument, although of course he tends to idealize his side of the debate while showing us the worst of the PC side.
Kronman traces the route of higher education in America from the founding of the earliest colleges and universities to post-civil war instruction to the 60s revolution that ousted most of what came before it. The problem is that the deconstructionists, after they were finished deconstructing, didn’t offer anything in place of what they had dismantled, at least beyond the hazy philosophy of cultural relativism and a reluctance to evaluate *anything* qualitatively. (Everything is equally good and equally valid; where you come down is merely a matter of taste and personal cultural prejudices.) We’ve heard this before. But then Kronman offers an ingenious insight and twist: the humanities, already under pressure in the post World War II rising tide of science and specialization–quantification and analysis–felt insecure and was already headed in the direction of measurement and other “objected” criteria. It felt uncomfortable making moral or ethical judgments. In order to save its own relevance and compete in the burgeoning environment of the social and natural sciences, it was adopting their modes of quantification and “objective” observation. If humanities couldn’t tell you the meaning of life, in other words, it could at least measure aspects of life and report on them. That way it too would seem more like a scientific discipline and less like pie-in-the-sky thought.
Thus it fell over when the multicultural attacks began. Humanities professors felt almost embarrassed to defend the subjective assertions of Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, et al, in the midst of accusations that they were just artificial constructs created to allow certain groups to remain in a state of cultural ascendancy.
Thus, in the last 30 or so years, religion and all sorts of “spiritual” movements have moved in to fill the emotional void left by the shrinking influence of the humanities. And colleges and universities have gone from being places where one went to feed one’s soul to places one goes to get vocational training for law, medicine, business, or some other career. Educational institutions now feel it is not their job to deal with the state of students’ souls. That is too personal and open to too many cultural and socioeconomic interpretations and stratifications. Rather than even make an attempt, they just abandon the mission altogether.
Kronman believes a reestablishment of the traditional humanities is vital if we are to escape the moral malaise we have been in for the last several generations. Yes, every generation talks about its moral malaise. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s accounts of the 20s sound a lot like Tom Wolfe’s accounts of the 80s. But at least in the 20s, if one wished, one could find a much stronger and broader program of, for lack of a better term, “the classics,” than one can find at most universities today. Kronman passionately argues that a return to qualification as well as quantification–a balance–is the only answer to a truly educated mind and soul.
My problem with Education’s End is not Kronman’s argument, but his writing. He repeats, over-explains and takes many paragraphs to make a simple point. This book could have been half to a third of its length. Or, alternatively, if he’s gunning for this length (about 270 pages) he could have dug deeper and gone further. I found myself reflecting on many of his observations and finding examples of them in real life–examples he himself could have examined. For example, the quantification obsession in colleges and universities, even in the humanities, could arguably be illustrated by the quality of entertainment we are getting. Every year artistic programs such as NYC’s Tisch School of the Arts, USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program, Julliard and Curtis music conservatories, and others, turn out robots who can leap the technical hurdles of their field while displaying no great gut feeling for it. We get folks who go into, say, film and television who can head production companies or turn out “product” for various “windows” of distribution, who can run numbers and predict what programs will rate the highest return, via all sorts of “scientific” focus groups and statistical compilations. How well does this approach work, ultimately? Well, open the movie page of your newspaper and take a look–there’s the answer. The movie moguls of the past–the Warners, Selznicks, and Zannucks–didn’t have these “scientific” marketing tools. We aren’t turning out people with a *passion* for the philosophy behind art–there’s passion for their own aggrandizement, but that’s something different. The film programs of today could never contain a Fellini, a Bergman, a Truffaut, a Coppola, or a Welles, and some graduates who originally had promise, such as Spielberg and Lucas, instead have turned into the cold, calculating technocrats themselves. (Compare their 70s output with more recent works.) A Yo-Yo Ma plays with more technical security than a Casals ever could. Ditto an Emmanuel Ax vs. a Cortot or an Edwin Fischer. But guess who I would rather listen to.
Kronman’s book never explores where this brave new world of preparing young minds has taken us, and there are examples everywhere you look. Instead the book reads like it was dashed off from some notes in a few short writing sessions. There is some poor and awkward wording that makes me wonder if he even went past the first draft–as an educator at Yale, would he have accepted such a half-baked paper from one of his students? I hope not.
Still, I recommend it for the cogent argument, one that more educators ought to be brave enough to make. But Kronman gets an “incomplete” from me until he polishes his writing style, chops the redundancy and fleshes out his argument to give it more strength and relevance. Class dismissed.
Rating: 4 / 5
Professor Kronman’s book fills a lamentable gap in the literature pertaining to higher education, to the extent that most of what is written on higher education today is rather empty. This is the kind of book that a thoughtful person, having finished college, would come across and, after having read it, would realize that they were utterly misguided in their undergraduate career. That being said, I feel the book should be required reading for anyone considering graduate school regardless of the field of study. His analysis of the “modern research ideal” seems to me right on. I would, however, agree with some previous reviewers that the book could have been shorter, and at times I found myself painfully aware that he was making a point he had aready sufficiently made. Nonetheless, the final chapter is quite profound and alone worth the cost of the book.
Yet, as a side note I find it striking that no mention of St. John’s College in Sante Fe and Anapolis was made in the book. The “great books” programs at Yale, Columbia, etc simply cannot begin to compare with that of St. John’s College. This omission is difficult to reconcile considering that the author sees the “great books” tradition and its secular humanism as the best way out of the current education crisis, and, quite simply, no other college or university better represents secular humanism than St. John’s.
Rating: 4 / 5
Kronman points to a very real and important trend in modern higher education. He gives a very cogent half-diagnosis of the source as well – that of the urge within humanities disciplines to ape the research methods of the natural sciences and thus exclude any sort of prescriptive ‘values’ from the research paradigm. However, Kronman underplays an even more important part of the source of the problem – the fact that a socially all-pervasive ‘free market’ mentality subtley and overtly pushes all that cannot be assigned a quantified (‘bottom line’) demarcation to the periphery of what is viewed as important, and finally legitimate, in human life. This is much more broadly manifested than in academia (witness how completely political legitimacy and fund-raising totals are equated in the current election cycle) but it is certainly also manifest in the concerns toward which Kronman points. Interesting is the fact that just as many in the ‘hard’ sciences, confronting the connections between their research and such realities as our genetic future, global warming, radical consumption inequality between and within societies, our continuing addiction to war and militarism, and so on, are beginning to recognize that the ‘value-free’ research model has always been more ideal than real, the humanities folks now jump on the same paradigmatic bandwagon. Kronman puts his finger on a real issue, but his analysis is arguably more focused on a case in point symptom than on the real source of the problem itself.
Rating: 4 / 5
Review:
Kronman is an intensely literate & learned Yale law professor (who also has a philosophy degree); he’s also a political liberal (who worked for the SDS in the sixties & who currently supports Obama). This work, however, is a work of cultural conservatism.
Few will argue with Kronman’s critique of higher learning. Both cultural progressives & cultural conservatives in the humanities will concede that college & university culture has one goal in mind: to train young minds to think professionally–that is to master a set of competencies (lexical & methodological norms) that will allow them to succeed in their chosen fields. That sounds rational enough, but the problem with this is that the professionalization of the humanities has also meant the mechanization of the humanities into a set of procedural norms that are no longer spiritually nourishing.
Kronman, who has also written a book about Max Weber, argues that the university’s current predicament is the result of a long process of secularization. Kronman claims that there is a resurgent need for spirituality at the present time & that the humanities once again need to provide not just professional but spiritual guidance.
Kronman is not suggesting a return to any specific religion, what he is suggesting is a return to basic questions & concerns ( ie what is the meaning of life ?, what is the best way to live?) that he (somewhat arbitrarily) calls “spiritual” into the matrix of higher learning. This is his suggested cure not just for what ails higher learning, but for what ails humanity.
A return to basic questions & concerns sounds like a fine idea, but Kronman opens himself up to a number of problems when he equates globalization with westernization & a return to basic questions with a return to the canonical texts of western civilization (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill). Kronman is not exactly dismissive of multiculturalism for he believes that students should learn about other cultures, but he believes that ones primary loyalty should be to one’s home culture. In other words, Kronman believes that students will not find fulfillment in “superficial multiculturalism” but by immersing themselves in strictly western ways of being/knowing/valuing/believing.
Kronman obviously means well, but he simply doesn’t account for the fact that the modern classroom is full of students & teachers with roots in many different cultures & traditions. To be fair to Kronman, he does respect other cultures & traditions, and he thinks that we need to learn about them, but what he fails to acknowledge is the possibility that we may learn something from them as well. As smart as he is, Kronman’s anglocentric bias prevents him from seeing the world (or the classroom) as it is: a multicultural contact zone. And he fails to see that contact with cultures & histories & traditions other than western ones does not entail a loss to the existing tradition but an addition to it.
I think Kronman, and those cultural conservatives like him, believe that their way of life, the western way of life, is threatened by multiculturalism & globalization. So Kronman reacts by writing a book that suggests we institutionally defend the west against encroachments from the nonwestern world. But the best of what has been thought in the west is not in any danger when we amend or compare & contrast those thoughts with the best that has been thought outside of the west. In fact, studying other traditions simply adds to the number of ways we can ask & answer the basic questions that concern all of humanity (and not just that portion of it that we call western).
The best possible future will be fashioned not by those who formulate east/west or west/other relations as a contest for superiority between separate worlds, but by those who have the imagination to build upon the best of what has been thought regardless of that thoughts national or hemispheric origin.
Many cultural progressives & conservatives agree that the idea of the university is in trouble. Kronman’s book is valuable for diagnosing what ails the modern university and the modern world, but his prescription is overly conservative, short-sighted, and does not engage the imagination in the way that a much more comprehensive and much more far-sighted (and much less anglocentric) set of higher learning reforms would.
Editorial:
I think the idea of a return to basic questions & concerns is a good idea, but I think that the problem with education today is even more basic than that. Kronman is a lawyer & an academic who is enlivened by argument & thus he no doubt enjoyed producing this text which is an intervention into a lively debate with a long history. The problem with Kronman is that he assumes that others will be enlivened by the same things that enliven him. The problem with academia is that too many academics assume that what interests them will & should interest 18-22 year olds. Very few academics really make an attempt to understand what interests & enlivens young people & why, and so many well-intentioned academics fail to recognize that the classroom is a stifling place for many creative-minded students who are not spiritually enlivened nor fulfilled by this or that academic’s version of educational life. I’m guessing that a concentration on western texts will alienate more students than it will assist or spiritually nourish. I think I am safe in saying that most students who read Kant do not find themselves to be having anything like a religious experience while doing so. What makes most people feel spiritually enlivened, I’m guessing, are things like love & hope & possibility, and not Plato & Kant & Mill.
Academics will better serve their students when they better understand student needs. And the quickest way to do this is to pay attention to what they spend their time doing: constructing & editing their MySpace & Facebook pages. MySpace or Facebook might seem like a foreign & irrelevant universe to academics but if they take the time to understand why these sites are so appealing to students they might better understand their students. MySpace & Facebook allow students a rare opportunity to express themselves; and to connect with distant and not so distant others; and they provide a unique way for students to produce & manage their private & social selves & worlds. If academics understood this then they might find better ways to understand & connect with students and, more generally, understand how contemporary individuals cope with contemporary realities. Discussions of common fears, hopes, & desires as well as discussions of contemporary ways of expressing & coping with common fears, hopes, & desires might prove more interesting & useful & satisfying than a seminar on The Republic, Critique of Pure Reason, or On Liberty (though these texts, of course, have their place as well). But if the university truly concentrated on basic real-world questions & how real people answered them then a university would cease to be a place that accredited people according to professional ability and instead a place that accredited people according to their value to each other and their community. And that, sadly, isn’t a reality. The reality is that real life & real people simply do not get the respect that Plato & Kant & Mill do and that is why professors value & teach Plato & Kant & Mill and that students share not their own selves & thoughts but their critique of the great thinkers (whose realities & concerns may or may not coincide with their own). This overvaluing & overpraising classic texts & undervaluing & underpraising self can be dehumanizing. Status at the university level is conferred upon those who publish books & not upon those individuals who connect with students. The university used to attract an attractive type: the gentleman scholar with one foot in the library & one foot in the street. Nowadays most professors are seasoned professionals more attuned to the realities of their profession (which means the realities of publishing) than the realities of living & functioning in the world that most of us live & function in. To rehaul the university and make it a more inviting & enriching place to spend four or more years will take more than a return to basic questions, it will take a reconsideration of what it is we truly value about the humanities, how best to teach them, and what kind of people are best suited to take on this invaluable role.
Rating: 3 / 5
Kronman writes a compelling argument as to why college humanities and traditional liberal arts programs should provide the necessary spiritual and moral direction for our maturing youth. The reader should expect his argument to be compelling, he was the Dean of the Yale Law School and he teaches the Directed Studies Program at Yale. The book is compelling and captivating. Most people would struggle with a book so focused on such a seemingly esoteric subject. But Kronman’s subject is is compelling and while lengthy – his arguments are almost alarmist in tone. The reading flows rapidly along throughout most of the book!
Kronman takes on political correctness, constructivism, and religious fundamentalism (American grown as well as the Islamic brand), and warns us of the potential for threats to our culture and a more subtly, to civilization. While I don’t question the validity of his arguments, I do question of the relevance of some of his points. He is advocating sandbagging, but the river is already out of its banks. He argues we could contain the crest of the flood despite the flooding today. (My simple and inelegant metaphor – not his).
His history and tracing of the evolution in collegiate philosophy and development are accurate and insightful. His assesment of the vacuum in spiritual teaching and direction on America’s college campuses is on point and certain to irritate humanities professors across the nation (as well as evangelicals and a few priests). He avoided political connections that could be made,the facist nation state and Nazi Germany – but the connections are there for anyone with familiarity in German or European history. The book is topical, virile,and provoking. Humanities departments would be well served to devise a study of the book and include it in their course offerings! But make no mistake, it is more exciting than any college course book. It is worthy of your time and consumption ant any age.
Rating: 5 / 5