J's and my New School history course this time round is a little smaller than we'd expected but actually a good size for our two-hour time frame. The students hail from across the university, which is quite exciting. The only funny thing is that what we'd conceived as a graduate class has now become an undergraduate seminar!
Today's class, the first one with assigned readings, revisited the founding ideals of the New School in the context of progressive ideas both a century ago and today. To keep the present on the table, we assigned an essay we've found helpful before, "What is college for?" by Gary Gutting in the New York Times' The Stone" column. It's from 2011 and today it proved dated in helpful ways.
The essay addresses discussion of the "value of a college education" that we've been hearing for several years now. The astronomical rise in tuition costs, and in student debt, have made this an ever more pressing issue, but Gutting is aiming higher. In a Pew survey, college graduates reported that college was "very useful in helping them grow intellectually," in "helping them grow and mature as a person," and in "helping prepare them for a job or career." But these arguments, skeptical as well as positive, all result from a basic misunderstanding of what colleges are for.
What are colleges for? Gutting argues that they nurture a world of ideas, and demonstrate that we regard intellectual culture as essential to our society. But professors as well as students have lost sight of this. Professors need to need to realize that dedication to their disciplines expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications. Students need to appreciate that a college education broadens you. Good teaching does not make a course's subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests - and so makes them more interesting.
Read in 2018 this seems a little quaint. A majority of Republicans has in the last two years been persuaded that colleges and universities are "bad for the country." Bastions of elite liberalism, they're regarded as making students not "more interesting" but more self-absorbed, at once relativist and intolerant. The "world of ideas" sounds either idly or subversively disengaged from the world. "Critical thinking," which we liberal educators purport to be teaching in all we do, is seen as nihilistic, morally and socially corrosive. (Actually it's not clear where the antipathy comes from; I'm stringing together views I've seen written about in various places.)
So what is college for? Happily we were reading this together with several documents from the time the New School was founded: an excerpt from John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916), the "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women" (1917 or, more likely, 1918) and Herbert Croly's celebration of the proposal in The New Republic, "A School of Social Research" (June 1918). None of them is interested in college. Dewey writes about education as lifelong, though his focus is on the education of children. The "Proposal" and Croly's essay argue the need for a school for adults. They're also all suspicious of otherworldly "world of ideas" talk, which displaces and degrades the active work of will and intelligence in life and endeavor.
What distinguishes these century-old proposals from most of our discussions today is their deep conviction that education is a social experience. (Croly giddily conflates social ideal, social process, social purpose, social life, social effort, social sympathies, social aspiration, social behavior, social knowledge, social relations, social activity, social impulse, social science, social practice, social experiment .... all of which flow together and through social research.) It should help students become the social beings they are meant to be, and in the process helps society as a whole become what it is meant to be. (The proposed new school would train and send out experts in bringing the social to the fore in all departments of life.)
Dewey argues that all thinking is research (D&E 174) - thinking understood as the work all of us do all the time in trying to solve problems, make things meaningful and build lives. (Correlatively not all research is thinking!) We think in and by doing. Schools aren't the only places thinking happens, but the places where thinking becomes reflective about itself, becomes habitually reflective. In the process we clarify our commitments, recognize and deepen relationships old and new, feel and hone our creative powers as interdependent social and moral beings in a world that is not settled and finished but rather is one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective (D&E 178).
Is that not what college is for, too?
Today's class, the first one with assigned readings, revisited the founding ideals of the New School in the context of progressive ideas both a century ago and today. To keep the present on the table, we assigned an essay we've found helpful before, "What is college for?" by Gary Gutting in the New York Times' The Stone" column. It's from 2011 and today it proved dated in helpful ways.
The essay addresses discussion of the "value of a college education" that we've been hearing for several years now. The astronomical rise in tuition costs, and in student debt, have made this an ever more pressing issue, but Gutting is aiming higher. In a Pew survey, college graduates reported that college was "very useful in helping them grow intellectually," in "helping them grow and mature as a person," and in "helping prepare them for a job or career." But these arguments, skeptical as well as positive, all result from a basic misunderstanding of what colleges are for.
What are colleges for? Gutting argues that they nurture a world of ideas, and demonstrate that we regard intellectual culture as essential to our society. But professors as well as students have lost sight of this. Professors need to need to realize that dedication to their disciplines expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications. Students need to appreciate that a college education broadens you. Good teaching does not make a course's subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests - and so makes them more interesting.
Read in 2018 this seems a little quaint. A majority of Republicans has in the last two years been persuaded that colleges and universities are "bad for the country." Bastions of elite liberalism, they're regarded as making students not "more interesting" but more self-absorbed, at once relativist and intolerant. The "world of ideas" sounds either idly or subversively disengaged from the world. "Critical thinking," which we liberal educators purport to be teaching in all we do, is seen as nihilistic, morally and socially corrosive. (Actually it's not clear where the antipathy comes from; I'm stringing together views I've seen written about in various places.)
So what is college for? Happily we were reading this together with several documents from the time the New School was founded: an excerpt from John Dewey's Democracy and Education (1916), the "Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women" (1917 or, more likely, 1918) and Herbert Croly's celebration of the proposal in The New Republic, "A School of Social Research" (June 1918). None of them is interested in college. Dewey writes about education as lifelong, though his focus is on the education of children. The "Proposal" and Croly's essay argue the need for a school for adults. They're also all suspicious of otherworldly "world of ideas" talk, which displaces and degrades the active work of will and intelligence in life and endeavor.
What distinguishes these century-old proposals from most of our discussions today is their deep conviction that education is a social experience. (Croly giddily conflates social ideal, social process, social purpose, social life, social effort, social sympathies, social aspiration, social behavior, social knowledge, social relations, social activity, social impulse, social science, social practice, social experiment .... all of which flow together and through social research.) It should help students become the social beings they are meant to be, and in the process helps society as a whole become what it is meant to be. (The proposed new school would train and send out experts in bringing the social to the fore in all departments of life.)
Dewey argues that all thinking is research (D&E 174) - thinking understood as the work all of us do all the time in trying to solve problems, make things meaningful and build lives. (Correlatively not all research is thinking!) We think in and by doing. Schools aren't the only places thinking happens, but the places where thinking becomes reflective about itself, becomes habitually reflective. In the process we clarify our commitments, recognize and deepen relationships old and new, feel and hone our creative powers as interdependent social and moral beings in a world that is not settled and finished but rather is one which is going on, and where our main task is prospective (D&E 178).
Is that not what college is for, too?
