Education Toward Sanity

by Dan Loesing

“Study Everything. Do Anything.” So reads a T-shirt I got from Notre Dame’s arts and humanities college, my alma mater. As written, it seems a fine motto. Pope St. John Paul II championed education that “combines excellence in humanistic and cultural development with specialized professional training.” As practiced, I’m less confident. 

The arts and humanities college offers thirty-three majors. On their “outcomes” pages, no less than twenty-nine of them plug that a recent graduate works as a consultant. (The other four include Fortune 500 companies and investment banks.) It was not always so. In 1855, the school offered one course of study toward a degree. The curriculum included Latin, Greek, and English grammar, ancient, modern, and American history, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, mathematics, natural philosophy, and chemistry. A graduate would have read, among others, Homer, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus, and have committed Horace’s Ars Poetica to memory. (At least in theory. The faculty included just one trained classicist.)

So where there was one education, meant to prepare students for a wide range of vocations, whether a life in the priesthood, business, or any of the “learned professions,” there are now basically infinite educations, each created by the individual student out of electives chosen based on personal preference, and each billed as preparing her for a small subset of competitive, demanding (and high-paying) jobs. The shirt might as well read: “Study Whatever. Do Consulting.”

According to G. K. Chesterton, a similar shift happened in household tools. Once, a man carried “the universal stick,” which he used to hold himself up, to knock enemies down, to point with, to tap, or to twirl. Read the rest at First Things.