“Making money cannot be the permanent business of humanity, for the simple reason that there is nothing to do with money except spend it. And we cannot go on spending. There will come a point when we will be satiated or disgusted or both. Or will we?”—How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life
“Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward.”—Blessed John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University
Two statues grace the
main campus of Newman University. Blessed John Henry Newman, our namesake,
watches the the campus from the front of the administration building. Some two
hundred feet to his left, in the plaza that was once McCormick Street, St.
Maria de Mattias has her arm around a young woman, guiding her into the future.
Walking across campus, I often think of our two statues and of what they
represent to the profession of education.
Though both were
19th century Catholic educators, Newman's two founders could not be more
different. St. Maria devoted her life to teaching literacy and household
management to poor women and girls in rural Italy. Everything about her curriculum was useful. Newman, on the other hand, was the 19th century's greatest advocate of the
proposition that one should learn things for no other reason than that learning things is good.
Between St. Maria and Cardinal Newman lie most of the
goals of the modern university. On the one hand, education must teach people
how to do useful things. To justify society's investment, schools must prepare people to be useful to society. And, since America's founding, education has been the universally acknowledged ticket into the middle
class.
Modern education teaches people how to make a living. But, for most of human history--during which people worked with their bodies rather than their minds--this, was not the case. From ancient times through the end of the 19th century, societies have considered "an educated person" (of whom there were always very few) to be somebody who knew how to use leisure time for personal enrichment. An "educated person" was somebody who know how to live a good life.
One of the central insights of How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life--a wonderful new book by British economists Robert and Edward Skideisky--is that education in Western societies has become very good at training people to enter the work force and very bad at teaching them what to do when they aren't working. Lacking any clear understanding of how to use our leisure time, most of us gravitate to the most passive and least enriching forms of entertainment. We watch hours of TV every day. We play video games. We obsess about our "like" count on Facebook. And when all this fails to satisfy us, we throw up our hands and say, “I’m bored.”
People have a right, of course, to amuse themselves however they see fit, as long as they do no harm. It does us no good, however, to pretend that the above activities are on par with more meaningful leisure activities: reading literature, creating art, playing an instrument, gardening, jogging along a river bank, having deep conversations about interesting things, or even just thinking about stuff because some stuff is fun to think about.
A decent education, I believe, must prepare us to do all (or at least most) of these things. Of course, this means rejecting one of the central tenets of the modern liberal state, which is that all perspectives are morally and aesthetically equal. I, for one, am willing to make this sacrifice--to say without embarrassment that Sponge Bob and Shakespeare, Bach and Bieber, are separated by more than just the accidents of human preference. I am even willing to throw in a good word or two for exercise.
For most of human history, education has done precisely these kinds of things—although only a privileged few have had access to it. The only things worthy of the name "education," Seneca famously remarked, are the "liberal arts"--or those that can be profitably studied by a free man (a liber) who does not have to worry about making a living.
But one of the strongest tendencies of modern societies has been to view education purely as an end to something else, with the “something else” usually being to lift people out of poverty, train them for the work force, qualify them for good jobs, and, generally, help them make money. This is not a bad thing at all. Unlike Seneca's Romans, we have set a goal of educating everybody, not just the elite, and non-elites have a legitimate need to know how to make money.
And up to a fairly definable point, money is a non-negotiable component of a good life. When that threshold is reached, however, we see almost no correlation between money and happiness. The person who makes ten million dollars a year is not guaranteed one iota of marginal satisfaction over the person who makes merely five million dollars a year.
Most people, I think, understand instinctively that there is more to a good life than making a lot of money. And yet we are moving at light speed towards a model of education that focuses primarily preparing the student for eventual success in the workplace. For the third grader, this may mean less recess and more test preparation. For the college student, it means an impoverished core curriculum that cuts down times to graduation and makes sure that every person will become a productive member of society.
But let's be careful. If the primary purpose of education is to prepare people to work, and the primary purpose of work is to earn money, we are at a dead end—for unlike education, money is not logically capable of being its own end. We encourage an irrational psychosis when, in the name of readying students to make a good living, we eliminate those aspects of education that themselves constitute living well.
Modern education teaches people how to make a living. But, for most of human history--during which people worked with their bodies rather than their minds--this, was not the case. From ancient times through the end of the 19th century, societies have considered "an educated person" (of whom there were always very few) to be somebody who knew how to use leisure time for personal enrichment. An "educated person" was somebody who know how to live a good life.
One of the central insights of How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life--a wonderful new book by British economists Robert and Edward Skideisky--is that education in Western societies has become very good at training people to enter the work force and very bad at teaching them what to do when they aren't working. Lacking any clear understanding of how to use our leisure time, most of us gravitate to the most passive and least enriching forms of entertainment. We watch hours of TV every day. We play video games. We obsess about our "like" count on Facebook. And when all this fails to satisfy us, we throw up our hands and say, “I’m bored.”
People have a right, of course, to amuse themselves however they see fit, as long as they do no harm. It does us no good, however, to pretend that the above activities are on par with more meaningful leisure activities: reading literature, creating art, playing an instrument, gardening, jogging along a river bank, having deep conversations about interesting things, or even just thinking about stuff because some stuff is fun to think about.
A decent education, I believe, must prepare us to do all (or at least most) of these things. Of course, this means rejecting one of the central tenets of the modern liberal state, which is that all perspectives are morally and aesthetically equal. I, for one, am willing to make this sacrifice--to say without embarrassment that Sponge Bob and Shakespeare, Bach and Bieber, are separated by more than just the accidents of human preference. I am even willing to throw in a good word or two for exercise.
For most of human history, education has done precisely these kinds of things—although only a privileged few have had access to it. The only things worthy of the name "education," Seneca famously remarked, are the "liberal arts"--or those that can be profitably studied by a free man (a liber) who does not have to worry about making a living.
But one of the strongest tendencies of modern societies has been to view education purely as an end to something else, with the “something else” usually being to lift people out of poverty, train them for the work force, qualify them for good jobs, and, generally, help them make money. This is not a bad thing at all. Unlike Seneca's Romans, we have set a goal of educating everybody, not just the elite, and non-elites have a legitimate need to know how to make money.
And up to a fairly definable point, money is a non-negotiable component of a good life. When that threshold is reached, however, we see almost no correlation between money and happiness. The person who makes ten million dollars a year is not guaranteed one iota of marginal satisfaction over the person who makes merely five million dollars a year.
Most people, I think, understand instinctively that there is more to a good life than making a lot of money. And yet we are moving at light speed towards a model of education that focuses primarily preparing the student for eventual success in the workplace. For the third grader, this may mean less recess and more test preparation. For the college student, it means an impoverished core curriculum that cuts down times to graduation and makes sure that every person will become a productive member of society.
But let's be careful. If the primary purpose of education is to prepare people to work, and the primary purpose of work is to earn money, we are at a dead end—for unlike education, money is not logically capable of being its own end. We encourage an irrational psychosis when, in the name of readying students to make a good living, we eliminate those aspects of education that themselves constitute living well.
