THE TWO HEADS OF CONSERVATIVE EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT

3/20/2015

THE TWO HEADS OF CONSERVATIVE EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT

If Jedediah Purdy has it right in the March 19th New Yorker ( “Ayn Rand Comes to UNC” ) some contemporary conservative thinking about higher education has two heads

One wants is to increase “ ’diversity of ideas” on campus and ‘encourage respect for the institutions that underlie economic prosperity,’ including ‘private property,’ ‘competition,’ and ‘limits on government.“

The other head calls for a return to “the Great Books model of humanities education: literature and philosophy as a source of eternal truths, dating back to Plato, passing through John Locke, and perfected by Ayn Rand and the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek. A Pope Center research paper published this year describes a “renewal in the university” through privately funded programs dedicated to teaching the great books untainted by relativism.”

But the truly great books can’t be pushed so easily into programs proving “the morality of capitalism,” or battling against relativism. At the core they put under scrutiny that drive contemporary behavior, corporate and individual. Challenging the “unexamined life” is are subversive, now as it was then.

You can't have it both ways, a curriculum that inevitably challenges the way students decide to spend their lives, and a set of values that uncritically support corporate needs. Which will win out?

1 Comment

E. Johnson

3/20/2015 05:48:10 am

You're quite right about the seeming contradiction between the desire for a rigorous great-books curriculum and a more vocationally focused, job-training style of higher education.

But the key lies in *who* has access to each kind of education. There are a great many policymakers across the country who no longer believe there's any public interest in having taxpayers subsidize the kind of open-ended, wide-ranging liberal arts education that has historically been the province of universities. It's all well and good if students *who can afford it* enroll in private universities and seek such luxuries.

But for the great mass of students — those subsidized by taxpayers in public colleges — a job-centered curriculum is seen as good enough. Those students don't have any need for a truly expansive college experience, the thinking goes. They're just in it for jobs, anyway.

This isn't a radical notion. It's simply a return to the elitist way education operated for centuries. Higher learning was reserved for the elite; everyone else gets training.

That's the crux of the debate we're having. Whether the country's ambitious vision of higher education made broadly available — a vision we've held at least since the Morrill Act of 1862 — will survive. Or whether we'll return to an antebellum conception of higher education for the anointed, and glorified HR programs for the rest.

THE TWO HEADS OF CONSERVATIVE EDUCATIONAL THOUGHT

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