<p>I recently read an article that I found to be quite interesting. I quote:</p>
<p>"Education and Solipsism
Solipsism: The theory that the self is the only reality</p>
<p>I RECENTLY HAD CAUSE to look through the catalog of a fully-accredited institution of higher learning called John F. Kennedy University of Orinda, California. The courses there fell into two categories: on the one hand, there was a graduate program in parapsychology, English offerings in "Literature of the Mystic Quest" and "The Energy of Communication," a two-year sequence called "The Tapestry of Knowledge," something on "Varieties of Mind-Body Therapies" — in other words, the sort of psycho-junk you expect to see advertised on the bulletin board at your local frozen yogurt parlor. On the other hand were courses of straight no-nonsense training in Police Science, Personnel Management, Business Administration, and Accounting. I couldn't help wondering how the Primal Scream majors got along with the pre-cops when they happened to meet up in the cafeteria.</p>
<p>I was about to dismiss the school as just so much institutionalized Bay Area weirdness when it occurred to me that John F. Kennedy University was on to something. Not only were the touchyfeely courses and the career training united by the dynamic of egoism and narcissism masquerading as "potential"; too, the university was responding in predictable and understandable fashion to real shortcomings in our conventional colleges. All over the nation, people are beginning to see that the increase in college enrollments has not led to a decrease in misery, small-mindedness, or social pathology; people are beginning to call for education that is integrative, value-oriented, and humane — at the same time that they demand practicality and cost-effectiveness. Universities respond to this conflicting message with such token reforms as refurbished core curricula and affinity-group housing, all the while coming more the power of the marketing specialists, the Management By Objective seminarians, and the bottom-line boys. John F. Kennedy University is unique only in that it takes both routes at the same time. There are better responses, and I will describe one in some detail. But first, it is necessary to recognize that in crucial ways our colleges are structured to produce not citizens and compassionate people, but self-serving egomaniacs.</p>
<p>The normal college performs several functions quite well: students with discipline and curiosity can emerge with impressive verbal and quantitative skills, a sufficient familiarity with the Western tradition of thought, and thorough knowledge of an academic field. In four years of more or less independent living they can establish goals and identities outside the influence of the home. I do not mean to belittle these accomplishments.</p>
<p>Yet it seems to me that all too frequently they take place in an environment that isolates and fragments the individual. During his first week in a normal college the student, no matter what courses he chooses, learns that the next few years consist of a series of obstacles — classes, distribution requirements, exams, theses — leading finally to graduation. The defining characteristic of these tasks, and what makes them almost unique in human endeavor, is that they are faced by the individual alone, and that success or failure in them has consequences to the individual alone. As a result, one of the undeniable and pervasive fictions colleges teach every day is that life's problems present themselves to individuals, are solved or not solved by individuals, with repercussions that do not extend beyond individuals. Thus, when we see people in later life deserting their families, exploiting their employees, cheating their bosses, befouling their environment, and otherwise indulging themselves, all the while blithely assuring everybody that while they might not be acting well, it's OK because they are "taking responsibility for their actions," these people are repeating the lesson they learned, among other places, in college, where they could flunk a test, cut a class, or skip an assignment without visibly affecting anybody but themselves. College is where we are confirmed in our delusion that the source and outer frontier of all significant action is the self.</p>
<p>And if this weren't bad enough, the concept of "self" that conventional colleges promote is preposterously distorted. I am not the first to point out that in spite of all the rhetoric to the contrary, our system of higher education produces cerebrating machines by intention, and emotional, ethical, and physical people only as an afterthought. At most universities, certain elements of the human character are identified over and over, in the classroom, as crucial to the survival of the race: sympathy and compassion, the ability to make responsible judgments, the ability to live together in harmony. Yet the situation in which these abilities are lauded is one where competition and caginess determine success, and important decisions are the exclusive reserve of the teacher. When it comes to actually cultivating the desirable human traits, or even to providing a milieu in which they might be nurtured, the academy either begs off entirely or else establishes an ill-financed and ineptly-staffed Office of Student Services —whose principal duties are likely to consist of cafeteria policy and Greek residence coordination.</p>
<p>Why can't college education — or at least part of it - take place in an environment that not only allows, but that demands moral, ethical, and emotional growth? An environment where values must be discovered and tested as part of everyday life? An environment that combines freedom with serious obligation, exposing thoughtlessness and self-indulgence, providing students the rare and difficult opportunity to find out what it means to make decisions and to live with their consequences — in other words, what it means to try to live virtuously?
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The conventional college is structured around the motif of escape. Students escape the "real world" of work and accountability on campus. They escape the campus by going into town for entertainment. Socially, jocks escape nerds, fraternity men escape intellectuals, blacks escape whites, Young Americans for Freedom escape Students for a Democratic Society, faculty escape students. Everybody escapes thinking about curricular matters through chemical stupefaction and through the greatesmt escape of all: sleep. I think it is significant that the drugs of choice on college campuses have always been soporific (alcohol) or isolationist (marijuana), and the activity of choice has always been some form of escapism, frequently epitomized either by leaving or passing out.
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When colleges are overtly political, and use political terms, it is a politics of conflicting interest groups and of inherent inequality that is invoked. Nowhere do members of what we cynically call the university community talk or act as though there were, in fact, a community in the university. The ideas of mutual restraint, obligation, participation. agreement on major goals and basic philosophy that mark the discourse of true communities appear, at the conventional college, only in the textbooks of political theory classes. It is no coincidence, of course, that these classes themselves are more and more forced into extinction, to be replaced by ones that use the "clean" and "value free" terminology of social science, survey research, and bureaucracy: the language that is itself appropriate to the political structure of the liberal multiversity. That this is the structure of the political world, writ small, does not justify the situation. If colleges are the DNA of society, then we don't have far to look to discover how we might restore to the world that sense of community it needs.
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In the normal college, idealism too often serves as the handmaiden of despair. Lofty goals like the cure for cancer, the end of racism and poverty, the Great American Novel, all prove not only elusive, but totally out of range. All too frequently, the next step is a retreat into cynicism, hedonism, careerism, or narcissism."</p>
<p>Thoughts?</p>