We have often opined here that the real purpose of a liberal arts education is life enrichment rather than to enhance one's future in commerce.
As usual, my views are hopelessly old-fashioned. Tim Black at Spiked discusses the subject in The Modern University: You Get What You Pay For. It's the UK, but it applies in the US too. One quote:
Underpinning the fees debate – indeed the thing that makes the fees debate possible – is this contemporary degraded idea of university education. Gone is the ivory tower; in its place stands the glass-fronted hub of much-mooted, never-seen economic growth. The establishment of the UK Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills is itself testament to the shiny new role laid out for the twenty-first century university. In his first speech as secretary of state for the department in 2007, John Denham stated: ‘To compete and prosper in this world, to respond to the needs of leading global and national businesses, we must enable many thousands more people to study and graduate each year. To become a world leader in skills, as Lord Leitch recommended, we must aim for at least 40 per cent of adults to have higher level qualifications by 2020.’ (6)
How Chaucer helps a nation compete in international business is beyond me, but I would not want to live in a world without him. Tim Black, like me, wonders what this is all about. Another quote from his piece:
The transformation of higher education into a glorified, paid-for training service has, likewise, turned what might once have been aspirant scholars into very demanding customers. Students today come not so much to learn, as to consume the ‘educational product’ on which they have just splashed several thousand pounds. In the proud words of the 2003 government white paper, The Future of Higher Education, students are at university for the ‘acquisition of skills’ (8). Their future earning potential depends on it. In this sense, the NUS’s alternative to tuition fees – a loan to be paid back dependent on earnings – seems like the demand of little more than a consumer watchdog.
It has not always been this way. In his 1853 treatise The Idea of a University, JH Newman defined it as ‘a place [for] teaching universal knowledge’ (9). Such notions of the integrity of university education were not nineteenth-century oddities. They were informed by a deep, anti-utilitarian sense of the intrinsic value of culture and knowledge, something perhaps best expressed by Newman’s contemporary, Matthew Arnold, as the ability to ‘turn a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits’. The university enshrined such freedom. It demarcated a place outside the demands and interests of commerce and business. The value of education bore no relation to monetary value; indeed its ‘uselessness’ was its virtue. Such humanistic ideas of the university accompanied the expansion of higher education provision in the 1960s. In the 1963 Robbins Report on giving more social classes the opportunity to attend university, the committee wrote ‘[the] search for truth is an essential function of the institutions of higher education, and the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes in the nature of discovery’ (10).
Bring me up to date, please. What is college for these days? Life enrichment? Creating an informed citizenry? Nurturing of scholars? Work certification? Job training?
