I urge you to take a few minutes to read Gagdad Bob's latest, which concerns education and religion. A few quotes, to tempt you:
Anyway, like me, Professor Taylor is worried. However, we are worried about opposite things. While I am worried about his influence on students, he is worried that “more American college students seem to be practicing traditional forms of religion today than at any time in my 30 years of teaching,” which he calls “religious correctness” -- thereby confusing the disease with its cure.
He is obviously upset, because these religiously correct students seem immune to the charms of his academically correct vacuities. “Indeed,” he writes, “it seems the more religious students become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about faith.” Translated, this means that these dangerous students are less willing to confuse a prideful ability to doubt anything with the discernment of truth.
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Taylor then says that “In the most egregious cases, defenders of the faith insist that only true believers are qualified to teach their religious tradition.” To which one can only reply, “well duh.” Any religion, in order to be understood, must be understood “from the inside,” because that is precisely the sort of knowledge embodied in religion: interior knowledge. Religions are not about the horizontal, objective, or quantitative world, and to treat them as such is to misunderstand them, precisely. They are specifically roadmaps of the cosmic interior, and only someone who knows the territory on a first hand basis is qualified to teach about it.
It is absolutely no different with, say, psychoanalysis, which cannot be understood objectively, but only subjectively. Its truths must be experienced, or they are no truth at all, just empty “k.” It is no coincidence that the most egregious misunderstandings and misapplications of psychoanalysis have always come from academia, because intellectuals naturally believe it is something that can be greedily understood just like any other merely intellectual system.
The purpose of an elite university education is no longer to become educated -- to acquire a well-furnished mind and familiarize oneself with the best things that have been thought and said -- but to become stupid by elevating a means to an end. Thus, upon contact with his luckless students, Professor Taylor tells them “that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed.” In short, the goal of education is to make students as lost and confused as Professor Taylor, through the deification of man’s capacity to doubt anything.
Enough? Bob always leaves me thinking. Read the whole thing. America's first colleges: King's College (Columbia now), Harvard, Yale, the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) - were all begun as places to mainly educate clergy, and/or religiously-interested lay people. Have they simply been co-opted by a new religion? Are colleges still doctrinal seminaries, with new doctrines?
