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Go Home Education is the Work of Teachers, not Hackers

DECEMBER 21, 2012

Education is the Work of Teachers, not Hackers

BY LEON WIESELTIER

Washington Diarist.

WHEN I LOOK BACK at my education, I am struck not by how much I learned but by how much I was taught. I am the progeny of teachers; I swoon over teachers. Even what I learned on my own I owed to them, because they guided me in my sense of what is significant. The only form of knowledge that can be adequately acquired without the help of a teacher, and without the humility of a student, is information, which is the lowest form of knowledge. (And in these nightmarishly data-glutted days, the winnowing of information may also require the masterly hand of someone who knows more and better.) Yet the prestige of teachers in America keeps sinking. In the debate about the reform of the public schools, the virulent denigration of teachers is regarded as advanced opinion. The new interest in homeschooling—the demented idea that children can be competently taught by people whose only qualifications for teaching them are love and a desire to keep them from the world—constitutes another insult to the great profession of pedagogy. And now there is the fashion in “unschooling,” which I take from a forthcoming book by Dale J. Stephens, the gloating founder of UnCollege. His deeply unfortunate book is called Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will. It is a call for young people to reject college and become “self-directed learners.” One wonders about the preparedness of this untutored “self” for this unknown “direction.” Such pristinity! Rousseau with a MacBook! Yet the “hackademic,” as Stephens calls his ideal, is a new sort of drop-out. His head is not in the clouds. His head is in the cloud. Instead of spending money on college, he is making money on apps. In place of an education, he has entrepreneurship. This preference often comes with the assurance that entrepreneurship is itself an education. “Here in Silicon Valley, it’s almost a badge of honor [to have dropped out],” a boy genius who left Princeton and started Undrip (beats me) told The New York Times. After all, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Dell dropped out—as if their lack of a college education was the cause of their creativity, and as if there will ever be a generation, or a nation, of Jobses, Gateses, Zuckerbergs, and Dells. Stephens’s book, and the larger Web-inebriated movement to abandon study for wealth, is another document of the unreality of Silicon Valley, of its snobbery (tell the aspiring kids in Oakland to give up on college!), of its confusion of itself with the universe. To be sure, all learning cannot be renounced in the search for success. Technological innovation demands scientific and engineering knowledge, even if it begins in intuition: the technical must follow the visionary. So the movement against college is not a campaign against all study. It is a campaign against allegedly useless study—the latest eruption of the utilitarian temper in the American view of life. And what study is allegedly useless? The study of the humanities, of course.

 

THE MOST EGREGIOUS of the many errors in this repudiation of college is its economicist approach to the understanding of education. We have been here before. Not long ago Rick Santorum, if you’ll pardon the expression, delivered himself of this tirade: “I was so outraged by the president of the United States for standing up and saying every child in America should go to college. ... Who are you to say that every child in America go? I, you know, there is—I have seven kids. Maybe they’ll all go to college. But if one of my kids wants to go and be an auto-mechanic, good for him. That’s a good paying job.” He was responding wildly to Barack Obama’s proposal that “every American ... commit to at least one year of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship.” Obama was not forcing Flaubert down a single blue-collared throat. Indeed, Obama and Santorum were regarding education from the same stunted standpoint: the cash nexus, or the problem of American “competitiveness.” A few months later, the Council on Foreign Relations published another instrumentalist analysis, equally uncomprehending about the horizons of the classroom, called “U.S. Education Reform and National Security,” which proposed, among other things, that the liberal arts curriculum be revised to give priority to “strategic” languages and “informational” texts. As Robert Alter acerbically remarked, in a devastating issue of the Forum of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, this is “Gradgrinding American education”: “there is no place whatever in this purview for Greek and Latin, because you can’t cut a deal with a multinational in the language of Homer or Virgil.”

 

THE PRESIDENT IS RIGHT that we should “out-educate” other countries, but he is wrong that we should do so only, or mainly, to “out-compete.” Surely the primary objectives of education are the formation of the self and the formation of the citizen. A political order based on the expression of opinion imposes an intellectual obligation upon the individual, who cannot acquit himself of his democratic duty without an ability to reason, a familiarity with argument, a historical memory. An ignorant citizen is a traitor to an open society. The demagoguery of the media, which is covertly structural when it is not overtly ideological, demands a countervailing force of knowledgeable reflection. (There are certainly too many unemployed young people in America, but not because they have read too many books.) And the schooling of inwardness matters even more in the lives of parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers, where meanings are often ambiguous and interpretations determine fates. The equation of virtue with wealth, of enlightenment with success, is no less repulsive in a t-shirt than in a suit. How much about human existence can be inferred from a start-up? Shakespeare or Undrip: I should have thought that the choice was easy. Entrepreneurship is not a full human education, and living is never just succeeding, and the humanities are always pertinent. In pain or in sorrow, who needs a quant? There are enormities of experience, horrors, crimes, disasters, tragedies, which revive the appetite for wisdom, and for the old sources, however imprecise, of wisdom—a massacre of schoolchildren, for example.

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the December 31, 2012 issue of the magazine under the headline “The Unschooled.”

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71 comments

Thank you, Mr. Wieseltier, for a moving and merciless column. Thank you, also, for the wonderful quotation from Robert Alter's essay. You draw attention to two aspects of education that often get dismissed: the teacher's offerings, and the "schooling of inwardness." Like you, I swoon over my teachers--that is, people who showed the way to things I didn't already know or understand. Yes, they vigorously encouraged us to think for ourselves, but they stood before us as people who knew how to do so. I loved to listen to them--not because I was passive or lazy, not because I lacked creativity or initiative, but because they said and asked interesting things and taught interesting subjects. As a public school teacher, I have seen policymakers and trainers oppose this conception of teaching, often aggressively. The teacher is supposed to either "drive results" or "facilitate" the students' self-directed learning. Even students (not all, but many) expect to be given something to do instead of something to think about. They (policymakers and students) are unaccustomed to a "schooling of inwardness." Educators argue over whether education should be competitive or cooperative, but "inwardness" encompasses both and goes beyond both. It is important both to compete and to cooperate, but neither one is sufficient as a goal of education (or of anything else). A musician must compete when auditioning for a symphony or other ensemble; he must play well with the other musicians once accepted. Still, he does this for the music. Without the music, the cooperation and competition would be empty. The "schooling of inwardness" shapes daily and not-so-daily life--relationships, decisions, responses to emergencies. Gradgrind causes harm not because he means ill but because his idea of "facts" has consumed him. When he recognizes his error, his sorrow is great, though long overdue; he tries to do what good he can from there. Perhaps humans never get to see all of their wrongs on time, even with the best education. Still, they can learn to pause and remember books and teachers.

- dlsenechal

December 22, 2012 at 6:23pm

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P.S. I wrote some more commentary here.

- dlsenechal

December 23, 2012 at 6:02pm

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I haven't read Robert Alter's essay but I found Wieseltier's defense of classical education very tedious and sometimes risible. I am not defending the book that favor's home schooling (the phrase is something of an oxymoron) but surely there were many people who were taught by their parents and made great contributions to society. John Stewart Mill was taught Greek and Latin at home by his parents. Would he have learned more had he been sent to a "public school?" However such examples don't tell us much either pro or con "home schooling." Much more important is an interesting contradiction in LW's essay: he argues for the importance of both a classical education (I assume he means knowledge of Greek and Latin) as well as the "education of inwardness" which is a Romantic and hence a modern phenomenon. Ancient Greek and Latin cultures on the contrary assumed that one was educated in order to take one's place as a leading member of the upper class hence children received a good deal of training in rhetoric and hardly an in "inwardness." The ancient child also spent a great deal of time learning how to ride and to fight. The classical civilizations spent most of their time at war with others and at civil wars. Greeks versus Persians (read Herodotus and Xenophon) or fighting each other (read Thucydides) or the many Roman historians. It is important for us to know about these ancient civilizations but let's not swoon over them. It's important to learn about them as cautionary tales as much as for the "wisdom" they can teach us which is very real. Speaking of an "education of inwardness is also problematic: since Rousseau that education has taught us as much to a pretense of inward feelings as it did to educate our emotions. Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity" has a great deal to tell us about that. He too was conflicted about our methods of education, specially in literature. Wieseltier a student of Trilling should at least have acknowledged some of the problems with "a classical education" even in an essay that argues against troglodytism. Aside from Trilling the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has traced in his many books the history of the modern education of inwardness which he says led to what he called "the hermeneutics of suspicion" which he traced to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud although one could find them already in Spinoza and Hume. Arguing for an education is one thing pretending to know how such a thing can be delivered to young people (especially in our noisy and getting noisier world) is something else. In some cases home schooling may indeed be the answer. The problem with the book Wieseltier reviewed is that it also tried to offer a single answer to a complex issue. IN my years of teaching I met many brilliant students and teachers who did teach themselves by reading the classics. I know one teacher who read all of Shakespeare when he was in the service and after being discharged signed up at a local College to study the rest of the Western canon. Such people are unusual in any age but I don't know very many brilliant people whom the college system made more brilliant.

- arnon1

December 24, 2012 at 10:27pm

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" An ignorant citizen is a traitor to an open society." Best sentence of the essay. I don't think LW was arguing for young people to be steeped in the classics per se, but be taught how to think by others who have learned to do so. Some of the classics could be of help here. This site, which features bloggers and commenters, is a good example of people who have learned to think and who are learning to think. Thinking for oneself demands tough-mindedness, which most mean-spirited people think they have, but don't. And, as LW says, thinking does not include the gathering of endless factoids from our information obsessed world. I saw a documentary on Timothy McVeigh yesterday. He was a typical survivalist. He was convinced that the U.S. government was going to come at any moment and take away every citizen's guns. If someone had sat down with him and forced him to name one citizen whose guns had been confiscated, maybe his mind wouldn't have become a melted marshmallow. McVeigh thought he had a mind of steel, but because he had no idea how to think, his mind was oozing goo. When asked to comment on the children he had murdered, he said that everyone loses children and grandchildren and then advised us to "Get over it." His mind of steel was like Hitler's, a mess of mindless, romanticized glop. People who can't think are, indeed, many, many times more of a danger to our society than the government is. Millions of American citizens agree with Timothy McVeigh, and many of them home-school their children. We need teachers who aren't emotionally involved with their students and who can teach young people to think. Unfortunately, most teachers in America don't know how to think themselves. They're embracing the torrent of detached information that we get from the Internet. With overcrowded classrooms, I can understand why they do it. Right now it looks like LW and others like him are on a Don Quixotian quest. We may all, indeed, learn how to think in the future--like machines.

- magboy47.

December 25, 2012 at 6:11pm

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"People who can't think are, indeed, many, many times more of a danger to our society than the government is. Millions of American citizens agree with Timothy McVeigh, and many of them home-school their children. " Many do and many don't. There are also many examples of McVeighs is the ancient world. Brutus is a case in point and by no means the only one.

- arnon1

December 26, 2012 at 12:32am

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I wonder what Wieseltier would say to someone who suggested that they avoid college and just read TNR, and the great classics?

- arnon1

December 26, 2012 at 12:35am

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Arnon1, I am not sure why you insist on a misreading of Wieseltier's piece. The kind of "inwardness" he mentions here is not all-encompassing or sentimentalized (nor was the Romantics' view of inwardness so simplistic or uniform). Rather, it is an inwardness informed by and informing one's actions in the world. Consider the Divine Comedy, for instance--Dante the Wayfarer makes a remarkable journey with Virgil through Inferno, up Mount Purgatory, and (without Virgil) to Paradise. Along the way, he speaks with contemporaries and historical (and mythological) figures and reflects on politics, divinity, and morality--in an imaginative but also ordered manner. This is a schooling of inwardness, if there ever was one. When Virgil tells him, "Qui vive la pieta quand' e ben morta" (very roughly, "Here pity lives where she is truly dead"), he is bringing out a paradox that has everything to do with inwardness (and outward action): our responsibility to distinguish among various kinds of pity and recognize when a certain kind is or is not appropriate. Or take Plato's commentary, in the Republic, on the importance of music education: "Aren’t these the reasons, Glaucon, that education in music and poetry is most important? First, because rhythm and harmony permeate the inner part of the soul more than anything else, affecting it most strongly and bringing it grace, so that if someone is properly educated in music and poetry, it makes him graceful, but if not, then the opposite. Second, because anyone who has been properly educated in music and poetry will sense it acutely when something has been omitted from a thing and when it hasn’t been finely crafted or finely made by nature. And since he has the right distastes, he’ll praise fine things, be pleased by them, receive them into his soul, and, being nurtured by them, become fine and good. He’ll rightly object to what is shameful, hating it while he’s still young and unable to grasp the reason, but, having been educated in this way, he will welcome the reason when it comes and recognize it easily because of the kinship with himself." I am not advocating that everyone read Plato and Dante in the K-12 years. The point is that they articulate a kind of inwardness that informs one's participation in the world. Any self-contained standard for inwardness has limitations and problems. Yet one need not look for contained standards. One can read literature and philosophy not for direct guidance, not for "how-to" instructions, but for questions, suggestions, and surprises (among other things).

- dlsenechal

December 26, 2012 at 8:58am

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There is far more to the Dante quote than I suggested in the above comment--there's also a suggestion of "pieta" as "pity" vs. "pieta" as "piety" (the latter in a Virgilian and possibly also a Christian sense). In any case, the "schooling of inwardness" (as I see it) has a great deal to do with such tuning of words.

- dlsenechal

December 26, 2012 at 9:07am

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Just one more correction (I am sorry for the additional comment, but there is no "edit" feature, and I hate letting certain kinds of errors stay): the quote "Qui vive la pietà quand’ è ben morta" (this time with diacritics) is better translated as "Here pity lives when she is fully dead." "When," not "where"; and "fully" is preferable to "truly."

- dlsenechal

December 26, 2012 at 9:50am

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dlsenechal Arnon1, “I am not sure why you insist on a misreading of Wieseltier's piece. The kind of "inwardness" he mentions here is not all-encompassing or sentimentalized (nor was the Romantics' view of inwardness so simplistic or uniform). Rather, it is an inwardness informed by and informing one's actions in the world. Consider the Divine Comedy, for instance--Dante the Wayfarer makes a remarkable journey with Virgil through Inferno, up Mount Purgatory, and (without Virgil) to Paradise. “ dl, I think you are getting lost in the details of your own reading of texts. Dante is not at issue, here and had Dante’s text been able to save Western Civilization he would have done it by now and we wouldn’t seed to discuss the doltish Dale J Stephens but could discuss Dante instead. I was reacting above not to Wieseltier’s point of view (with which I agree) but with his angry lashing out which makes him at times incoherent. For example when Wieseltier says: “The demagoguery of the media, which is covertly structural when it is not overtly ideological, demands a countervailing force of knowledgeable reflection. (There are certainly too many unemployed young people in America, but not because they have read too many books.)” What is he talking about? Which media does he have in mind? PBS? NPR? The NY Times? Even the Wall Street Journal is a lot more coherent (even when I disagree with them) than Leon W. is here? As for the question of inwardness you lose me, dl when you say: “Rather, it is an inwardness informed by and informing one's actions in the world…” and then start discussing Dante’s “Commedia. It doesn't take a scholar to know that Dante was not writing about “the world” in that work. Nor is it a book about “inwardness.” It is an allegory (perfect the most perfect book written in that mode till the 20th C. ( I am thinking of Joyce and of Herman Broch.) But this is not what LW’s angry essay is about. It’s about the author’s feeling that educated humanity (in the US at least) has lost its way. The essay blames the high tech industry and especially those who like Dale Stephens who wish to do away with College completely. I doubt one man and certainly not Stephens will be able to accomplish that. It is the Colleges that are at fault for overreaching. To assume against all evidence that every person can get an education in the humanities is the very definition of folly. This is what was assumed which is why colleges over built and overstrained Ph.D’s who are now unemployed (or worse under-employted). Those European countries that are doing very well economically have a dual education system: a small one in the humanities and a vocational one. Most of high tech learning falls under the rubric of vocational education. I hope we can duplicate that kind of system since it will help both job seekers and our economy, overall. It will also help our education system. Certainly there are the Stephens who write books about the waste of a humanistic education. But to blame people like him for the state of the humanities is like blaming an author who writes about “how to make money from a down housing market” for the housing debacle we just lived through. I don’t understand where LW’s anger is coming from. It seems that whenever someone mentions “digital media” he starts yelling. In the world we live we are going to need a lot more programmers than Dante or Joyce specialists and he had better get used to it if he wants to live in our world (and I hope he does for I would miss his voice should he have a heart-attack or suffer some other disabling medical catastrophe). I know I didn’t address all the issues you raised; nor all the issues that are on my mind. But time, time, time… compels me to stop here. “Had we but word and time…. “

- arnon1

December 26, 2012 at 6:43pm

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The last line should read: "Had we but world and time...."

- arnon1

December 26, 2012 at 6:44pm

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Arnon1, I recognize that you were genuinely responding to some of my points, but it still seems that we are talking past each other. Given time constraints, I will reply briefly (but not coyly--to pick up on the Marvell quote at the end of your last comment). I am not sure why the Divine Comedy's failure to "save" civilization has any bearing here. Why should any work or field of study save civilization? There's something more important than saving civilization: understanding the choices and possibilities within it. A study of the humanities (and math and science) contributes greatly to such understanding. A work does not have to be directly "about" the world in order to influence one's life and action substantially. When you say that we are going to need a lot more programmers than Dante or Joyce specialists, you imply, it seems, that (a) the purpose of studying Dante or Joyce is to become a Dante or Joyce specialist; (b) those who choose to study Dante or Joyce are not as much a part of "our world" as others; (c) "our world" is defined primarily by the needs of the current economy; and (d) the best preparation for "our world" is direct and practical, not interpretive and historical. I dispute all of these assumptions.

- dlsenechal

December 26, 2012 at 9:04pm

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“When you say that we are going to need a lot more programmers than Dante or Joyce specialists, you imply, it seems, that (a) the purpose of studying Dante or Joyce is to become a Dante or Joyce specialist; (b) those who choose to study Dante or Joyce are not as much a part of "our world" as others; (c) "our world" is defined primarily by the needs of the current economy; and (d) the best preparation for "our world" is direct and practical, not interpretive and historical. I dispute all of these assumptions.” I’ll be brief: the emphasis of the Marvell quote was on time and not on coyness. I implied none of the points you attributed to me. I was being realistic. Do you know anyone who reads Dante in his Tuscan dialect who is not a specialist? Or had been an Italian teacher at some point? (I know some people who read Chretien de Troyes in Medieval French but they used to teach French years ago.) I read Cervantes in the original Spanish but I don’t know anyone else who does. I never said that those who teach Dante are not “part of our world.” What I said (or implied) was that Dante was an allegorist and didn’t write about this world directly. His allegory was informed by Aquinas’ world view which was part of “his world.” Joyce was and is too much part of our world (and that’s a compliment). Finally, I don’t know what the best preparation for our world is. Our world is changing too fast for anyone to be certain. I do know that the society we live in needs programmers more than it needs readers of Cervantes. Doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be better off if it were the other way around, but it ain’t the other way around.

- arnon1

December 26, 2012 at 9:37pm

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arnon, I would agree you can learn a great deal by self direction but being alone or hearing only a few voices won't give you a broad range of opinion. This thread has gotten a bit erudite so I don't want to get into debating the best way to learn classics. The point of a University is inherent in its word and not something you can get at your home, in fact I don't think most of our universities are universal enough and I believe every student should be required to study one year abroad, preferably in a non English speaking country, and should have foreign language instruction from year one. Leon is wrong about one thing, strategic languages are also broadening. If you are fluent in Spanish learning Italian, Portugese, or even French will be much easier. (yes, the same is true with Latin but the practical benefits of learning Spanish in America far outweigh the loss of understanding Latin). And Chinese has its own infinitely complex rewards, especially for an occidental. One other thing, even Leon is likely to be prone to operating within his own comfort zone, of academia, of literati, of people of his class and his faith. I think this is why we should bring back someting akin to a draft, either in military or civilian service.

- blackton

December 27, 2012 at 1:00am

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Arnon1, As it happens, I do know people who read Dante in his Tuscan dialect and are not Dante specialists or teachers of Italian. Granted, they read it along with English translations. There are excellent resources for this, including the Princeton Dante Project, which has recordings of Lino Pertile reading each of the cantos. But that's beside the point. I don't understand your statement that "the society we live in needs programmers more than it needs readers of Cervantes." First of all, there are many different kinds of "need." I assume you are referring to economic need. Let's suppose for the time being that you are right (in terms of economic need). it follow that programmers should be trained narrowly and quickly? I know programmers who went through four years of college and benefited immensely from this education. Yes, once in a while they wished they could be out in the working world--but college gave them an opportunity to toy with ideas and to take courses in other subjects. It also gave them a chance to build a theoretical foundation in computer science itself. There is currently some debate about whether introductory CS courses should emphasize theory or whether they should focus on quickly satisfying things like making apps. Some argue that a course on apps will draw in and motivate more students; others counter that such motivation is superficial and that a theoretical foundation opens up more possibilities. I am not informed enough to argue well for one side or another--but I lean strongly toward the latter side. Computer science training should not become purely job training. The student has many more resources for life if she or he understands the principles of computer science and has taken courses in other subjects, such as literature, history of science, a foreign language, and so forth. I have taken "computer science" classes intended as job training--and they were narrow and dreary. Nothing was taught that wasn't immediately applicable to a job; nothing was taught that a student couldn't figure out independently. The tone of these courses was, "Here are some tools to help you do your job." But we live for more than our jobs. I learned more on my own than I did from such courses--but I learned less on my own than I would have learned from a good CS class in college. I have Donalt Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, which I hope to read in full one day--but it would take quite a bit of doing to read it in full at this point. The gift of college, or part of it, is that one has room and time to read Knuth AND Dostoevsky. Even if the world did "need" a greater number of computer programmers than of Dante specialists (to fill jobs, that is), it does not follow that (a) other needs are absent or unimportant and (b) the best way to meet this need--and other needs--is to prepare young programmers swiftly and efficiently for existing jobs.

- dlsenechal

December 27, 2012 at 6:35am

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blackton “arnon, I would agree you can learn a great deal by self-direction but being alone or hearing only a few voices won't give you a broad range of opinion.” I wouldn’t disagree with that, all education worthy of the name incorporates some form of dialectics (in Plato’s and not Hegel’s sense). I grew up in a neighborhood and at a time where lots of folks read books and talked about them ad nauseum. I am a strong believer in public education (not the British kind of “public” which is actually private). Besides I doubt that most people would have the time or the inclination to educate their children. We are talking about a small number of ideologically motivated and usually paranoid people. These often have an “authoritarian personality.” I met some of them when I was in the service. The rare child who is taught by a parent who values education and openness is lucky indeed. You also say that: “One other thing, even Leon is likely to be prone to operating within his own comfort zone, of academia, of literati, of people of his class and his faith. I think this is why we should bring back someting akin to a draft, either in military or civilian service.” You agree with Wieseltier, Blackton above and the you criti9cize him for beint to parochial and isolated. I can’t put your two comments together as they seem to contradict each other. First, I agree that we should reinstitute the draft. When I was in the service I got to know people from all walks of life and not just people from other races or “cultures.” When someone says that students need to be exposed to people who are not like them they usually mean people from different religions, ethnicities and countries. To me this is a joke: all the people from third world countries that I met with some important exceptions where more Western in their attitudes than many “western” people I know. Even Edward Said that champion of the Orient as a zone of “difference” was more Western than many relatives of mine. The media has exposed the whole world to one mode of being. This is ehat third world people today get so bothered when they are regarded as thirs world people. In their heart they don’t feel “like Orientals” they feel Western as did the hypocritical Said. Finally, just learning how “the other” doesn’t see herself or himself as “the other” is an education in itself. Your post was very interesting and brought many different thoughts. I just answered a couple of them. It’s time, you know….

- arnon1

December 27, 2012 at 5:52pm

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Dlsenechal, since we have already gone a couple of rounds about these interesting issues, and since we could spend the rest of our lives talking about it, in the interest of brevity I’ll answer only a couple of your points. “I don't understand your statement that "the society we live in needs programmers more than it needs readers of Cervantes." First of all, there are many different kinds of "need." I assume you are referring to economic need.” All true, but I used “programmers” as an all-inclusive term that applied to almost all non-academic jobs. We need programmers today the way until recently we needed farmers. That didn’t mean that we didn’t need intellectuals, but that without farmers who could grow food the society would starve. Programmers today don’t just work on apps or blogs. They do essential works in hospitals, in Banks, in government, universities, in law firms, in utility companies, retail outfits, department stores, supermarkets and almost all those institutions private and public that keeps society going. Without them we would starve and freeze and go naked. Now, this is societies point of view and not necessarily mine. Sorry but I don't have the time to develop my argument any further.

- arnon1

December 27, 2012 at 6:09pm

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What this thread reinforces (in my view) is the importance of physical presence in education. It is easier, in person, to clarify definitions at the very start--or to make tentative comments that do not have to be definitive statements but are open to refinement. Online, the longer one goes on, the worse it gets--and many a seemingly thorough comment (I refer to my own here) shows its limitations later. This thread was not so terrible, all in all, but like other online discussions, it left me wondering, "why did I get into this?" In the classroom, it is obvious why one "gets into it": to arrive at a greater understanding than one had before, to shake up one's assumptions entirely, or to refine existing ideas. Online discussions have value but should not replace the ones we have in person, in the classroom or elsewhere.

- dlsenechal

December 28, 2012 at 8:52am

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arnon: I can’t put your two comments together as they seem to contradict each other. Ah, but this is because I contain multitudes. When I said meeting other people, I mean literally leaving the country to study abroad, hopefully in another language. The most interesting thing I have found in my many years of travel is not any concept of westerness or easterness that binds or seperates people (assuming you share a language) what I found is that connections that happen are not quantifiable and this is true whether in America or any country. Personality types have something to do with it and common interests but it is something beyond that. This capacity to develop connections to people whom you do not ordinarily think you ever would I think is an important element in education. dlsenechal: I disagree in part, before online we had letters and some of the greatest works that we have are letters between prominent people (even letters unearthed by complete unknowns can be staggering in their beauty). I have had some wonderful online discussions with some people, some that have lasted for many, many posts. Writing gives you a chance to think and to present the best possible argument, too many times within a class (even as a teacher) I think...oh, I should have said that but it slipped my mind, or a new idea crosses my mind much later (yes, a later class benefits but not the previous one). Now I would agree that 99.99% of the "debates" online are utter crap, but there are sometimes those rare ones which are thoroughly enjoyable, especially when they are people of opposing viewpoints who engage in frank but respectful dialog.

- blackton

December 29, 2012 at 12:46am

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I've never been a big teacher guy. I've always been a real and self-styled self-educator. I graduated from a big four year school, studying French and well, education. But I can confidently say that most of everything that I've ever learned I taught myself. With that exception, I found much to agree with in your article. Humanities is where it's at! A great read.

- jerrol

December 29, 2012 at 7:10am

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When I was a lad, my father would buy five-day old calves, and it was my job to teach them to drink out of a bucker. I was to become their "udder mudder." When I see students hooked up to a computer, tv set and the like, I think of those calves. Some 25,000 students went through my introductory course in economics during my teaching career--1949-1985 I carefully avoided the "lowest form of knowledge" with considerable success. My object was to make them think. See http://www.artofteachingecon51.com

- johnkuhlman

December 29, 2012 at 3:03pm

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Here's a piece that Wieseltier saw, and most probably read, before making his own fine effort in the column above. http://www.jimsleeper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Dissent-Liberal-Education.pdf

- jimsleeper

December 29, 2012 at 3:04pm

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Dlsenechal “What this thread reinforces (in my view) is the importance of physical presence in education. It is easier, in person, to clarify definitions at the very start--or to make tentative comments that do not have to be definitive statements but are open to refinement. Online, the longer one goes on, the worse it gets--and many a seemingly thorough comment (I refer to my own here) shows its limitations later.” Most on line discussions, including this one are not meant to educate, DL. If one learns something from someone’s comments great, but this isn’t the function of most discussion fora. Personally I see little difference between say a correspondence course and a course on line. There is no reason why the correspondence couldn’t establish other more personal venues of discussion. This leads to a fundamental disagreement that I have with Mr. Wieseltier: he seems to assume that it’s either all digital or all non-digital. He makes no room for both forms of learning: through reading books and discussing them in a personal setting as well as using digital media. We live in a digital age, there is much about that I hate as passionately as LW but it is here and it’s not going away. Some of what it brings to the reader is first rate. I can now download old editions of books I could never have gotten hold of; I can now discuss certain texts with the very few people interested in a forgotten author. I can see reproduction of art works that where only available before in very expensive books, books out of my reach. And of course the original in Russia or some Museum in Eastern Europe is also out of my reach. Digital media becomes a threat when people assume that it is all there is that one need not look for originals, talk to others about what one reads, etc. But I assume that people who are interested say in Machiavelli or say Leo Strauss will also be interested in discussing their works with others. Strauss famously carried on a conversation through letters with a Russian-French philosopher, Kojeve and their letters on “Xenophon’s Tyranny” have since been published. One reason I suppose people are interested in posting on literary and cultural forms is to enter into serious discussions with others who have similar interest. In actual existence it’s unlikely that someone who lives in a small town in Arkansas will be able to find many (or any person) people who read say, Plotinus. Wieseltier here writes like a privileged character: someone with access to great libraries, museums, and well educated people with whom he can discuss his intellectual passions. Most are not that lucky.

- arnon1

December 29, 2012 at 4:11pm

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“When I said meeting other people, I mean literally leaving the country to study abroad, hopefully in another language. The most interesting thing I have found in my many years of travel is not any concept of westerness or easterness that binds or seperates people (assuming you share a language) what I found is that connections that happen are not quantifiable and this is true whether in America or any country. Personality types have something to do with it and common interests but it is something beyond that. This capacity to develop connections to people whom you do not ordinarily think you ever would I think is an important element in education.” Blackton, I understood what you said and I don’t disagree. What I wanted to reply which got lost in all the verbiage, was that I found more people who were unlike me right here at home when I was in the service. Also these people weren’t necessarily people of other races: many were young white farmers, some but not all were “hillbillies.” They opened up a whole new world that till then didn’t know existed. Didn’t know how smart, well read and cunning “hillbillies” could be. Who would have guessed that people who lived all their lives in the Ozarks could be agnostics who attacked preachers as con-men! Going abroad is an education (though many Americans I met abroad insisted on speaking English and never bothered to learn the language of their host country), but one can find many people who are completely dissimilar from oneself right here at home. I don’t think, though, that one is likely to meet many people different from oneself on line.

- arnon1

December 29, 2012 at 4:28pm

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Blackton, I agree with your point about letter. When I wrote my comment to DL I hadn't read your terrific reply.

- arnon1

December 29, 2012 at 4:30pm

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If Jim Sleeper is the same man who wrote "Liberal Racism" I must say that I have read many of your articles, on line, and learned a great deal from them. Thanks.

- arnon1

December 29, 2012 at 4:34pm

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I see that this thread has continued in interesting ways. Blackton and arnon1, I agree with both of you that digital resources and online conversations (as well as other kinds of correspondence with strangers) can be thoughtful, beautiful, and important. One also needs the physical presence of others. This is complex, because presence and absence complement each other. The problem with too much absence, too much virtual communication, is that a certain kind of sympathy drops from the picture (not always, but often). By "sympathy" I don't mean pity or condescension; I mean the awareness that the other person's wishes and intentions are roughly as honorable as our own. (Of course, the person might be a scoundrel, but that's another matter.) I also agree with arnon1 that one can meet people profoundly different from oneself within one's own racial group and nationality, just as one can find a lot in common with someone who lives on the other side of the world. One can also find surprising differences within similarities. For instance, one can meet someone who "shares" one's interest in a particular subject, yet find that the person thinks about it in quite different terms. But discerning difference (and enjoying it) takes time. In my teens and twenties, I longed to meet (or sometimes thought I had met) a kindred spirit who saw things as I did. Now I am more interested in differences--or mixtures of the different and the kindred. It was largely my literature, history, and language classes (in college and graduate school) that helped me understand such differences, that helped me take interest in things that were not in any obvious sense about me but that, over the long term, would help me know myself and others. Of course I learned a great deal outside of school as well--but there was something special about the ritual of going to class, listening to the teacher, taking part in discussion, and going home to read. That is one reason why I owe so much to my teachers (not all of them, but more than several). They showed me something beyond myself, without belittling me or any other students. They realized that they were teaching not only for the immediate result, but for understandings that might come long after the course was over.

- dlsenechal

December 29, 2012 at 5:41pm

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I keep expecting to gain wisdom by reading TNR and the intelligent comments from other readers and participants. How foolish of me!

- skahn

December 29, 2012 at 7:35pm

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I To take two points from among the many I didn't like in this piece insofar as they relate to the fundamental importance of a humanities education: I don't really know what "inwardness" as an educational ideal means in any practical sense; and I don't believe, and neither as I understand him does Stanley Fish--from whose common sense I'm taking much of what I argue, that "Surely the primary objectives of education are the formation of the self and the formation of the citizen." Inwardness, it is posited, will come from an education in the humanities, specifically, I would imagine, from studying literature, the fine arts and philosophy. I think that's romantic bunk. What one gets from studying, these self justifying magnificent subjects, includes a grounding and perhaps some competence in them, and the foundations for further study and appreciation of them. (I agree with the critique made by some in this thread that Wieseltier is being altogether too prescriptive in insisting on formal education as the necessary means to an education in the humanities and he, to add to that critique, doesn't sufficiently distinguish sharply enough in his comments between public school education and post secondary education.) As for inwardness, an entirely self congratulatory category, students from any discipline will or won't have it if it means a deeper self awareness, a deeper soul, a more intense sense of self and the world and the relation between them, a greater moral sense, and all that kind of thing. Nor does any post secondary education vouch for greater inwardness so understood. What one gets from one's studies, as noted, isn't inwardness but precisely outwardness, which is to say relative competence in particular bodies of knowledge. Inwardness in the way I'm thinking about it will be an incident of the kind of person one is and the kinds of crucibles of experience, including education and a number of others, one has gone through. ....” Surely the primary objectives of education are the formation of the self and the formation of the citizen. A political order based on the expression of opinion imposes an intellectual obligation upon the individual, who cannot acquit himself of his democratic duty without an ability to reason, a familiarity with argument, a historical memory... This as an argument for the essentiality of a humanities education is equally guff. At some level of abstraction I suppose formation of the self and the formation of the citizen are the objectives of an education. But I don't understand them to be criteria guiding pedagogy at any level of schooling, let alone being vindicated in particular by a humanities education. Those informing criteria are rather intellectually appropriate ways of imparting discrete bodies of knowledge and developing in tandem with that imparting continually ascending intellectual ability to deal with more challenging and difficult instances of that knowledge. The values one learns along the way are those, individual and social, that make such learning possible. Formation of the self and of the citizen are necessarily incidental to that learning. (In saying this I don't want to be taken as disagreeing with Hirsch's argument for cultural literacy. But it's to be noted that that's an information based argument, the same information so pooh-poohed by Wieseltier as bottom rung stuff.) Again the notion that the humanities are unique and superior in better self and citizen formation, however attenuated these goals are from day to pedagogy at any level, is screaming romantic nonsense. I don't see where the humanities educated shine in their virtue, self formation or citizenry any more than any other group of folks one might want to categorize. I have under estimated Wieseltier's occasional deep capacity for soft headedness as instanced in this less than sterling diarist piece.

- basman

December 29, 2012 at 7:58pm

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P.S. I'd add to what comprises a humanities education in the sense I understand Wieseltier means the classics and learning another language.

- basman

December 29, 2012 at 8:01pm

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Inwardness may or may not be a “real place” but it does have its history in western thought: The Tanakh somewhere speaks of an inner self. “The still small voice of the lord, etc…” This is taken as one of the origins of the notion of inwardness. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet his hesitancy was thought of as pointing to some inner self. Adorno thought that this holding back and not acting according to the code of “revenge tragedy” is the starting point of bourgeois subjectivity. Similarly I take Pascal “the heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of” as another index of subjectivity. Wordsworth’s correspondent breeze (In the Prelude) was also seen (by M H Abrams and other scholars of Romantic poetry) as an important argument for inwardness. TS Eliot uncomfortable with this Hebraic notion of inwardness was uncomfortable with Romantic poetry thought to displace it with the more “objective” poetry of the Renaissance. His views held sway in academia till Harold Bloom and others challenged it and restored Romantic poetry to its rightful place.

- arnon1

December 29, 2012 at 10:23pm

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I digress but this, so nicely succinct and concise, ...In Shakespeare’s Hamlet his hesitancy was thought of as pointing to some inner self. Adorno thought that this holding back and not acting according to the code of “revenge tragedy” is the starting point of bourgeois subjectivity...is at the very heart of the play, the veryvfount of its meaning. And I think Adorno is right in what you describe him saying. To undigress, I note and don't disagree with your thumbnail sketch of ideas of inwardness over time, but argue, as I did, that a humanities education is no necessary or superior path to it. A mechanic say, just to pick an arbitrary example, may have as much inwardness as any aesthete or humanities educated person. And the same for formed character and formed citizenry. Especially insofar as inwardness is as it is in Hamlet intuitive morality that has not even reached the level of consciousness as it has not for Hamlet, precisely his tragic bane.

- basman

December 29, 2012 at 10:42pm

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We live in an age of subjectivity and each one of us is blessed or cursed with inwardness which is something Freud tried to free us from and Derrida tried to deconstruct. Neither of them was successful. "To undigress, I note and don't disagree with your thumbnail sketch of ideas of inwardness over time, but argue, as I did, that a humanities education is no necessary or superior path to it." Not superior but it is a quicker way to understanding it.

- arnon1

December 29, 2012 at 11:06pm

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I don't think Wieseltier is saying that the humanities are the only route to "inwardness." Rather, "the humanities are always pertinent" and should not be treated as dispensable. I disagree with arnon1's "thumbnail sketch" of the history of inwardness. The history is much more complex than that, since outwardness and inwardness exist in complex relation. Emerson wrote: "Society and solitude are deceptive names. It is not the circumstance of seeing more or fewer people, but the readiness of sympathy, that imports; and a sound mind will derive its principles from insight, with ever a purer ascent to the sufficient and absolute right, and will accept society as the natural element in which they are to be applied." Inwardness need not be blatant or self-announcing. One can develop inwardness when reading works of political philosophy; the logic and rhetoric can sharpen one's own reasoning and help one form one's own views. As for Hamlet, I am uneasy with the assumption that the play is mainly about his tentativeness and inability to act. He does act, in fact; he just does so blunderingly. His inwardness comes not so much from hesitation (as I see it) as from the burden of unnatural knowledge; he sees and knows things he is not supposed to see, and these things separate him from others. There are excellent works on the relation between inner and outer life. One that I find particularly interesting is David Bromwich's A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost. It challenges some of my assumptions and introduces me to works I have not yet read. I am eager to read Wordsworth's The Borderers, for instance. I wrote a book on solitude and education (Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture). I'd venture that "solitude" in the book is fairly close to Wieseltier's "inwardness," but I can't say this for sure.

- dlsenechal

December 29, 2012 at 11:30pm

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...The only form of knowledge that can be adequately acquired without the help of a teacher, and without the humility of a student, is information, which is the lowest form of knowledge... What the other ways W. offers? Maybe if you were clear and succinct about what inwardness is, we can have a discussion on how it is that those educated in the humanities have a better shot at it than others, which is what I take W. to be saying and you affirming. (See last paragraph of this note.) If Hamlet isn't centrally about his self conflicted attempts to avenge his father's murder as manifest in his failure to act with the dispatch of say an unreflective Laertes, could Laertes so act, he is no match for Claudius's natural superiority to him, what is it centrally about? Of course Hamlet 's inwardness doesn't come from his hesitation, no one is saying that. Rather the latter is a manifestation of the former. It's unclear to me what you mean by unnatural knowledge, but if you mean his encounters with, and what he learns from, the ghost as the source of his intuitive dimly at best realized and therefore unwitting moral rebellion, that is only mechanically true, like it's true that if I hadn't seen the ad I wouldn't have bought such and such. I bought such and such because I am that way. Hamlet's inner nature gets released by what he learns from the ghost and by the burden of revenge the ghost lays on him. Thus long after the ghost disappears from the play and ceases to have in itself thematic resonance, Hamlet's central dilemma persists. Again, if you want to lay out a concrete argument in a step by step manner I'd be happy to consider it on the relation between the acquiring of inwardness and an education in the humanities, which acquisition, as Arnon notes is different from learning about inwardness. I think I understand W's argument and I've stated why I reject it. So if you have a version of that argument you'd like to share, great. Or if you have specific points to counter mine, great too. Quoting Emerson is fine; and it's good to know you wrote a book on these themes. But if you wish to explore and examine and develop the lines of argument, what you quote and that you wrote a book, with the greatest of respect, aren't all that helpful.

- basman

December 30, 2012 at 12:07am

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"I disagree with arnon1's "thumbnail sketch" of the history of inwardness. The history is much more complex than that, since outwardness and inwardness exist in complex relation." Of course, it is. A "sketch isn't meant to offer a definitive outline of a subject. The same with Hamlet, there is no definitive interpretation of such a complex play and no one not even David Bromwich's. I am puzzled by dl view that an education is the product of intimate exchanges among interlocutors but insists on trying to present some definitive interpretive view. In the sciences one can find definitive interpretations which are alas temporary, but not in the humanities.

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 12:15am

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This isn't the place for it but I'd argue there is a definitive interpretation of Hamlet its complexity notwithstanding. Maybe some time on some other appropriate thread. Here I'm interested in the relation between a humanties education andnone's own inwardness, self formation and citizen formation.

- basman

December 30, 2012 at 1:09am

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This whole thread, from Wieseltier on down, reads like an all too typical bunch of hoary humanists and classicists once again analyzing how we are circling the drain because we no longer give adequate thought and study to the musings of people who wrote great works of art centuries or millenia ago, utterly ignorant of the conditions under which we would eventually read them. For all the effort one puts into them, they are no more likely, and probably significantly less likely, to lead to understanding valuable to a modern citizen than much more recent and accessible work from everyone from Charles Dickens to Leo Tolstoy to Mark Twain to Chaim Potok to Solzenytsen to Alice Walker to - the list goes on and on, in languages and using metaphors and knowledge with which most readers are instantly familiar. More to the point, though, the entire conversation seems ready to denigrate, or at best ignore, most of the learning that has actually moved society forward in the last 3 centuries, in the physical, life mathematical and computational sciences - All this so we can teach inwardness. Socrates is alive and well, and seems to have most of the authors in this thread firmly by short hairs. Wieseltier's major theme - that teachers and teaching is critically important - is easily stated and argued. They are important from birth through most of our adult lives, although their character changes over the phases of our lives. But they are not important because the help us read and interpret the classics, without which society would be somewhat poorer, but entirely functional. They are important because the biological nature of the human creature requires that we recreate most useful knowledge in each generation, over and over again, and requires that each individual recreate their own knowledge, day by day and year by year, in order to keep it alive. Teachers and teaching are thus so fundamental to the success of humanity that to argue otherwise requires willful stupidity. But the vast majority of knowledge that we must thus transmit is not humanistic nor inward looking - it is knowledge that allows us to engage the actual, physical, risk-filled world in which we live. A couple of comments to the side: First, home-schooling is no oxymoron, and properly done can produce intellectually capable, informed citizens at least as well our schools. Two PhD candidates (one in the humanities, and one in mathemetics if you must know) amongst my two two children, either of whom are better people and better citizens than I am will serve as an anchor data point. Second, I couldn't agree more that advising the best and brightest or even the merely aspiring of ordinary capability, to skip higher education for entrepreneurship, is crappy education policy, and bound to leave a lot of disappointed people underemploying their talents. But this article fails to understand why it is so dangerous - it's not because of the "inwardness" education that those folks will lack, it's because it's yet another step in the glorification of those who excel at business over those who produce the goods, knowledge and services that business so crassly manipulates. None of the famous drop-out successes have given us much in the way of new ideas, but they have excelled on capitalizing on one or two good ideas that were "in the air" when they were dropping out. Our economic system gives those who do this a much higher leverage than those who actually create and implement the ideas, which may be just what we want, but is no reason to glorify Dell, Gates, Jobs or Zuckerman as anything other than extremely astute exploiters of societies needs and our capitalist system. Almost by construction, most people will never achieve this, however talented, and so most of them should be honing their knowledge, skills and talent for a place in the productive, rather than the manipulative, class.

- IowaBeauty

December 30, 2012 at 11:20am

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There. May be a definitive interpretation of Hamlet, but I haven't seen it. In any case, dlsenechal seems to argue from authorial authority citing books on the subject as proof. This explains the disdain for blog discussions. Dl has every right to sneer at discussions such as this one but why would the poster participate in discussions he or she finds repulsive?

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 11:26am

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"Socrates is alive and well, and seems to have most of the authors in this thread firmly by short hairs." Interesting image. Socrates though had no interest in anyone's short hairs. Alcibiades found that out.

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 11:37am

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"Socrates is alive and well, and seems to have most of the authors in this thread firmly by short hairs." So Iowa Beauty is Socrates or wishes she were Socrates. IB's comment show the usual Midwestern contempt for intellectualism, her naming of some novelists such as Dickens and Tolstoy, notwithstanding.

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 12:09pm

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IB I have some sympathy for some of your points but you are anti intellectual in disdaining the immersion in the geniuses of a past more far away than your examples reach back to. Chaim Potok, Alice Walker: really? Methinks your just riffing names. I'll see your Walker and Potok and raise you with a Rabelais and Euripides. Of course I'm gently teasing you. There is no real issue here. Time permitting and the constraints of practical exigencies intruding, the study of and immersion in what the greatest amongst and before us have created and thought, as per M. Arnold, should ideally form as much of a secondary and post secondary education as is possible. It is all useless in a narrow utilitarian sense and utterly and magnificently self justifying.

- basman

December 30, 2012 at 12:26pm

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@ Arnon 1 Try this it should be free to download. If not I'd be happy to send you a copy. On either basis you'll probsbly find it worth every penny it wouldn't cost you. http://www.lulu.com/shop/itzik-basman/futility-as-tragedy-an-interpretation-of-hamlet/paperback/product-51022.htm

- basman

December 30, 2012 at 12:31pm

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That link seems not to have taken. One more try. http://www.lulu.com/shop/itzik-basman/futility-as-tragedy-an-interpretation-of-hamlet/paperback/product-51022.html

- basman

December 30, 2012 at 12:51pm

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No, arnon1, my comments on Hamlet were an aside. The books I cited had to do (or had partly to do) with certain kinds of inwardness, not with Hamlet. Nor did I "sneer" at blog discussions. I participate in them from time to time but am ambivalent about them. Basman, you are asking me for a detailed exposition of my views--something you have not demanded of anyone else, including yourself, and something that no one on this thread has offered. Your tone leaves me unwilling to oblige you. I will give a brief answer. If that is unsatisfactory, so be it. I see inwardness as both a condition and a practice: an inherent condition of having a mind that is different from other minds, and a practice of making sense of things, noticing meanings, distinctions and relations, developing affinities, raising questions, imagining possibilities and implications, and testing out ideas. It involves self-questioning and self-criticism as well as questioning and criticism of things outside oneself. The humanities (and sciences) help develop inwardness not only by posing problems and challenges but also by offering splendid exemplars of thought. A single paragraph of Locke (which is often a single sentence) can help develop such inwardness by (a) challenging the reader to put together the many pieces of his argument and (b) inspiring the reader to consider the meanings and implications of what he says. In different ways, Newton's Principia and Dante's Divine Comedy do this too. It is not only the "classics" that do this--but there are some works that people continue to ponder. Such pondering is important for life in general because it involves probing beyond the immediate or superficial "takeaway." The practice does not directly transfer from one field to another, but it can transfer indirectly, as can the awareness. I do not assume that this is Wieseltier's definition. Nor do I consider it complete. The topic is much too large to sum up in a few paragraphs, and this is not the occasion for a treatise. Diana Senechal

- dlsenechal

December 30, 2012 at 1:17pm

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Mr Wieseltier is unaware that most college today is nothing more than a tradeschool. Liberal arts degrees, which used to be ungodly hard and broad but in return thought thinking skills that would last a lifetime, mean nothing anymore. They are where the dumb kids end up (along with communication and journalism). These degrees used to prepare our finest to lead the country or as a foundation for law. But anymore they are a joke. Colleges have been dumbed down because the clientele has been dumbed down. If the goal of college is to educate the top 5 to 15% of the population, then the programs remain difficult, the professors remain valuable (and challenged) and the rewards remain high. If the goal of colleges is to educate the top 50% of the population, then college becomes a joke. Only slightly more challenging than highschool. You can imagine the caliber of professors that stick around to endure this. Teaching is not a gift bestowed upon a select few. It should be innate in all parents. I can vividly remember countless teaching sessions from my mom and dad. Dad explaining how to pick a drill bit size for a given screw, how to feel the tool working and to push more or less. Mom explaining how shading can emphasize drawings. And Dad showing up after hours of me and my buddies building stuff with a heroic idea on how to make it better or to keep a piece from falling off. This was not just imparting information as the author asserts. This was allowing me to learn the basics under a watchful eye, explore and push the limits on my own, and then gently show how to do it even better next time. Every day was an endless list of lessons and teaching. The experiences learned from my parents exceeded that of my public school teachers manifold. No surprise there. That is how it should be. Yes, I had an occasional teacher that a I sensed cared. But I had a larger pile of teachers that verbally told us they didn't care. Now, if caring parents are already outperforming teachers in most all areas of teaching, does it not make sense that they could also add geometry to the list of lessons they impart? Of course it does. The trend the author notes about UnCollege paints the author as out of touch. Most people work to make money. Acquiring skills as quickly as possible is a laudable goal, especially since college has become so expensive and much of it is wasted on remedials and drinking. Would the author criticize a blacksmith in the 1700's for trying to learn his trade too quickly by jettisoning stuff his future employer said he didn't need to know? And yet, that is what most of what we're doing any more is: a trade. That is a bulk of what engineering is. And medicine. And law. Employers need someone who can type C++ or Verilog and build subsystems as quickly as possible. They don't care if you've never seen the Sistine chapel or how many languages you might know. They don't care if you can formally explain logic. You are a modern blacksmith, and the horseshoes were due yesterday. And here's a fat pile of money for the horseshoes. A pretty fair trade, actually.

- seattleeng

December 30, 2012 at 1:22pm

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Diana, if my tone troubled you, I'm sorry for that. I meant not to give offence. I appreciate the extent to which you have laid out what you mean and think. It's good that you did because we may be "whistling past each other." I had in mind, and thought you did too, perhaps without warrant, the notion of some greater intensity of self touching on the spiritual, a better self, which might include a more refined morality, a greater sensitivity to others, more compassionate self, a deeper self, a more authentic self, and like qualities of interiority. Also, generally, a better person, considering the putative first principled objects of education being the best formation of the self and of the self as citizen. The argument I tried to suggest in this thread is that essentially what an education does is make us relatively competent in the subjects of our education and develops our minds so as to be adequate to that competence. My argument is that no superior self, and no inwardness in the way I'm thinking about it necessarily or probably ensues from such an education, whether in the humanities or otherwise, and that we do not as a result of our education become better selves, as judged by the criteria derivable inwardness so understood, or better citizens. Our education will be incidental to that inwardness, and to the kind of exemplary or less than exemplary selves and citizens we might be. But as I read what you sketch out as to what you mean by inwardness, your notions of it seem astride mine, not better or worse, just different. If we can agree, on your understanding of inwardness, that someone who can take a passage of Locke, disaggregate it, understand it, think critically about it, and then can do so with analogous examples of thought, exemplifies what you mean by inwardness, then it seems that what you mean by it is what I mean by my argument. For what that exemplifying person has is certain competences as nurtured and guided to in the course of an education. You say part of what I think when you say, ...The humanities (and sciences) help develop inwardness not only by posing problems and challenges but also by offering splendid exemplars of thought... I take this statement one step farther by saying so does a course in auto mechanics, cooking, plumbing and hotel and restaurant management and any other discipline that requires hard mastery leading to relative competence in it. But I say, again, that those competencies, or others, given the study of different disciplines, vouch no greater exquisiteness of soul, sensitivity, intensity, morality, or, generally, self hood or citizenship. Going back to the example of unlocking Locke, I'm not sure how that skill entails "...self-questioning and self-criticism as well as questioning and criticism of things outside oneself," the one part of your notion of inwardness with which I had some problem. The "things outside oneself" is obvious as a discipline deals necessarily with matters external to one's self but that said, I don't see self questioning as necessary or self criticism save as one is constantly appraising one's self in relation to how one is progressing in one's discipline, which isn't the sense of those words I think you mean. If you wish to respond to this, I'd be most interested. Itzik Basman

- basman

December 30, 2012 at 2:49pm

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"The humanities (and sciences) help develop inwardness not only by posing problems and challenges but also by offering splendid exemplars of thought..." Sorry, Mr. Basman but the sciences do not help develop "inwardness." We live in age where we take the concept of humsn subjectivity for granted. Hence one can claim that any one or any thing is possessed by inwardness. Humanity has always had "inwardness," but like Moliere's MONSIEUR JOURDAIN, we didn't know that we were possessed by inwardness. That realization came about very slowly and the texts and writers I mentioned had a lot to do with making us aware of it. Of course, there were other authors involved too and if I missed someone's favorite writer, I am sorry, but there are too many to mention. The ones' I mentioned seem to me to be seminal figures.

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 3:12pm

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Thank you for the clarification, Itzik. I appreciate your response. Again, inwardness can't be summed up in two paragraphs. When I brought up self-questioning and self-criticism, I was referring, in part, to what you call "some greater intensity of self touching on the spiritual." When reading Locke, one can analyze its structure and meaning while thinking about liberty itself and its complications. (Take, for instance, what Locke says about "just war" and slavery in the fourth and seventh chapters of the Second Treatise.) This is not just an analytical exercise, though it is that too. It can also make a person aware of his or her own contradictions and caveats; it can help one appreciate just how difficult it is to effect liberty, even though it is inherent in us (if one believes, as I do, that it is). Reading Locke (and others) can also awaken compassion and respect. One thing I particularly enjoy about Locke is the credit he gives to counterarguments, even as he refutes them. This has proved a stumbling block for many of my (high school) students, as they equate the counterargument with his own view (simply because he acknowledges some of the truth of them). It takes mental discipline, and familiarity with the language and syntax, to read his argument through and see his ultimate point. But mental discipline and understanding of his points are not the only reward. This also opens up the possibility of giving appropriate respect and consideration to one's adversaries--and incorporating the best aspects of their views in one's own, without blurring the distinctions. I consider this a moral if not spiritual good. (Incidentally, I do not claim to have superior understanding of Locke; I believe and hope that my understanding will evolve over time.) There is also the exhilaration of reading some of these works--the sense, as one reads (or after one reads) that something ineffable has taken place. This can happen in a physics class as well. One wants to be alone for a while and think about the poem or theorem or passage. That, too, is an aspect of inwardness. I have not once said that the humanities are the only route to this kind of inwardness. Nor does the awareness necessarily come immediately. Some of it may come years after the formal study. But the formal study plays a large role.

- dlsenechal

December 30, 2012 at 3:29pm

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"IB's comment show the usual Midwestern contempt for intellectualism, her naming of some novelists such as Dickens and Tolstoy, notwithstanding." "IB I have some sympathy for some of your points but you are anti intellectual in disdaining the immersion in the geniuses of a past more far away than your examples reach back to." Taken together, these comments suggest a very interesting view of what constitutes an intellectual or respect for intellectual achievement. The product of the human intellect is vast and heterogeneous, and it mostly a product of the last 2 or 3 centuries. Most of it is not literature or literary. I don't disdain Plato, or Euripides or Dante, and I have no issue with keeping their works alive in the corpus of our thought. But that the notion that they somehow bring unique insight into the present human condition and into which more than a few of us ought to "immerse" ourselves, or that they are somehow more important than the equal genius in literature that is far more accessible and relevant to the present, is just silly. Plato is beautiful in Greek, and even rather wonderful in English, but a good teacher could get just as much meaning, far more easily, out of the authors I mentioned. Meanwhile there is an ocean of intellectual work that it is far more important for modern citizens to understand, starting with fundamental theories in modern and classical physics, evolution, genetics, biochemistry, information theory, statistics, psychology, economics, and the theory of mind, and moving inexorably into the practical arts of medicine, engineering, law and finance. What one can, with great effort, learn from reading Plato is, to use his own allegory, but pale shadows on the walls of a cave, compared to these intellectual edifices - an observation with which I rather suspect Plato would instantly agree to, were he alive today. If all this makes me anti-intellectual, then fine. Names don't really bother me. But I've read (and been taught, back when the liberal arts where hard, as someone mentioned above) Plato, and Euripides and Virgil and Dante (and Tolstoy and Dickens and Solzhenitsyn), and I've also been a practicing physicist and software engineer, and mastered the fundamentals of most of the rest of the disciplines I've mentioned along the way (psychology being a notable exception). I am a great deal farther from disdaining the human intellect than those who get through an entire discussion about the value of teaching without even getting to Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Shannon, Turing, Watson, Crick, etc, etc, not to mention Tolstoy, Twain, and Solzhenitsyn, etc. etc.

- IowaBeauty

December 30, 2012 at 3:53pm

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To me one of the greatest modern philosophers of inwardness was Kierkegaard. Read his Either/Or

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 3:55pm

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I hate post number 51 it separates it from all the preceding posts.

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 3:56pm

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Your second link worked fine, Basman: FUTILITY AS TRAGEDY: AN INTERPRETATION OF HAMLET Do you expect us to pay the ten dollars for the book?

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 4:15pm

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IowaBeauty, LW was discussing the theory of human subjectivity, aka, "inwardness" and not the theory of relativity nor the theory of beauty. If that seems to have upset you, too bad. Start your own thread were people can discuss your own subjects.

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 4:18pm

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Arnon, Diana, IB, I read with interest and enjoyed your last comments. FWR, I don't have the energy or will to pursue these issues further right now as interesting as they are. Diana in particular I hope you will show up further around here, particularly now that we've set a workable civil tone with each other. No doubt these issues or variations of them, and others too, will arise from time to time, about which we may have some further things to say.

- basman

December 30, 2012 at 7:39pm

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P.S. Arnon I made it clear in my comment that I thought there was a way of downloading the book for free, which was the way it was set up originally. I also in the same comment offered to send you a copy at no cost, of course, in the event you couldn't download it. Given that I made all that clear to you, I find your last question to me churlish.

- basman

December 30, 2012 at 7:44pm

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I know, and thanks, Basman. I do this for a living. Read and grade papers on Hamlet and other writers. I don't know what you would like me to do with your interpretation of Hamlet? Are you offering it as a comment on Subjectivity? I am not sure I understand how you would like me to respond to it? Please advise?

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 8:19pm

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btw: Happy New years, everybody..... You too skahn!

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 8:20pm

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I don't want you to do anything with it save for reading it and hopefully enjoying it. I thought to let you know about it in relation to the brief reference to a definitive interpretation of the play. (I understand how immodest that sounds.) I didn't know you graded papers for a living and had of course no intent in adding to that burden. So whatever you wish.

- basman

December 30, 2012 at 9:02pm

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Arnon, Wieseltier mentioned inwardness only in his ultimate paragraph. His main argument was against anything and everything that might diminish the teaching of the humanities in pursuit of "the formation of the self and the formation of the citizen." This engendered an extended thread in the responses, where folks waxed rhapsodic on the wonders of Dante and other classics, and of their teaching. But the classics are but a small part of the humanities, and the humanities but one facet of a well educated mind. Which was my point from the outset - you all sound far more parochial than intellectual chiming in to tout the beauties of a classical humanist education as somehow the sine qua non of either education or teaching. If a Wieseltier's lament of the decline of respect for teaching distills itselt into a paean to classical humanities, then his mind is small indeed, because the world of human intellect, and human potential is far, far wider than that, and every bit of it is a justification for education and teaching. Wieseltier concludes: "There are enormities of experience, horrors, crimes, disasters, tragedies, which revive the appetite for wisdom, and for the old sources, however imprecise, of wisdom—a massacre of schoolchildren, for example." With the first, I agree. But with "old sources of wisdom particularly?" Why? I should hope citizen's (another of LW's concerns in the essays) response to Sandy Hook be at least as informed by Darwin and Freud and their intellectual descendents as by Dante - who for all the literary value of his work, tells us nothing about the mental conditions that launch a horror like Sandy Hook, nor of the political mechanism that enable, or might disable, them. Inwardness is all well and good, but it is the world that teaches us what does and does not work, even for human issues, and the vast majority of what we know about that world was not accessible to Dante or Plato or anyone else who lived in the long ago.

- IowaBeauty

December 30, 2012 at 9:18pm

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Thanks Basman, I'll be glad to read it when I can.

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 9:30pm

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"you all sound far more parochial than...." thanks for sharing. If you took the time to read what each one of us "you all) wrote you will see that no two people here agree on many of these issues. When someone says they love Dante I have no reason to counter her likes or dislikes. You certainly made up a lot of what wrote people said. Dante is not Plato but both did have a curiosity about the nature of the universe which is something many Darwinian or Freudians aside from their own narrow fields don't seem to have. And certainly most digital mechanics don't even have that much curiosity. This is what Wieseltier was saying and leaving aside his view of what makes a "good citizen" I agree.

- arnon1

December 30, 2012 at 9:40pm

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Thank you, Itzik, for your pre-penultimate comment. I, too, am signing off on this thread. Happy New Year to all.

- dlsenechal

December 30, 2012 at 10:55pm

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...pre-penultimate... Synonym: I just learned it: antepenultmate. Happy New Year from me to all too.

- basman

December 31, 2012 at 12:26am

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Basman, I downloaded your essay on Hamlet and will read it as soon as I am able.

- arnon1

December 31, 2012 at 2:18pm

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Arnon I'm glad to hear it. Love to hear any comment, yay or nay, you have. But please don't feel obliged that way. Again Happy New Year to you.

- basman

December 31, 2012 at 2:56pm

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Basman, I read your paper and found interesting the thesis of Tragedy being made possible by the absence of a State: "Statelessness is a ground of the tragic where cannot deliver justice to himself through the mediation of the just State...." Thanks for a.lowing me to read it. I only wish I had more time to devote to it.

- arnon1

January 2, 2013 at 12:32pm

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Arnon you're welcome. I'm glad you found part of it interesting.

- basman

January 2, 2013 at 4:59pm

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I realize that I am commenting late in the day. But for the Happy Few, here are some thoughts. The core point that education is the work of teachers -- i.e., solely teachers -- is absolutely incorrect. Education is the work of students who are aided by many, many sources, including teachers, but also including books, information on line, films and music, lectures, conversations, magazines and newspapers, etc., etc. All of us, Wieseltier have learned and continue to learn well outside of and well beyone the formal education experience. Wieseltier says: "Surely the primary objectives of education are the formation of the self and the formation of the citizen. Well, I can somewhat agree with the self part, but to limit the role of the self to the citizen is nonsense. Education helps us understand our world, or at least some part of it, for at least two purposes: To permit us to function as understanding, thinking adults with some core of information about the world in which we live and to permit us to earn a living. Both are critical. Back in the day ... until roughly the 1850's -- a classical education was what was offered to those few able to attend universities, which was fine since that education enabled the former students to understand one another since they had a common base of content. Today -- thanks to a changing world, a changing student population, and the work of reformers -- education is about much more than the classics or even the "humanities", whatever they may be. It is about physics and math (no, Leon, not just technology), art, history and geography, building design, politics ... as well as poetry and imaginative literature, to name a few. The evidence that a sound education often has nothing to do with teachers is evidenced by the list of those who have made a constructive impact on our lives with little or no "higher edcation" -- for example, Abraham Lincoln, Bejamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, Frank Lloyd Wright, Harry Truman, Harold Ross, H.L. Mencken, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Eric Hoffer, Eleanor Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, Orson Welles, E.A. Poe, The Wright Brothers, G.B. Shaw, J.D. Salinger, William Faulkner, et al., et al. Just sitting in a classroom -- even with an excellent teacher -- simply won't do the job.

- PeteBeck

January 2, 2013 at 5:07pm

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in the second paragraph I meant to say "including Wieseltier"

- PeteBeck

January 2, 2013 at 5:08pm

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Let us not forget the shameful role that many humanists themselves have played in espousing the false binary of bread or hyacinth in defending the humanities from the so called philistines. I cannot count the number of times i ran into people of authority in academia who pridefully echoed Oscar Wilde's "all art is useless" as a way to separate themselves from those who were in the vocational side of higher education and who by the way made more money than they. As Mr. Wieseltier argues the utility of a liberal arts education is citizenship education. Sad to say not many in my experience in academia could launch such an argument. And though they smoothly articulated the "pleasures" of the liberal arts they could never really muster a very good argument for why this "pleasure" was a requirement. The decline and respect for a liberal arts education (an education for a free people) has its roots in academia.

- TRIVERS

January 5, 2013 at 8:48am

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