Education as counter-hegemonic

Over on the Porch, much of the talk is about education. Two recent posts there highlight some of the changes in higher education of which, it often seems, many are unaware because the change has been over maybe five decades or more.

For instance, Ted McAllister, one of the less active Porchers, riffs briefly on Pepperdine’s substitution of “first year” for “freshman:”

I’m struck by how thoroughly universities have largely given up any sense that they should serve as repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom, replaced by an embarrassingly old-fashioned and moralizing (and hence not morally serious) crusade to be institutions of social transformation.

Jason Peters focuses not on the crusade to be institutions of social transformation, but the pervasive money orientation of the whole enterprise:

What makes all of this so disheartening is that it is cast in monetary terms in the first place—and exclusively. Clearly the value of an education must be realized in dollars. Education is no longer an end but a means only—and a vulgar one. In such talk as we meet here it is impossible to make sense of knowledge “acted upon, informed, or . . . impregnated by Reason.”

“Repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom” are deeply counter-cultural in a consumerist society. We need our institutions of higher learning to be such repositories, not agents of faddish social transformation.