Philosophy On The Mesa

In all the hand-wringing about our dysfunctional education system, the issue that is almost never discussed is that most Americans really do not value education as an intrinsic good. We value it only instrumentally– as a means to getting a job or improving one’s salary–but not something to be intensely pursued as something worthy in itself.

Susan Jacoby assembles evidence of American anti-intellectualism.

“According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.”

There is no regime of student testing, program of teacher training, or voucher system that will correct for this defiency. If we want to know why American students are falling behind the rest of the world in educational achievement, we need look no further than the idea that knowledge is nothing but a meal ticket.

Should anyone want to listen in on academics discussing fashion, here it is.

From the comments: “The same lack of style which marks one as a force to be reckoned with inside academia gets taken as evidence of mental deficiency outside.”

Students should be aware of the finely-honed sense of sartorial signalling we professors deploy each morning.

Bob Dylan, in Chronicles, the first volume of his memoirs, discusses his early influences. In commenting on the collection of classic literature of some Greenwich Village friends with whom he was staying, Dylan sensed:

“an overpowering presence of literature…you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness.”

That is about the best description I have seen of the aim of undergraduate education, especially the study of philosophy–to overcome the seductions of incuriosity and laziness. 

Is there a standardized test to determine when this occurs?

It is irritating and sad that in the 21st Century professors have to spend time in the college classroom explaining that snakes can’t talk. It is frightening that a professor can be fired for it. 

That is apparently what happened to a community college instructor in Iowa, who claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted. The story is here. (And check out the update at the bottom. The video is hilarious.)

Stories like this make research like this important. There is some evidence that rigid adherence to dogma can be explained by underdevelopment of the frontal lobes of the brain.

“Do extremism and an unconditional adherence to religious dogma result from a failure of a portion of the frontal lobe to fully develop or, if fully developed, to activate? Studies suggest that faithful adherence to a single reasoning strategy on tests such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test means that parts of the frontal lobes are inactive, have failed to fully develop, or have even been damaged. Thus, unqualified disdain for divergent beliefs,for personal interpretation, and for creative theories like Darwin’s theory of evolution, may indeed have, at least a partial, biological explanation: a reduced utilization of that section of the brain which has played such a vital role in humanity’s creative advances—the frontal lobes.”

Of course it took a lot of imagination for people to come up with stories about talking snakes. But wouldn’t it be interesting to update it a bit?

Since the influential 1983 study A Nation at Risk, we have been debating the question of how to improve education in the U.S. The debate has focused on improving teacher competence through new teaching methods, reorganizing schools as in the charter school movement, or using high stakes testing to punish teachers for their student’s low scores.

The motivations of students and cultural expectations regarding the purpose and importance of education are usually ignored in this debate, as if we could just take them for granted.

On a related topic, there is a debate raging within the sciences and engineering regarding the lack of women in these fields. Explanations range from lack of encouragement, lack of interest, to differences in brain structure between men and women.

This study conducted in Iceland suggests that, for both issues, the role of motivation is primary. The study found that girls perform vastly better than boys in math in the primary grades and high school because they are more highly motivated. However, this difference disappears in college and the work force because girls lose their motivation.

It is difficult to draw conclusions from one very limited study, but it suggests that the U.S. debate about improving schools, since it ignores motivation and cultural expectations, is looking for improvement in all the wrong places.

I suspect that many philosophy professors, when asked what cognitive benefit students acquire in a philosophy class, would respond that students should begin to acquire a world view.

What is a “world view” and why is it good to have one?

“World view” seems to refer to an understanding of how everything in our experience fits together conceptually. (Assuming it does fit together conceptually, which is not obvious.) And I suppose that the great thinkers in history–Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, etc.–have attempted some sort of comprehensive, synoptic understanding. But this is a devilishly difficult intellectual task and they all seem to have gotten it wrong, since we are still preoccupied with figuring out exactly what they were trying to say and posing an endless stream of objections to their respective world views.

But if these accomplished and devoted thinkers got it wrong, how can we expect our students to get it right? Yes, I know there is value in understanding how the great thinkers of the past got it wrong, but that understanding is not sufficient for constructing a comprehensive alternative view that gets it right. So it is likely that whatever our students come away with will be wrong in some significant respect.

What is the value of a world view that is likely to be false? I suppose the maxim “any port in a storm” applies here but, in a real storm, imaginary ports are dangerous. Isn’t this true of imaginary ideas as well?

^{In “The Prestige”, a film about two 19th Century magicians competing for prestige, we learn that a successful magic trick contains three elements: the Pledge, in which the magician shows us something ordinary yet hints at an impending mystery; the Turn, in which the ordinary is made to do something extraordinary while the atmosphere grows thick with suspense; and the Prestige, the final act, in which we are led to see something shocking that we have never seen before.}

^{Isn’t this how we teach philosophy? We take an ordinary concept that everyone takes for granted and we hint at a deep problem. We then make the concept disappear, dismantling the scaffolding that holds an idea in place, as our students anxiously wonder how something so obvious and necessary could be so doubtful. Finally, through a serious of logical maneuvers and much handwaving that must look like magic to our students, we make it reappear in a new guise, with the promise that it might disappear again if you come back tomorrow.}

^{As the end of the semester approaches, I suspect that the trick is getting old.}