Truth: Plague of Dunces

When Dunces Teach Dunces:

American institutions of public higher education should be shut down immediately. They should not re-open until they can do their job; teaching our young 'how' to think, and not 'what' to think. Two radically opposed views on objective truth are struggling for control of American minds in public higher education. Both are defective. One view, championed by Professor Howard Zinn, proposes not only that objective truth is impossible, but that is would be undesirable even if it were possible. The opposing view, championed by Allan Bloom, claims that diversity of opinion does not entail the lack of objective truth. On the contrary, error points to objective truth by enlightened recognition. The stakes are high. What passes for public higher education in America is not working and has no prospect of ever working due to an inherent flaw. It fails to teach students how to learn on their own.

American public higher education is both economically and pedagogically unsustainable. It’s economically unsustainable when college administrators realize that tax dollars will support any rise in tuition to any level they wish. They do so confidently assured that the federal bureaucracy will loan any amount to students baited into seeing a college degree as a life necessity. Hordes of students are now rebelling against this indentured servitude. Merely educating for specialized competency and high paying career misses the whole point of what used to be called a liberal education not to be confused with today’s notion of liberal as in socialist.  Students are rebelling against this ‘union card’ model also.

American public higher education is also doomed pedagogically. With pitifully rare exceptions and mostly in the hard sciences, our colleges and universities fail to equip our students with the tools of learning that last a lifetime after college. Prior to 1965 American higher education did, in fact, teach these tools of learning under the aegis of ‘a liberal education'. If you are unaware about what that a liberal education was then, Dorothy Sayers, in her 1947 Oxford University lecture, Lost Tools of Learning, nailed it for you. She argues for a return to the liberal arts curriculum practiced in the medieval universities. Let’s save that for a solution at the end. In the social sciences, it's code blue. We have dunces teaching dunces.

First, let’s see the cancerous failure wrought by Professor Howard Zinn’s oft-quoted; “Objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable.”  ( Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1980, p.646)

“Objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.” ^[5]

Now, surely Zinn was not so stupid as to mean no ‘objectivity’ outside the social sciences when he wrote this. But that’s no excuse for his enthymematic omission. By his rabid ravings in this and other works as Boston University’s Professor Emeritus of Political Science, he certainly did not object to his acolytes taking this view literally with all that entails. Within the social sciences (an oxymoron, by the way) Zinn has god-like status and his writings are received as inspired revelation. In the hard sciences, Zinn is viewed as either an annoying unreconstructed 1930’s Marxist or a senile old fool. At least three generations of college teaching professors nevertheless accept and sing from the Zinn choir book. This combined with similar self-contradictory writings from logical positivists, post-modernists, atheistic existentialists and cultural relativists have closed the American mind in public higher education and therefore in media, politics, philosophy and theology.  In what way are these thinkers and their ideas self-contradictory? Because if their claims are true, then their claims must be false. If there is no objective truth, then that claim itself must be false. And if it’s false then it must be true. The result is nonsense by any metric of logic. 

Cultural relativism rules the publically funded academia today. Of one thing any public college professor today can be certain of on the very first day of any college class; all of the students arrive in class fully believing that truth is relative. The sole exception is whatever they happen to believe is the truth. Gore their oxen at your peril. It’s a pitched battle to convince them otherwise and the battle is almost always lost.

Writing in Spectator magazine, James Mccann complains that it's time to cull the 'plague of dunces' now populating our colleges and universities: 

"It’s not the case that a higher percentage of students are capable of matriculating; it’s that matriculation has been dumbed down to accommodate a higher percentage of students. Exams are less frequent and less strenuous. Courses like Nutrition and Tourism have been dreamt up so that the incapable need not actually study Biology or Economics, and something very strange indeed has happened to good old Geography. 

Hordes of students who have been failed by our high schools (or rather, not failed by our high schools) are ushered into university totally unequipped for the rigours of undergraduate study."

Allan Bloom sees this quite clearly in his “Closing of the American Mind.”

“Everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns him. The physicist wants to save his atoms; the historian, his events; the moralist, his values. But they are all equally relative. If there is an escape for one truth from the flux, then there is in principle no reason why many truths are not beyond it; and then the flux, becoming, change, history or what have you is not what is fundamental, but rather, being, the immutable principle of science and philosophy.”

While Bloom sees the public higher education devastation visited by writers denying an objectivity, he has little to recommend as a remedy. He seems content, as do many others, to play the professorial Pontius Pilot waiting for Godot. All he can offer is a re-invention of the university based on western civilization philosophies found in the Great Books. Hardly a workable solution to an educational crisis of mega proportions that he condemns.

So what is the solution? Well at least part of the solution is to revitalize the tools of learning inculcated in every university student from medieval to modern times and abruptly abandoned around 1965. What were (are) these tools of learning? The medieval scholars labeled them the Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Latin terms themselves simply mean; the ‘three ways’ and the ‘four ways’ where roads meet, respectively. An astonishingly good account of these twin pedagogies can be found in this Wikipedia entry with hot links for your convenience of further study:

"The Trivium is a systematic method of critical thinking used to derive factual certainty from information perceived with the traditional five senses — sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. In the medieval university, the trivium was the lower division of the seven liberal arts, and comprised grammar, logic, and rhetoric.^[1]

Etymologically, the Latin word trivium means “the place where three roads meet” (tri + via); hence, the subjects of the trivium are the foundation for the quadrivium, the upper division of the medieval education in the liberal arts, which comprised Arithmetic (number), Geometry (number in space), Music (number in time), and Astronomy (number in space and time). Educationally, the trivium and the quadrivium imparted to the student the seven liberal arts of Classical antiquity.^[2]"

Did the medievals have it right? Would you send your child to a cooking school that did not first teach the physical principles of cooking? Would you send your child to a candle making school that did not begin by teaching the fundamental properties of wax and fire? Rubbish! Then why do we today send our children to colleges and universities that do not begin with each student first learning the fundamentals of learning, grammar, rhetoric and logic? Well that’s exactly what we do in American higher education. And therein is its fatal defect.

As noted at the beginning here Dorothy Sayers got it right her 1947 Oxford University lecture, Lost Tools of Learning. ( Hot link for your further study):

“Taken by and large, the great difference of emphasis between the two conceptions holds good: modern education concentrates on "teaching subjects," leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressing one's conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along' mediaeval education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of learning, using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.

Is not the great defect of our education today--a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned--that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child, mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play "The Harmonious Blacksmith" upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorized "The Harmonious Blacksmith," he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle "The Last Rose of Summer." Why do I say, "as though"? In certain of the arts and crafts, we sometimes do precisely this--requiring a child to "express himself" in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe: it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economize labor and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd piece of material, in order to "give himself the feel of the tool."

As a 20-year veteran teaching Critical Thinking and Writing in American higher education, I can assure you that all of the problems my students have becoming critical thinkers are due to their total lack of learning tools. Of the thousands of students I’ve taught over the full 40 years teaching philosophy at the college level, I can count the exceptions on the fingers of one hand. It is not uncommon for a student who respectably finished my critical thinking class to write to me with this question; “ Why don’t they require this class on the very first day we get to college? I would have got so much more out of my other classes if I had this class first.”

If this is happening to you or your child, then move to close their college or university until the tools of ‘learning how to learn’ are restored. Then, demand a refund of your tax dollars for the systemic malpractice by our Doctors of Education.

REASON ARGUE REFUTE Critical Thinking About Anything 

by Mark McIntire 

Link: http://amzn.com/B00CC12QNE