BECAUSE IT WAS THERE

Rites of Passage: Self-improvement is our culture's most durable religion (Andy Crouch, 06/04/2003, Christianity Today)

It is not hard to spot a culture's gods--they are what people swear by, the stories that need no explanation. Living and working in Boston has given me the opportunity to ask scores of first-year students why they came to Harvard, the academic equivalent of the New Jerusalem. In all but a handful of cases, their answer, delivered with both awe and delight, is "Because I got in." I've asked the same question of students at many other schools, and they almost always answer with a story. They talk about a particularly strong department or sports team, a generous scholarship or a great professor, being close enough to home or just far enough away. But students at Harvard don't tell these stories. Harvard is its own story, and they're simply grateful to be part of it. And if you ask students nearly anywhere why they are in college at all, they look just as dumbfounded as their Harvard peers. For the American middle class, college is its own story, self-evident and self-justifying.

I certainly don't deny the advantages, or the delights, of having a college education. My wife spends her days in the laboratory and the classroom, and some of my happiest times have been spent in libraries, listening in on two millennia's worth of the scholars' grand conversation. The Apostle Paul himself studied with one of the greatest teachers of his day, and he had picked up enough Greek culture to know how to give a speech on Athens's Mars Hill, the Harvard of the ancient world.

But Paul did not come to Mars Hill to join its story; he came to present another and better story. I can't help wondering whether, for many graduates leaving Boston this month, the scope of their ambitions and the shape of their lives will continue to be determined by where they "get in." They will buy the biggest house they can afford, send their children to the best schools they can find, and take the highest-paying job they can get (to pay for their children's college education, of course). It all will make perfect sense, because it all will fit in the only story Americans have left, the only religion in which our culture still believes.

There is another story, though, that can't be entirely dismissed. In this story, wisdom looks like foolishness (and vice versa), infants have an edge on the educated, and the earth belongs to the meek, not the merit scholars. The one who was last in the class becomes both salutatorian and valedictorian, the one who welcomes us into the feast and the one who bids farewell to the world we thought we knew. He tells a story of a strange banquet whose unexpected guests "get in" through no fault, or merit, of their own. His story, full of upset expectations and undeserved gifts, squares no more easily with the American college dream than a camel squeezes through the eye of a needle. And the outcome of the Class of 2003's ultimate graduation day will depend on which story they finally decide is true.

Few social reforms would be more worthwhile than to end government assistance to college bound students. The value of a college education these days lies almost solely in the diploma itself, a kind of universalized social promotion, rather than in the education itself, which is quite minimal.
Albert Jay Nock disposed of the democratic faith in education sixty years ago:

It is one of my oddest experiences that I have never been able to find any one who would tell me what the net social value of compulsory universal literacy actually comes to when the balance of advantage and disadvantage is drawn, or wherein that value consists.? The few Socratic questions which on occasion I have put to persons presumably able to tell me have always gone by the board.? These persons seemed to think, like Protagoras on the teaching of virtue, that the thing was so self-evident and simple that I should know all about it without being told; but in the hardness of my head or heart I still do not find it so.? Universal literacy helps business by extending the reach of advertising and increasing its force; and also in other ways.? Beyond that I see nothing on the credit side.? On the debit side, it enables scoundrels to beset, dishevel and debauch such intelligence as is in the power of the vast majority of mankind to exercise.? There can be no doubt of this, for the evidence of it is daily spread wide before us on all sides.? More than this, it makes many articulate who should not be so, and otherwise would not be so.? It enables mediocrity and submediocrity to run rampant, to the detriment of both intelligence and taste.? In a word, it puts into people's hands an instrument which very few can use, but which everyone supposes himself fully able to use; and the mischief thus wrought is very great.? My observations leave me no chance of doubt about the side on which the balance of social advantage lies, but I do not by any means insist that it does lie there.

It's unimaginable that any useful purpose, other than a wholly unwarranted boost to their self-esteem, has been served by handing the mediocrities and submediocrities college degrees. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2003 5:51 PM