On Education, Or Lack Thereof

Jennifer Fulwiler at National Catholic Register ponders the question, "do housewives waste their educations?" Her answer surprised her, which was 'yes'. But for her, it wasn't because there was anything wrong or lacking in the vocation of being a stay-at-home mom

[...] when I considered whether I ever use the knowledge I gained in my four (okay, four and a half) years in college, I realized that the answer was no. But the problem isn’t with my vocation; it’s with my education.

Fulwiler describes her education as a quest for purely practical knowledge - arming the self with skills and information that will help us navigate the competitive career world. This was partly due to her former atheism, she goes on to say, as she had avoided philosophy classes that would have introduced her to the bigger questions on finding truth, wisdom, existence, and meaning.

While it is true that the absence of philosophical courses makes for a severely lacking education, my experience and observation of others tell me that the presence of them does not necessarily make one a lot better at navigating the world of abstract ideas and in using critical thinking to evaluate their validity. I can only count with one hand the courses that I have taken wherein the important subjects dealing with philosophy, religion, and politics were taught without bias and contempt for anything traditional/conservative. Even professors that don't deal with such subjects would often pepper their lessons with anti-conservative or anti-christian sentiments. My professor in cognitive psychology, in teaching the history of the field, dismissed any theories that included God by saying that they were unconvincing. He did not even bother telling the class about any of them so that the students could decide for themselves. Not to mention my developmental psychology professor, who, going on a political tangent, told the class that skeptics of global warming 'are ignoring scientific evidence' just to conform to a party platform. And then there's the same professor's lamenting over the embryonic stem cell controversy and its lack of advances in the US because of the "A-word" and then going on to cite the example and sing the praises of some Scandinavian countries that have made progress in their research.

One of my few good professors in his refusal to answer a student's question on who he was voting for in the 2008 elections, said that he knows many of his colleagues talk about their political views in class, but he refuses to do the same. "I think it's very unprofessional," he says, shaking his head. "If you really want to hear my views on that, see me after class." The other three or four unbiased professors I've had have said something similar - that while the norm is a professor bringing his politics and own personal views in his teaching, what they want is to teach us "how to think" as opposed to "what to think", and let us make our own conclusions and decide for ourselves what to believe. There is a shortage of such professors. And talking with friends who graduated from different schools revealed that it wasn't just at my alma mater.

This is probably why we have intellectual giants such as Chesterton with the following words about education:

"No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education, no man's education is complete."

To help us understand this, perhaps Mark Twain's distinction between formal education (schooling) and education would help:

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

Not to mention Einstein's:

These days, taking school too seriously could very well lead to a closing of the mind. Political correctness is the order of the day. New biases are formed, new and progressive ideas are preferred over time-honoured (and tested!) ones, with the latter being rejected just because they are 'old', without a fair and balanced examination of why they were there to begin with. Challenging the progressive ideas, taking a conservative-leaning position, is automatically hate-filled, fascist, racist, sexist, or religious fundamentalist, and should be dismissed if not driven out of public discourse.

Formal education, despite the inclusion of liberal studies such as philosophy, literature, political science, and so on, does not necessarily provide a broadened view or the skills to help us know and understand our world, our lives, and our purpose in our limited existence. This is worrying because discovering such truths enables us to address the pressing issues of the day such as raising our children and what values to instill to the next generation, what kind of society we wish to build, what kind of society is best, and so on and so forth  

If I had taken too seriously my public university education which included those important subjects, I would've been a flaming liberal. I would've had nothing but contempt for the honourable vocation of being a full-time mother and housewife. I would have ceased to be Catholic or even Christian. I would have been of the belief that it is best to raise genderless kids without taking any account of the differences between male and female and the strengths inherent in each sex. That is assuming I wouldn't have been completely against having children to begin with. I would have insisted to decide what womanhood meant for me, which could very well be anti-woman (see radical feminism) not to mention out of step with even basic biology. I would have rejected real femininity and real masculinity. I wouldn't have been a romantic.