Education of the soul

David Brooks’ piece on the state of universities today is spot-on, if perhaps (at least to me) rather obvious. He comments on the New Republic‘s most-read article in its history: a piece by former Yale professor William Deresiewicz entitled “Don’t Send Your Kids to the Ivy League,” which laments the mill we send our best and brightest through. Here’s Deresiewicz:

Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

But in a response to Deresiewicz, Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that there’s something fuzzy about education of the soul.

Perhaps I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with elite American education, but I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul. It isn’t taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and promotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it.

He’s right, in one sense: graduate schools are about good thinking within disciplinary methodologies. What he misses, though, is how incredibly stifling that can be. When all you learn is a discipline, you learn how to use a very specific kind of hammer that makes the world into one massive nail.

Deresiewicz’s Yale colleague Anthony T. Kronman argued seven years ago that colleges had given up on teaching life’s meaning, but his prescription for addressing it– perhaps larger doses of reading Moby Dick and other great literature– is only scratching the surface. We’re bumping up against one of the perennial questions here, one which many, many colleges– and most of the elite ones–abandoned two generations ago: does human life have meaning?

Brooks names the problem:

But people in authority no longer feel compelled to define how they think moral, emotional and spiritual growth happens, beyond a few pablum words that no one could disagree with and a few vague references to community service. The reason they don’t is simple. They don’t think it’s their place, or, as Pinker put it, they don’t think they know.

But like those he critiques, he stops short of offering an idea of what moral education–education of the soul (my term) actually involves.

My experience in the world of Catholic higher education has shown me that we can’t get enough of thinking about exactly what that involves. (Hint: that’s why everyone takes theology, regardless of what they believe. Theology is thinking about God, and thinking about how to think about God. It’s indispensable at a university.)

If you’re interested, read along with my Capstone students one great beginning of answer.