The University and Education
Are we headed for a second Dark Age?
As recently as the dark ages humanity suffered from a lack of general education.
During the dark ages, for instance, curriculums were intentionally limited to grammar, logic, and rhetoric and arithmetic.
Later during the enlightenment, when access to knowledge and information was still relatively restricted, the university would eventually expand to include broader domains of knowledge including science.
And eventually the university would become the institution humanity relied on to create flourishing through an abundance of ideas and knowledge.
But the world has changed since the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment.
The university is now no longer a place where humanity gets its best knowledge or ideas from.
It’s a place that settles for brainwashing the masses instead of training the future generations of thinkers.
The university, then, is no longer the center of human education.
Instead it’s a student loan funded graveyard where deadhead professors and other zombies of knowledge feast on the wallets of the unaware including parents and students.
To give life to our education system -- and its many paying customers -- we should make the following changes.
First it should seek to be “provincial” instead of” universal”
That is instead of having courses for everything and activities that cater to everyone -- with the exception of the taxpayer -- the scope should be much more narrow.
Future provincial schools, for example, should exist to meet regional needs. This emphasis would stop the all encompassing bloat that’s implied in the name “university,” and incentivize regional stakeholders to closely monitor how the intuition is doing.
Second, these provincial schools should be professional -- that is deliberate rigor must be made part of the faculty’s ethos and protected at all costs. This is in contrast to the current ethos of the university that prioritizes appeasing different constituencies through loose grading and resort style amenities.
Third, the provincial school should reject government funds in an effort to keep the institution affordable. If anything these schools should be subsidized by employers, philanthropists, businesses, to keep prices low for local populations. This differs from the university system where resentful socialists happily burden new students with eternal debt, and whose donors’ main interest is in funding sportsball mega stadiums, dorms that bear their name while housing students who live a 24/7 party lifestyle, and plush golf courses that most taxpayers never use.
When these changes happen, instead of living through a second dark age, America may experience a renaissance.
Zigmund Reichenbach has an M.A. in Philosophy from West Chester University and works as an advocate for less government by day. You can help him combat bad ideas in politics and philosophy by donating to his work at https://ko-fi.com/zigmundreichenbach .
Follow him on X at @zreichenbach1
I think the general suggestions for changes to upper education would be beneficial. However, I disagree with the characterization of Medieval education as a “Dark Age.”
The education wasn’t limited to the trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, it was expanded to that. Our concept of a university grows directly from the Church-founded institutions of the middle ages. Rather than limiting knowledge, the Trivium provides a solid core for the growth of a critically-thinking mind.
The medievals were dramatically more inventive than say the Romans for example, who piggybacked off the Greeks and hardly invented anything for 500 years of empire. By the late Middle Ages, large sections of Europe had the highest standard of living in the World and had a far more dense population than those same regions under Roman rule, largely due to major technological innovation.
What the medievals lacked was the manpower, urbanization, and large scale organization that the Romans possessed, which allowed them to, through sheer force of numbers (mostly slaves) level entire mountains.
Gothic architecture exemplifies what the medievals did better than the Romans. The Romans might spend 10 years with 10s of thousands of slaves working to build a massive public work using concrete and a Greek cargo cult aesthetic. In comparison, the medievals would build a far more complex and innovative building using entirely volunteer labor, but which took centuries to build because of their limited wealth and labor pool. Lincoln Cathedral and Trajan’s forum/marketplace are two works which exemplify this difference.