John Agresto - The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do about It

HOW AMERICAN EDUCATION HAS FAILED OUR STUDENTS AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

John Agresto

2022 by John Agresto

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Dedicated to my wife, Catherine.

For her I have love; for me she has love and patience.

In one way or another, the liberal arts and liberal education have been a part of my life for now well over fifty years. Even though trained as a political scientist, Ive spent years teaching not only politics but also history, philosophy, law, and sometimes literature. Ive also been president of one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in America, as well as chancellor, provost, and academic dean of a comprehensive university with a liberal arts base in the Middle East. Several years earlier I was both the administrative and policy head of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC.

Throughout all this Ive been writing, arguing, lecturing to anyone who might listen on the declining fortunes of liberal education in America, generally to no avail. Though I see myself as a writer and an educator first and foremost, most people, friends included, think of me as something between a Cassandra and a noodge. OK, as we might say in New York, It is what it is.

The first impetus to write a book on the nature and significance of the liberal arts in todays America came in the late 1970s, upon the murder of Dr. Charles Frankel. Dr. Frankel was a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the first director of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. I was a young fellow at the center and I volunteered to help put together the Festschrift in Dr. Frankels honor, a volume we entitled The Humanist as CitizenEssays on the Uses of the Humanities. This idea of the public significance of the humanities was a subject close to Dr. Frankels heart. Sadly, too many of the essays turned out to be narrow, semi-scholarly worksnothing that would convince anyone that the humanities had any broader, civic value at all.

As I read over many of the essays, I saw three conceits at work, each of them with a long pedigree in the liberal arts. First, (contrary to the books title) that the liberal arts have no uses; that they serve no outside, material, or worldly good; that they are proudly and distinctly irrelevant to any application or wider purpose. Second, that the notion of the liberal arts as somehow helping to foster something as crass as citizenship was a corruption of their high and distinctive place in the world. And third, that true humanistic scholarship is not broad and accessible as much as narrowly focused and academic. I hope, in this book, to show how all three of those ideas are wrong.

The second impetus for this book came a bit later, with the dismantling of the Western Culture curriculum at Stanford. There was at Stanford, before 1988, a core course taken by all freshmen which contained required readings from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the modern era. Criticized as Eurocentric as well as sexist and racist, it was first replaced by a more truncated version, then abandoned altogether.

What was amazing to me was not that Stanford would dismantle a perfectly reasonable course under pressure from student activistsafter all, I was a graduate student at Cornell in the late sixties, when a whole university capitulated to the self-aggrandizing and anti-intellectual demands of student radicalsbut the reasons the faculty gave for abandoning the older course. With claims that a Eurocentric course in Western Culture was an affront to minority students and faculty, that Blacks and other minorities didnt see themselves as represented in the readings, and that reading a few great authors in the Western canon diminished minorities and womens self-worth, the course was revised to satisfy the demands for ethnic and gender proportional representation.

Nonetheless, what truly made Stanford stand out from the many independent academic minds that were all leaping in this same direction was the double-pronged student chant that echoed round the campus, perhaps even joined in by a presidential candidate who marched with them: Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go! It was that open revelation of motive, that showing of how curricular change could be simply another scalpel in the service of politics and ideology, which made Stanford the byword for intellectual retreat in the face of the political takeover of the life of the mind.

A few years later another event encouraged me to try to write a proper defense of the liberal arts. It came from a question that William F. Buckley Jr. asked me at the beginning of one of his Firing Line television shows. It was a simple question, as the best questions often are: Do you think everyone should have a liberal education? Being, by then, a longtime professor as well as a short-time president of a small liberal arts college, I gave it my best shota measured, thoughtful, and totally wishy-washy answer. Something like, Well, while not everyone, clearly, should be forced to study the liberal arts, I do think everyone should be given the opportunity to be exposed to great literature, some science and history, maybe some Well, I dont think so at all, Mr. Buckley interrupted, adding something like, Some people arent suited for it, dont like it, and we shouldnt waste their time. They prefer to study other things and we should respect that. Nonetheless, I tried again; and, when I still couldnt give a satisfactory response to whether the liberal arts were right for everyone, the conversation moved on to other things.

So here was Mr. Buckley, surely one of the most liberally educated men one might meet, asking a college president to cut through the baloney and talk clearly about the liberal arts. Not sing their praises, not intone pedantically about their high character, not praise them for virtues they may not have, not view them as some kind of universal medicine the admixture of which makes all things finer. No, to speak clearly about them, about their uses and uselessness; about their promise and their limitations; and, above all, about their value to different individuals, value to the country, and value to civilization in general.

The last incentive I needed to write this book came from another question I was asked, this time by three students at the American university I helped found in Iraq. They were freshmen and had just been studying long sections of Thucydidess History of the Peloponnesian War.