Reinventing Education: American Confidence in Higher Education Plummets
Good!
A poll last week from Gallup gladdens my heart. Americans’ confidence in higher education has plummeted. Those with either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education has fallen from 57% in 2015 and 48% in 2018 to 36% now. Check out Gallup for more devastating details.
Why does this make me glad, almost merry even? Because American education has sorely declined in quality largely thanks to the toxic influence of Critical Theories (aka wokeness). Ideological conformity and indoctrination is crowding out education that is worth the name. So confidence in higher education should be falling.
But my gladness is more than schadenfreude. Most U. S. universities (along with most public schools) are so far gone that I think it necessary to reinvent education as I’ve written before here.
A revival of superior education is needed. Although there is hope for larger institutions to reform here and there (I hope to post another time on that possibility), so much is beyond reform — and, of course, the education of children and youth can hardly be delayed in hopes of some future reform — that the revival of education has to occur and soon in a multitude of smaller ways.
Reinventing Education – Smaller Can Be Better
Yesterday, I greatly enjoyed going over to First Things to read “How to be on the Right Side of History” from James Hankins. It is an engaging take on different views of what constitutes “the right side of history” or even if such a thing exists. This amateur historian loved it.
But that’s okay, because smaller can be better. Oxford, no less, knows this. To this day, the core of that ancient university’s method is the tutorial system.
Speaking of smaller, building on the proliferation of classical schools, new classical micro-colleges are part of this young revival.
Reinventing Education - The Necessity of Christian Classical Schools
I am prompted to revive my Reinventing Education series by a bittersweet post by Rod Dreher. (Is there anything Dreher writes that isn’t bittersweet?) In “The Wonder and the Dusk of the West,” he uses Mont-Saint-Michel as a metaphor for needed redoubts of Western civilization in the midst of civilizational suicide.
A needed part of this revival has to be returning to scholarship being evaluated on its quality, not on the degrees and letters behind it. Even if the education establishment, preferring their degrees and letters stay prestigious (and expensive), won’t evaluate that way, we need to.
Reinventing Education - About PhDs and Specialization
In arguments over things woke, there is a common pattern. Many of you have seen it before, but it can be seen again in several responses to an observation by Matt Kennedy on twitter this week. The woke side uses two tactics in attempting to discredit opposition:
Fortunately, this shift in evaluation of scholarship may already be underway. Many, as I do, regard James Lindsay as the foremost scholar on Critical Theories. Check out his wealth of offerings over at
for yourself. Yet the CT establishment rejects and abhors him. And his degrees are in mathematics, not in any grievance studies.Jordan Peterson may be a C. S. Lewis of our day — and let us pray he, too, becomes a reluctant convert to The Faith. His podcasts and other efforts are brilliant and incisive, as most of you know, and go far far beyond his background in psychology.
The best minds would rather not jump through all the DEI (or it is DIE?) hoops in higher education. That is one reason both Peterson and Lindsay walked away from standard academic careers. So we need to open avenues for good minds like theirs to flourish and produce.
All this and more is why more and more people seeing American higher education today as not worthy of confidence is good news indeed. For it increases the likelihood that superior alternatives will be sought and received, even if those are outside the usual prestigious names and lacking the usual degrees and letters.
Let’s hope the alternatives continue to increase for the sake of future generations. The movie Idiocracy is becoming too prophetic already!
I have more to say about reinventing education as I revive this series for a time, but that’s enough for now.
Reflective practitioners and internship could very well replace the present model. I applaud the approach suggested in your article, mentor for small groups of learners. The Socratic model used by Hillsdale may also work.