Drawing on themes from his new book, Beyond the University:Why Liberal Education Matters, Michael S. Roth pushes back (NYT) against higher education’s valorization of critical thinking, worrying that it results in “creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers”:
In campus cultures where being smart means being a critical unmasker, students may become too good at showing how things can’t possibly make sense. They may close themselves off from their potential to find or create meaning and direction from the books, music and experiments they encounter in the classroom.
Once outside the university, these students may try to score points by displaying the critical prowess for which they were rewarded in school, but those points often come at their own expense. As debunkers, they contribute to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning — a culture whose intellectuals and cultural commentators get “liked” by showing that somebody else just can’t be believed. But this cynicism is no achievement.
Dreher nods, connecting Roth’s argument to his days as a film critic:
Because of my job, I got into the habit of watching every movie critically. That’s not to say I watched every movie trying to tear it down, but rather every film I saw I watched in an analytical frame of mind, because I knew I was going to have to write a short essay saying what the film’s strengths and weaknesses were. Once you get into that habit, it’s hard to turn it off. I couldn’t watch anything just for fun in those days, even if I wanted to. After I moved to another line of writing, it took a couple of years for me to be able to lose myself in the subjective experience of movie-watching — which is how almost everybody else watches movies. …
To draw out the philosophical point, this suggests that there are some things that cannot be fully known from a critical distance, that is to say, objectively, but rather must be engaged subjectively if they are to be understood. Then again, to know something subjectively is to cease to be able to see it objectively, and that means closing off a dimension of knowledge. If I only know X., the Oscar-winning actress, from her film performances and what others have written about her, I don’t know her as her father does. But then, a father’s eyes are conditioned to see differently, and he almost certainly cannot judge her performative capabilities with anything approaching objectivity.
In an interview about his book, Roth offers a defense of what he calls a “pragmatic liberal education”:
[Y]ou can’t just tell students to go study German literature or philosophy and then figure out how to transfer it once they graduate. That process needs to start earlier. If you’re studying German literature, you should be able to explain to someone in computer science what’s valuable about it. And the computer scientist should be able to do the same thing to the German literature student. I teach Great Books courses, and if students can’t explain why Virginia Woolf or Baudelaire matters in terms relevant to their own lives, I don’t think they understand the book. It gets back to that anti-specialization theme. I don’t think there’s anything “liberal” about specializing in philosophy compared to specializing in business. We don’t want specialists with just technical training. When you have a liberal education, you’re not just a technician. You’re able to move among fields. We don’t want you just to be an academic expert to please a professor. That’s just making believe you’re a mini-professor and you want to grow up to be a big professor.
The Dish 