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February 3, 2008
Anthony T. Kronman's Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life argues that a renewal of secular humanism provides the solution to the crisis in the universities. US conservative intellectuals argue for the decline of the humanities as a respectable field of study, in books such as Allan Bloom’s classic The Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education.
Their critique holds that in an earlier era, the humanities were devoted to studying the highest achievements of Western civilization. But beginning in the 1960s, with the ascent of political radicals to positions of academic prominence, the humanities lost their way. Today, they cast aside the classics of literature, philosophy, and history to dote on the often exaggerated contributions of minorities, women, and Third World cultures. Conservatives say that left-leaning faculty have shown themselves hostile to the conservative charge that the humanities are in crisis. The general argument is that the natural sciences and the 'harder' social sciences, uninfected by relativism have surged ahead to become the dominant practices of the academy while the humanities are no more than a laughingstock. They argue that many humanities programs exist mainly to inculcate students in “political liberalism.
Kronman adds to by this arguing for a restoration of teaching 'the meaning of life'---by which he means the training of character, and nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together from the basis for living the best life one can. Kronman identifies science, technology and careerism as impediments to living a life with meaning and argues that a revitalized humanism” based on reading the great texts can contribute to the growth of the self --enoble us-- and would put the conventional pieties of our moral and political world in question. The humanities need to recover their older role as guides to the meaning of life even though this role has lost its credibility in the modern liberal academy.
Peter Berkowitz In this review of Kronman's text says that he understands the contemporary universities and their mission from the perspective of secular humanism, rather than from that of the liberal tradition and liberal education:
Partly as a result, he does not recognize the extent to which our universities and the liberal education to which they ought to be devoted are products of liberal democracy and ought to serve liberal and democratic ends., liberal education serves liberal and democratic ends by remaining true to its highest ideals, which means, among other things, protecting the classroom from politicization. Students must be free to read, discuss, and write without pressure to conform to the party line. Liberal education, however, is not closed to political thought. To the contrary, it welcomes conservative as well as progressive points of view. From such an education students learn lessons in toleration and moderation that will serve them, and the liberal democracies of which they are citizens, well.
Stanley Fish argues that the role of the humanities of acting as guides to the meaning of life has lost its credibility. Students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise from reading the canon: they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between, and evaluate different arguments, of the foundations of knowledge. These are disciplines, which at their best, teach us to think critically.
So we can be taught to to be able to think for ourselves about the art of living and how we ought to live our lives.That's ethics isn't it. But we can learn to be autonomous in out thinking in other disciplines as well.
Update
What Kronman offers is a sophisticated account of a familiar conservative thesis, namely the decline of standards and erosion of the methods and ideals assumed to underwrite the humanities by their politicization and so they desire to rescue it from the increasingly alien authoritarian domain patrolled by the politically correct or postmodern thought police. "Theory" is the name for this and it refers to T that mélange of deconstruction, post-structuralism, feminism, race theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory that has animated the conversation about literature, humanities, cultural studies and philosophy for the past 35 years or so.
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I suspect that something far more profound and unpleasant is actually going on in regard to the teaching of humanities at university. You might be interested in Graham Good - Humanism Betrayed: Theory, Ideology and Culture in the contempory university.
In any case I am extremely wary of the phrase "think for themselves". While this was once sufficient justification for studying the liberal arts, it presumes that students actually know how to think. I doubt that this is still the case. The teaching of logic for instance is becoming a disappearing art.
I suggest that there is also a differance between merely having opinions (most people have these we don't actually need to teach it) and actually being able to form a reasoned position. It is not obvious that learning how to 'analyze literary effects" achieves this end