We seem to have forgotten that the expression ‘a liberal education’ originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely, was considered worthy of slaves only.

Henry David Thoreau  (via obitchuaries)

I’ve said it before and I’ll now say it again, “the college experience” was always “the ruling class experience”.

But a point worth making is that a liberal arts education isn’t merely about teaching the finer things in life as an end in itself, so that the ruling class might fully realize their potential. It’s about equipping them to claim that ruling position. Chemistry teaches mastery of chemicals, Physics teaches mastery of the physical, the humanities teach mastery of humans. Like,

The humanities tradition in America (and back to its forerunner in England) originates with the training of ministers, because, in pastoral roles, ministers lead humans.

States founded “normal schools” to train teachers of secondary education (these often remain as an intermediate level of state-run higher education, “below” even the satellites of the flagship universities but “above” community colleges, roughly like California’s Cal State system).

The land grant colleges, yeah, focus on the practical arts, agriculture and mining and engineering and everyday life, but even then they didn’t so much teach your average farmer, or pickaxe wielder, or machine operator, or mother so much as your surveyors, your agricultural extension educators, your machine designers, your social workers. Not to mention their entwinement with ROTC programs as a mechanism for cultivating a literal officer class.

(Which has weird side-effects occasionally. The bunk “POW/MIA” notion that after American pullout, the Vietnamese were still keeping American combatants captive for I guess the hell of it drew a lot of strength from the fact that those designated MIA - lost in the jungle where no one could account for them or recover their remains - were disproportionately pilots, and thus officers, and thus college boys and thus mostly scions of the upper-enough classes with the pull to enlist cultural and government support to affirm their denial. The new Battlestar Galactica also had a pretty good episode about the problems with having a guy who specializes in piloting outrank NCOs who lead men. The U.S. Army wisely deals with this by making its [helicopter] pilots warrant officers, but I’m digressing pretty far here.)

The small colleges associated with various Protestant sects in the mid-19th to -20th centuries drew on contemporary missionary fervor, and many of the subjects they were known for - sociology, anthropology, linguistics, comparative religion - were focused on enabling students understand the foreign cultures of the mission field so as better to convert them. (Ironically, these efforts boomeranged and undermined their host religions, producing things like The Golden Bough, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and counterbiblical accounts of human prehistory)

The problem with trying to expand a humanities education to everyone is the classic problem of too many chiefs, not enough indians. You can’t have everyone be a ruler ‘cause then who do they rule? We don’t have a Colonial Service, the classic outlet for surplus elites, and the education system in its expansion has long been recruiting from our internal colonies to train their own elites.

PhD programs are still run to train (and exploit) scholars more than general leaders, I suppose the equivalent might be terminal masters’ degrees like MBAs and nonprofit management programs. (The NGO-industrial complex is actually a pretty clear successor to Prot mission work domestically and abroad, and all of these basically serve(d) in America [in alliance with the U.S. Navy/Marines] as sort of a makeshift Colonial Service)

A weird thing about STEM partisans is when they think that shunting more people into technoscientific training will raise the status and power of people with technoscientific training rather than supply indians for the humanities chiefs.

- - -

I went to an Ivy League college. Cornell, which is in some ways the most marginal of them, but still. College of Arts & Sciences, majored in American Studies (mostly cultural and economic history). Recommend the experience.

And they’d always be bringing in various recognizable names on lecture tours, musicians on performance tours that the comfortable country burg of Ithaca wouldn’t otherwise rank. I went to some of them, but I remember being even more struck when you’d see some guy just hanging around getting coffee or dinner in the same place you did.

But you know, that’s the point. The students aren’t particularly expected to learn much from a lecture or a Q&A with a known name that they couldn’t from some less heralded figure, or these days just read online, the point is really to instantiate the physicality of these demicelebrities to hammer home the point that you are of a kind with them, shared members of the culture of People Who Actually Matter.

I had some great teachers. I had some absolutely great teachers - Stuart Blumin comes immediately to mind - and I learned a lot from my classes, in lectures and in reading that, honestly, I wouldn’t have done (or even been aware of as an option) otherwise. And I appreciate that all the more since I got out and realized that even a lot of the college graduates of my generation never even took classes from full professors until their senior year (or even only from upperclassmen in their freshman year).

But when I was about to graduate, I looked back on my experience and realized that probably the most significant things I picked up were from the shadow curriculum - an accurate geographical sense of Manhattan, a sense of taste in wine*, and a sensibility that *real* people count money in at least tenths of a million.

Of course, I’ve kind of fallen back from that a bit. I went to one of the global cities and hated it, and now reside in one of the merely national cities.


I tinker with an old motorcycle (and Pirsig and Crawford are right, it’s a very rewarding hobby for thinky writey types), take it into the countryside, and swell with pride when I realize I’m passing for redneck. Meanwhile a lot of the most promising people I knew have become corporate lawyers reviewing contracts 80 hours a week and namedropping restaurants and vacation destinations, or preening producers of “content” (I brag and show off, but I do *not* preen). A lot of my fellow graduates went into finance too, but they were the poker-playing frat bros I never respected in the first place.

But still, I mean, here I am, using my humanities knowledge, and my inculcated sense of self as A Leader, to try to influence and educate people that I consider to have a particularly strong potential to influence and educate people in my native culture.

So.




* part of this was just a factor of the one of the guys I hung out with, whose father would ship him cases of wine because… honestly I have no idea why. He wrote an amazing sonnet sequence in the more stable part of an amphetamine madness, that got him into an MFA program where he had, I’m told, an undistinguished turn, and ended up marrying a Canadian oil heiress.

But then, my point is that the point of the Ivy League is that that’s the kind of people you meet. (That’s not even getting into the fact that we had honest to god royalty in our classes. Or, you know, not in our classes, as the case might be.) And even then, part of it is that there’s an honest to god class, Wines, that almost everyone takes senior year. (Cornell, with Berkeley, is basically responsible for the existence of the American wine industry, and the course is in the incongruous Hotel School, which is the most prestigious training ground for the American hospitality industry, so they’ve kind of got an excuse. Kind of.)