True Impressions of Our Education, Pt. II

“I mean education in the most general sense, in the way that Henry Adams meant it, as Bildung; education as the lifelong integration of experience and ideas in a growing self.”

Henri Fantin-Latour, The Corner of the Table (1872), Musée d’Orsay

Rufus Knuppel is a 21-year-old writer from New York City and editor of The New Critic studying English at Dartmouth College.

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This is the second part of an essay dialogue between Elan Kluger and Rufus Knuppel on the value of humanities and the liberal arts.

Elan,

I believe what you say regarding the humanities: we should be reading as if our books contained a portal to God. But the time has come for schism. The liberal arts college is no longer a house of worship. Estranged from their charters, our schools cannot meet the modern demands of piety. So what to do about the question of our schooling? How should we pursue an education? To begin, we must establish the primordial reasons for the existence of the American college.

Knowledge has always concentrated in a locus. Before the advent of writing, ancient civilizations stored their knowledge in oral constellations of bards and sages. Knowledge then slithered into characters, onto cuneiform tablets, inked papyrus, vellum, parchment, and wax. Gathered together, such manuscripts, each illuminated by their individual sequence of knowledge, granted scholars entrance to the vast expanses of culture. These temples, called libraries, invited the literate classes to roam within boundaries of knowledge that far exceeded the limits of the human mind. This inscribed knowledge was expensive and, itself, a form of power. The elite coveted their access to the secrets hidden within books — knowledge clustered around feudal monasteries, private castles, and the early iterations of universities. Gutenberg’s press narrowed the chasm but could not rupture the paradigm between patricians and plebs, for truly cheap books — and the literacy which followed in their wake — took centuries to reach the press. To be educated essentially required the privilege to know the passcode to a knowledge vault. In turn, powerful minds and persons conglomerated in the loci of these safe houses. In the West, after the Enlightenment, the secularized university (and later government) played principal host to the archives of knowledge. The liberal arts college sprung up around classical and Christian libraries — teaching, in the fullest sense, the humanities and offering students the advantage of a paideia (a complete education). In the nineteenth century, the American university operated as a barrier to entry for elite adulthood, a sieve which separated the noble bourgeois from the dangerous elements; once admitted and passed, a boy could ensure, with good behavior, his folding in with the upper classes.

As new colleges emerged in the enclaves of the elite, the universities simultaneously adopted a more German attitude toward the humanities as Wissenschaft. As you revealed, Elan, the academic project then shifted more neutral, more professional, directing attention away from pupils and towards objectivity. The research institution transformed into a factory of knowledge production, using prodigious libraries and specialized experts to churn out monographs like puzzle pieces, filling gaps in the scholarship, plugging holes in the cultural conscience. Sometime in the late twentieth century (unfortunately coincidental with receding prejudice) the university machine alienated students entirely from its mission. While the scope of the universities ballooned, college, for its residents, became a four-year bacchanalia. Yet there remained, still, much one could glean from school: one learned skills for the corporate workforce, one met interesting and learned mentors, one spent minor but significant time contemplating big questions over small careers. Most importantly, one made friends. But the enrollment at elite universities — pledging still their universal values and excellent, humanist pedigree — was not a roster of model public citizens but rather a catalog of naturalized earners, ready for the disappointments of embourgeoisement and “real life.” Now in the daunting twenty-first century, American schools face new threats, existential dangers that will hollow out the unwilling liberal arts college and collapse entirely the prestige that supports their abandoned enterprise. Technology will force the university to re-encounter itself or face extinction. The question then remains, Elan: for a spirited mind in our modern times, what, in fact, makes a good education? To start, the whole unwieldy apparatus of higher education must be disassembled to its original promise, to the locus of knowledge, to the books.

When the internet digitized libraries, it made democratic the intellectual knowledge of universities. Laptops and phones turned the internet, and the knowledge within the cloud, into a compact and portable locus. No more must one travel (except in the rarest instances) to encounter a secret locked away on a shelf. Nearly every fact or concept one can learn at a university can also be found online by the curious sleuth. Nearly every book can be purchased oneself through a digital marketplace. One can even earn a legitimate diploma from an online college. Yet still the tangible, brick-walled university perseveres, citing evergreen relationships between pupil and professor, the fruits of the Socratic classroom, and the ancillary resources available to the enrolled attendant to justify its outstandingness. The echoes of prestige buttress these vacant rationales. No one can defend the cost of an education from a liberal arts college — it isn’t worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars that elite universities charge for raw tuition. But the degree still makes sense for the vetting process implied in admission, for the job placement, for the raised floor on a base annual salary, for the preschools and the clubs and the legacy policies — in sum, the external credit, the respect, the network.

But the network is only a loose, nebulous tangle of assumptions. In elite circles, college is not a maybe but a must; college is education. But if, like currency, the value of a school’s elite-ness plummets, the outcome of investment in that education craters, too. So, the assets of these universities are perched on a bubble of bogus inferences. Meanwhile, all indicators are flashing red. If artificial intelligence achieves what its myriad proponents think it will (and soon) — meaning a titanic sifting of our social order and high-paying work as we know it — then the market for a liberal arts education, in its present style and current infrastructure, will collapse.

Of course, great colleges adapt to change. Over hundreds of years, much has altered about the way humans live, and yet our schools have accommodated the tides and survived. But the accelerated development of artificial intelligence — the potential to unseat the very underpinnings of human analysis that powers the higher education algorithm — should worry our self-secure colleges. When first encountering large language models, many university departments forbade them from their classes. Now, overwhelmed by indistinguishable evidence, they tack back to a more moderate stance — a sorry posture of progressivism tinged with self-loathing, a policy that incorporates learning with technology for the common good. But ‘Chat,’ as OpenAI’s large language model is colloquially known on campuses, can already vastly outperform the average liberal arts student. A friend of mine knows a pre-law student, admitted to a top law school, who never wrote a single essay for class in college. Another friend makes hundreds of queries on models every day, hardly ever surfing the internet for answers. I applaud the guts and the advantage. But beware, today’s reality looks nothing like what follows — the present models are the least advanced they’ll ever be. Uncouth tech-lord dropouts already rule over the graduated polite establishment. But broad access to artificial intelligence will debase the very idea of going to college — that the curious student, to prepare for the world, should pilgrimage to the locus of knowledge. There will be no point. The highest truth will exist on their phone.

What this anarchy means for the university is either the dramatic reinvention of the tasks they assign to their students, a complete reappraisal of the modern meaning of a liberal arts education, or mass extinction. Universities fulfill many functions, perhaps least among them the intellectual education of their students. But education is the keystone of the arch — without students, universities will either devolve into research institutes (intellectual farmers feeding data to models) or decompose into ideological meaninglessness (a flagrant dissimilitude between thought and reality). In the age of artificial intelligence, what can a student receive from their university? Presently, the schools are not economically constructed to withstand the impact of an education recession and not intellectually equipped to answer my question.

So, I believe the colleges will fail. But I can’t predict exactly how they will react to the forthcoming cataclysm. I am entering my senior year, and the question of their survival concerns me less than before. Meanwhile, on the precipice, I must ask the question of myself.

What makes a good education?

I mean education here differently than I have discussed it above. I mean education in the most general sense, in the way that Henry Adams meant it, as Bildung; education as the lifelong integration of experience and ideas in a growing self. Most often we Americans reserve education as the period from birth to college graduation, the development of our brains to maturity — university, then, becomes the white-hot prime of our intellectual fervor before learning concludes and we are inducted into education’s alumni. But education engulfs more meaning than pure school, learning is not only a transaction between pupil and task. As such, when asking — in the absence of the liberal arts colleges we take for granted — what makes a good education, we must approach the question from the tallest outlook.

The first answer is verve. One must want to be educated. One must need to learn, see, do, and think. One must crave understanding of the world, over any comfortability, over any ease, over any ignorance. The greatest teachers are those who flint this spark in their students, who inspire an excavation of the layers above and beneath our reality. These teachers exist. I’ve encountered a few at university, but they are farther and further between than the curious student would hope. Many cynical professors (and indeed most of the thoughtful ones) simply resign from the project of “education” to pursue interior lives. Others abdicate their role from the beginning, admitting to themselves that they were always too scholarly to pursue mentorship with students. For these academics, becoming a professor means research and tenure, not teaching.

Implicit in our conversation, too, is the truth that a great education must be conducted by a candidate with certain intrinsic qualities — talent, zeal, thoughtfulness — that cannot be taught. In my arena, writing, this is certainly true; a well-educated writer is only that writer who has challenged themselves, by proxy of their reading, their mentor, or their inner monologue, to push the limits of their precision and their color and realize their highest selves as writers. Professors don’t often provoke genius; they mostly wait around for brilliant, eligible students to walk into their classes. Even then, a few stops by office hours are required for the big fish to bite. But verve requires no campus, no classroom. Verve for one’s education is merely a zest for life.

The second answer is dialogue. Education, fundamentally, is dialogue, harnessing input from the world and output from the self. My most rewarding classes have always been those in which I maintain a dialogue with my professor. This petite relationship can be extrapolated onto most of the educational life. As you elucidated, Elan, the humanities are, in their highest form, a mode of religious experience, interpreted as dialogue between author and reader, painter and onlooker, director and moviegoer. Indeed, most learning emerges out of the dialectic tug-of-war unfolding in a dialogue. Agitated by some new question or argument, the curious brain is compelled to synthesize, uncover, or fashion a response. The intellectual work of education is like that of trailblazing, hacking through the dark thicket of ignorance, clearing neural pathways in the uncontemplated wilderness; this is the operation of our learning. Ironically, the new age chatbots replicate this process. I am speculative, though — callously, consciously, stubbornly — of the generative power in the undercurrent of these dialogues. I have never remembered a single insight from an algorithm, while I can recall whole conversations with my friends. Artificial intelligence is excellent at tasks — but can it be excellent at dialogue, and hence at education? This is the question on the immediate frontier of our intellectual reality and the precise dilemma to which our schools must answer.

But the furthest horizons of education — nature, humanity, and experience — seem protected as of yet from digital settlers. These domains are dialogues, too.

Nature provides dialogue between the self and the elements, between our body and our mind, between one’s warring thoughts, between the molecular, the cosmic, the present, and the eternal. Within our creaturely humanity, in fact, is the very craving for dialogue, intimate and strange; this desire has not abated, though domestication of the human in the digital is a terrifying and probable future. Indeed, experience itself is another genre of dialogue; foreign, novel stimuli expand the perspectives and perceptions of our minds. A chief argument against the liberal arts college, especially within our Gothic revival castle campuses, is that experience narrows within its moat, reducing the abundance and oxygen of culture, at too young an age and to the point of intellectual asphyxiation. This period in our lives — of green minds and resilient bodies — is precisely the time for exploration, adventure, and discovery. I have found the most spirited learners in my life have insatiable, omnivorous appetites for experience. Why, then, aren’t we all traipsing around foreign lands and living transgressive youths?

The obvious limit is money. The silent limit is prestige, the powerful but fallacious sensation that, by skipping college, one foregoes any chance at a significant public life. But the secret, less often elaborated limit is loneliness. I and many friends have pursued our own form of intuitive education outside the classroom, in lost homelands or toward exotic corners or with monumental efforts. Most return to school dismayed by the failure of their experience, a disappointment they feel for no reason in particular. That vague, pervasive shroud of dissatisfaction is precisely the side effect of solitude. To not conform to the liberal arts is, at our age, to enlist in isolation, to opt out of time with friends; it’s not an appealing bargain. In fact, most do not go to university in pursuit of “education” at all — they go in search of friends.

They are right to search. Indeed, the most reasonable rationale for attending college today is one’s proximity to friends. Yes, the truest education involves friendship. Long conversations, perpetual insights, true impressions. One’s friendships are the greatest dialogues of all. My most dynamic and educative term in college, as you know, Elan, was my study in Morocco, not least because of the challenge and provocation of the experience itself. At its essence, my trip was made meaningful by the constant conversation of the friends surrounding me on our sojourn. One can elect to pursue an education outside the liberal arts, but they will need friends to accompany them. They will need a whole brigade of friendships, really. If the college economy collapses, maybe new avenues of education will emerge — new clusters of learning, new loci of knowledge. Until then, however, a real education requires verve and dialogue, within or without the liberal arts. We may no longer need our colleges, but they remain a great excuse for unencumbered living. Education is the struggle to learn, to learn by any means necessary. The fanatical student must never let up in their search for meaning. And if they are in possession of curious friends, then indeed, their wanting mind will find an education all around them.

Your friend,
Rufus