George Rebane
Colleges and universities will “soon begin to divide into two entities—the STEM fields and related practical subjects (i.e., business and economics), and the social sciences and humanities, which would start to shrivel under the weight of the degradations the left has inflicted over the last 40 years.” So writes Steven Hayward in ‘The Higher Ed Crack Up Begins’ to which a reader and correspondent draws our attention. The degradations to public education have been covered extensively in these pages over the years, and the anticipated ‘crack up’ described by Hayward is long overdue.
Our public institutions of higher learning already naturally divide their curricula into what I will call productive courses and today’s leftwing ideological “fever swamps”, consisting mostly of the ‘xx studies departments’ – you know the ones I’m talking about. Carrying out this kind of divisions over the land will not be easy, and there are plenty of opportunities to unintentionally cut off some desirable meat with the proverbial fat. Hayward points to some things that must be carefully considered in doing this surgery.
If we want to view this restructuring from a more encompassing perspective, we inevitably encounter and must answer the question, ‘What is the function of education within a defined society?’ The answer quickly begins forming around the society’s attempt to achieve two prime objectives – survival and enhancing the quality of life. To survive, a society must successfully pass on to future generations the culture that defines it and makes it unique – among such cultural attributes are its language, history, values, mores, traditions, religions, …; essentially their commonly held ontology.
To provide the economic basis for enhancing a society members’ quality of life, it must also pass on needed skill sets, functioning infrastructure, and the means by which wealth can be created and accrued. We are, of course, clear on the mutual support that achieving these two objectives provide each other.
The members of societies long ago realized that some of the educational efforts required to achieve these things necessitate collective action – pooling their private resources to work together in an organized manner. This immediately called for the formation of collective institutions to carry out needed functions – among these are the military, emergency responders (e.g. law enforcement, fire, medical), and, of course, education. But why education?
Societies also realized that the major component of survival was the ability to recognize, identify, and value what all joins to make the many into the us, and not the them – in America we canonized this meme into ‘E pluribus unum’. Such perpetual melding of successive generations requires that new members be subjected to a common mold, one that evolves its contours slowly and after much deliberation by the ‘pluribus’ who have seen the value in and therefore embraced the ‘unum’. To achieve such melding and molding, societies long ago decided to collectivize education – initially within the societies’ religious institution(s), and in modern times as a part of government services.
Societies developed infrastructure (farms, roads, aqueducts, mills, temples, granaries, fortifications, …) to enhance their survivability and quality of life. These were permanent structures that now required the protection and retention of a defined territory, again for us and not them. The natural rise of kingdoms and city-states facilitated that, and the later adoption of the Westphalian convention (1648) in Europe formalized such defined territories into modern nation-states that were sovereign within their fixed and mutually recognized borders. The theory here was that adhering to Westphalia would lend more stability to societies, prevent/reduce warfare, and clearly identify boundary-violating aggressors who would subsequently be sanctioned by other nation-states for their aggression so as to maintain the mutually beneficent world order.
If some people within a nation-state wanted to radically change their society, it would now have to be done from the inside – enter the Westphalian revolutions and civil wars. In modern times these soon came to be recognized as being too obvious and costly, quickly alerting the opposition to organize a defense. A more surreptitious means was required by which a small but zealous contingent within a society (country) could grow, rise to power, while in the process fundamentally transforming that society so as to either change its normative culture, or do away with the containing nation-state altogether. Gaining control of a nation’s educational collective was the obvious answer.
For centuries it was known that ‘as the twig is bent, so grows the tree’. But until education was collectivized, there were too many twigs that had to be individually bent. By the 20th century that problem had become easier as each nation-state collectivized its education under more and more comprehensive central authority. Realizing that nations could be made to fall from the inside gave impetus to several virulent ideologies seeking to dominate beyond established Westphalian borders. The solution was most prominently given voice (ca 1920) by the Russian Bolshevik V. Lenin who inspired nascent communist movements in other lands with the assertion (in one of its several forms), ‘Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.’
After the ravages of WW2, in which its totalitarian combatants were summarily defeated or fought to a standstill, Lenin’s dictum became the guiding light for socialism which was by no means defeated in that global war. Instead, socialism and its communist big brother became the target forms of governance in post-war anti-colonial struggles. America’s post-war hiatus on the road to socialism ended with the civil rights and anti-war riots that formed the attention-grabbing backdrop to the quiet launch of President Johnson’s Great Society – arguably the most long-lived and successful ideology-based initiative, sustained by politicians of all stripes, that to this day is growing unabated. As of 2018, America’s socialists have educated almost three generations of youth in our public schools that reach from kindergarten through university grad schools.
As part and parcel of the new world of education, the product(s) it delivers in the US have in large part become useless, nay destructive, to serve the two objectives of survival and QoL enhancement. And the large part consists of almost entirely of the non-STEM fields which have exploded into a potpourri of political pabulum. Graduates from those parts of campuses emerge with no skills for which any individual is willing to voluntarily pay out of their own pockets. These people with ‘unproductive skills’, assuming they wish to work, are hired only by governments and private corporations under threat of government gun to implement and comply with reams of regulations, the only visible purpose of which is to create employment opportunities for the politically compliant. In America, the handiwork of its ongoing fundamental transformation is best studied in the fate and fortunes of states like California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York, … .
The belated effort by higher education to segregate and/or oust the unproductive departments is laudable. It is finally responding to the reality of the job markets, recognizing which skill sets can contribute to making our lives better, and which are those that have come to act as a drag on who we are, how we wish to live, and where we wish to go. But the final chapter (given there is one) is yet to be written about what new programs and stratagems are needed to keep the unproductive from achieving their carefully inculcated goals.
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