Education’s End

"I like this book because it raises the question of why universities no longer spend much time addressing questions like the meaning of life. The author is a professor of law at Yale University and has been involved in educational planning there. He talks about the shift of the way that universities or colleges have viewed their educational function in the last 100-200 years. In both the United States and England, if you go far back enough, colleges were essentially religious institutions. They assumed that a big part of what they did was the ethical and religious training of the students who went there. Now they’re secular, but one result of that is that questions of ‘Why should I live?’ or ‘How should I live?’ are no longer addressed. These used to be taken as central questions. And it’s not just for philosophy but also for literature. Important works of literature can address issues about meaning and not just the most philosophical ones such as Dostoevsky. Lots of different works, from Shakespeare to contemporary novelists, are at least indirectly addressing questions about how people can and do and should lead their lives. But the people who are teaching at universities dodge these questions in favour of questions that are not only more secular, but also more narrow and more technical. Literature departments are more interested in French philosophers than in talking about what novelists, or playwrights or poets were getting at, which was often addressing key issues about life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think it’s really a good diagnosis of a situation in universities and it’s true even in my own field – philosophy, which I teach – where these questions usually just don’t come up. If you think about why people might take a philosophy class, people coming out of high school, it’s because they’re interested in these questions. But we just don’t address them – because philosophy , the social sciences, the humanities, got more tied up in technical internal questions, rather than looking at the issues that really matter to people. The book ends with an appendix where he describes the kind of curriculum they put together for a directed studies programme at Yale. I think it’s a good thing for most students to get that, not only read the classics of philosophy and literature, but discuss them in a way that gets at what I think are the main concerns of the great novelists, the great philosophers and the playwrights, which are very much tied in with the meaning of life. I think the humanities and the social sciences can do a much better job of addressing the sorts of questions that most young people naturally have in a very formative part of their lives. They needn’t be if they were done reflectively. But an awful lot of the theory, if you can call it that, that operates in those areas is really abysmal. It’s not only uninformed by philosophy or literature, but even sound work in the social sciences such as positive psychology. A lot of the theory as far as evidence goes is no better than self-help books: people just make things up."