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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 26, 2008
On education
When I was a wee little thing just 16 years of age, I made a big personal decision. I have often looked back on it and realized that it was the only major decision in my life that I got entirely right. It was to drop out of high school, and hit the road. You see, I wanted an education, and I wasn't going to get one at Georgetown District High School. Since I did not quite complete Grade 11, I can proudly boast of my 10th-grade credentials today.To be fair, with its then-rural catchment area through Esquesing Township in northern Halton County, "GDHS" was among Ontario's better high schools. They still taught Latin and other essential subjects that were being rubbed out by the province's Ministry of Education. But I was looking farther ahead, towards university, and realizing -- back in 1969 -- that Canadian universities were no longer worth attending. (Since then my judgment has extended to universities abroad.) Now, paradoxically, the dream of going to Oxford -- specifically, to Magdalen College, to study classics and philosophy -- had been among my more vivid ambitions in later childhood. But as I learned in Georgetown, "You can't get there from here" -- sadly, but luckily, for I later learned that Magdalen College is yet another place where academic standards have subsided, and the scholars devote themselves to attitudinizing, instead. Well, OK: Oxford still knocks Lakebottom University into a cocked hat, but my point about "attitudinizing" -- an important Johnsonian term, dimly grasped when I was adolescent -- has come to apply universally. There are some areas, such as advanced engineering, in which the best post-secondary schools still have something substantial to offer. But these are not university courses, rather specialized technical courses. Across the broad horizon of the humanities -- the university's raison d'être -- a degree today has come to represent "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame." It is a paper qualification to prove that the bearer has lost his moral virginity; that he now thinks he knows more than he will ever know; that he has, in effect, been stripped of the capacity for learning, whether from experience or from books; that he is now, in nine cases of 10, a fully indoctrinated little leftwing weasel. Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps it is only four cases in five. And anyway, my condemnation of the post-modern university needn't extend to all the students, or even to some of the professors. Fine, very intelligent, and yet thoughtful persons are still to be found in windowless corners. As a frequent user of university libraries, I am made constantly aware of the biological fact, that a certain proportion of young people in every generation are, compared to the others, quite remarkably bright. Moreover, the late J.M. Cameron, among the greatest teachers ever to grace a college in Canada (St. Michael's at Toronto), once gave me reason to hope. I asked him what, after half a century of teaching, he could find in common among his best students over all that time -- the handful who stood out permanently in his memory. I expected him to struggle with this question, but he answered straightaway: "They were all self-taught." Later: "They all arrived in university ready to make the best use of its resources, they were all burning with zeal to learn. They looked for professors who could help and guide them, they ignored professors who could not. Most came from humble backgrounds, and also stood out for their gratitude." He assured me that students like that were untypical in the dustbowl 1930s, just as they were in the salad bowl 1960s and '70s, but confirmed that university standards had been in free fall. Still, he said, "There are students who can't be stopped, and there are students who can't be started. The latter have always been more numerous." In the 1960s and '70s, as we should all know, universities were vastly expanded, on the new "drive-through" model, so that the majority of students who did not entirely belong in a demanding intellectual environment became an overwhelming majority, and the universities themselves were reduced to immense, tax-sucking bureaucracies, focused almost exclusively on turning out graduates, the way Burger King turns out Whoppers. But while that may be a fair enough description of what happened in innumerable red-brick universities, it does not quite describe the transformation of the "elite" institutions of the Ivy League, or their equivalents overseas. In such highbrow finishing schools, we now have smug elitists turned out in the manner of Whoppers. The preceding rant is to be taken merely as a preface to something shorter and more aphoristic I wanted to say about commentary on the U.S. election. It has to do with the comparison that is made, usually by insinuation but often overtly -- throughout the mass media, and especially in the elitist mass media -- between the educational backgrounds of Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. On second thought, it is probably too short and aphoristic to say in a family newspaper. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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