whither-ed

At my daughter’s convocation last year a young graduate of Mediterranean descent, when called, strode across the stage and, brandishing a kippah in one hand and rosary in the other, shouted, “I will bring brutal justice to this continent!” He then politely accepted his diploma, returned to his seat and, like the rest of us, calmly endured the remainder of the service.

Another true story: at a coffee bistro just off-campus from a Canadian university, a fellow wearing a red “Make Canada Great Again” T-shirt ordered a cup of slow-pour. He paid, thanked and tipped the barista, and left. A university student photographed the customer, posted it on social media and decried the proprietor for not showing the customer to the door sooner. You know the rest of that story.

"MCGA" "Mc-GAH?" Mebbe that's the noise one makes when refused a cup of coffee?

In the first case we have a student who has graduated from training in the hospitality services. Clearly his chosen extra-curricular studies intruded on his vocational path.

In the second case we have a student at a university that offers degrees in the sciences and liberal arts. Now, I do not know this student or her declared field of study, but I am willing to bet money it is not in the sciences.

And yet in both cases we have a moral stridency that, to my eyes, looks uncomfortably similar.

“Whither education,” eh? Anyone who asked me the question when I was in my 30s-to-late-40s got shrugged off (my apologies, Gideon!). My mid-50s finds me doing some heavy ruminatin’ on the matter.

Part of this is due to the question’s pride of place among the chattering classes. Part of this is due to watching my daughters navigate the Horrible Decade (20-30), which in their case means navigating the vicissitudes of a post-secondary education circa 2020.

And of course I am contrasting all of this with my remembered experience of my own post-secondary education from the mid-80s to the mid-90s — which is surely flawed, due to the viscous nature of memory. But hey, it’s all I’ve got.

I will try to unpack all this in short and hopefully more frequent posts than of late. Keep coming back, woncha? In the meantime here is Steven B. Gerrard: The Rise of the Comfort College. Sample quote:

At the beginning of Plato’s “Republic,” Socrates leads a dialogue centered on the question of whether there are alternatives to force. One of the participants, Thrasymachus, challenges Socrates and gives his own famous definition of justice: “I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.” In other words, might makes right, but this requires some unpacking. 

The key distinction is between power and authority. Suppose, in some weird version of Prohibition-era Chicago, I want to open a speakeasy on the corner of 57th and Ellis. Both Al Capone, whose turf it is, and Eliot Ness, the famous G-man, can stop me, but the first with power (I’m afraid of machine guns) and the second with governmental authority. 

What gives the government the authority to stop me? This is one of the foundational questions of political philosophy, and something we’ve been trying to answer for the last 2,400 years. The divine right of kings was the most popular answer for centuries; now “the consent of the people,” as seen through the prism of social contract theory, dominates. Thrasymachus, however, is saying there is no such authority at all: It is simply an illusion propagated by the strong. It is power all the way down.

Sooooo . . . who’s got the real power today?