Man, everybody loves to write about college. Here’s an e-mail that just came in:

A thought from an (anonymous, please) high school teacher, who teaches in a suburban, Catholic school where (by polls) 99% of the students are 100% aggressively Trump-supporting self-described Conservatives, and who sends a lot of kids off to very good universities and pays a lot of attention to academics and academic philosophy —

Your professor’s comments about the atmosphere on campuses is interesting, but I see other trends as well. back in the 1930s, Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago was complaining about universities being turned into job training centers. His though was that universities were meant to be repositories and transmitters of civilization, perpetuators of the great human conversation, and that training for jobs should be the province of the companies that were increasingly sloughing off the duty and expense of such things to colleges. To Hutchins, universities were what trained a new generation of citizens to participate in an informed, reflective way in this project of building society. The Great Books idea (now lived out in academia at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland) and the career of Mortimer Adler came from this.

Hutchins was no saint, but you see how far back this problem extends. I grew up in Jesuit schools, and there is a similar fundamental sense to their ratio studiorum: the goal was eloquentia perfecta, a good man with something useful to say expressing it carefully, clearly and compellingly. Of course, for Jesuits this was in service of a larger project, the “man for others” living a life of self-forgetful love of God by serving others to bring himself and others closer to living the image and likeness of God within, but Hutchins, Adler and the Great Books idea pursued this on a more secular level.

Thomas Jefferson’s plan for the University of Virginia as an “academical village,” where citizens could spend time throughout their lives, living a sort of intellectual retreat now and again, has a similarly “other-centric” purpose.

In other words, the university was once about providing a warehouse of the world’s thought (as in, a library), guides and advisers (as in, faculty) to allow people (especially young people) to live and explore their humanity (as in “the humanities”) to make them better able to be selfless citizens and members of the human community.

Now, we reduce college life to other things. It is a way station to mark time for the extended adolescence of modern life” my freshmen behave like nine year olds, my seniors behave like twelve year olds, and college students behave like 14 year olds, so is it any wonder that forty year olds behave like the worst of college kids of old? It is job-skills career-readiness competitive-advantage network-building skills-enhancement training: hence newspaper articles daily about how many millennials, sagacious and seasoned as they are (!) have wisely determined that college is just a big fat waste of time and cash when they could be “making bank” developing apps instead of, you know, reading books. And the wokesters see college as a time to empower themselves, to selfly empower, to empowerly explore their self-itude, to self-power their power-selves to empowerment of selfment. In other words, college has become the ultimate Frankenstein’s monster we (your generation and mine) created as the children of the “Me Generation.” University’s value, whether its Hillsdale and its righteous selfrighteous rightness, or the crunchiest granola safe-zoned College of Identity, is about me, in my me-ness, and my empowerment and my wealth and my celebration of myself, and singing of myself, and forcing you to assume what I assume.

The common ground, the American proposition as John Courtney Murray wrote about in 1960 in “We Hold These Truths” is of little to no interest. Ocasio-Cortez and Trump are our Frankensteins, the creatures of our making, deformed egomaniacs to the points of sociopathy, self-absorbed self-congratulatory power-and-money greedy shoots of the tree of the reality TV culture, and the models that students choose between as the guides of their lives.

Is it any surprise that education is in the state it is?

Let me give thanks once again for the classical Christian school my kids attend.  My 12-year-old daughter was sitting the other night reading Hesiod’s Theogony for one of her classes. Kids at that school are normal kids like any others — some are gifted, others aren’t, etc. — but they are having an unusual experience of education. And it doesn’t cost them much, because the school operates on a shoestring budget. This didn’t just happen. It happened — and happens every day — because of visionaries and hard workers. Classical Christian schools aren’t going to solve all our educational problems, but when I read letters like the one from the high school teacher, and reflect on how different our family’s experience is because the visionary young men who started this school saw the educational world as exactly this kind of desert, and wanted something better for kids — well, it tells me that it doesn’t have to be like this.

UPDATE: Interesting remarks by Edward Hamilton:

Another unappreciated angle of college is the way that it’s rapidly becoming the equivalent of a gifted-and-talented program for high school students who are dissatisfied with the quality of their high school education, or who simply want to burnish credentials in pursuit of admission to more prestigious programs at elite national universities.

In 2011, my small university of roughly 2000 students had 2 students in the 14-16 age bracket; generally this means they are dual-enrolled high school students who are not yet high-school seniors. By 2015, that number had climbed to 31. Any guesses where it is in 2019?

I just checked our enrollment statistics. We now have 349 students in the 14-16 age bracket. From 0.1% to 1.5% to 15%, in only 8 years. The growth trend is exponential.

This is being driven by intense desire among students (and their parents!) to do something that helps them (1) improve their standing in application to high-reputation schools, (2) control education costs by spreading them out over more years or putting the “fifth year” at the beginning (living cheaply off-campus) instead of the end (living expensively on-campus), and (3) escape from the influence of underachieving peers who force teachers to dumb down teaching.

In effect, this amounts to another mechanism that allows the wealthy to trade cash for enrollment privileges. Students from poor families are being frozen out, since dual-enrollment rarely provides scholarship aid.

Administrators see dual-enrollment as a way to rescue themselves from a short-term financial crunch. But in the long run the infusion of these students creates a state of dependence that isn’t easily reversed. And an influx of high-school students that become an essential budget component creates pressure to design a set of courses that appeal to such students and allow for their retention — which unsurprisingly tend to be courses with difficulty levels that match the somewhat limited abilities of high school underclassmen. So in effect, college becomes a sort of flexible alternative to expensive private prep-schools and boarding schools, for families in the top 20% income bracket, but not the top 5%.

But as the population of “real” college students gets continually diluted, college runs the risk of being devalued into what high school used to be, and high schools (now abandoned by all talented upperclassmen) are forced to recalibrate themselves to serve as remedial education for those unable or unwilling to pursue dual-credit. This mimics the experience of bachelors degrees themselves, which began as something that distinguished their holders as exceptional scholars worthy of employment in managerial positions, but now have developed into a credentialing screen for service-sector jobs. If a bachelors degree is the new high-school diploma, then I guess there’s a certain logic in colleges becoming charter-schools for teenagers. But it isn’t much fun for professors, who are stuck trying to figure out how to appease a class full of students who are increasingly prone to finding themselves in over their heads — and who will fill out faculty evaluations forms at the end of the semester to be read by the same administrators who know that the campus can no longer afford to meet payroll without their presence.