Why are we here? (Colleges ignore life's biggest questions, and we all pay the price)

Boston Globe ^ | 16 September 2007 | Anthony Kronman

[shrinkermd]

...In a shift of historic importance, America's colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life's most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. This abandonment has also helped create a society in which deeper questions of values are left in the hands of those motivated by religious conviction - a disturbing and dangerous development.

...Over the past century and a half, our top universities have embraced a research-driven ideal that has squeezed the question of life's meaning from the college curriculum, limiting the range of questions teachers feel they have the right and authority to teach. And in the process it has badly weakened the humanities, the disciplines with the oldest and deepest connection to this question, leaving them directionless and vulnerable to being hijacked for political ends.

But the encouraging news is that there is, today, a growing hunger among students to explore these topics. As questions of spiritual urgency - abortion, creationism, the destruction of the environment - move to the center of debate in our society, America's colleges and universities have a real opportunity to give students the tools to discuss them at a meaningful level.

[aposiopetic]

The fundamentalists have the wrong answers, but they've got the right questions.

Note to self: Kronman could be reckoned to be doctrinaire in a certain sense, but at least he doesn't mince words.

[Dumb_Ox]

Marx was all about producing more than we consume. His communist utopia was based on a projected surfeit of goods produced with minimal labor at negligible cost.

The materialism comes in when, like Marx, one sees economics as the primary question in life. While economic production is certainly a material necessity, surely religion, ethics, and the liberal arts rightly practiced are as integral to human flourishing as the economic life, if not moreso.