Education

I recently read Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, so I’m going back through to capture some quotes. Most memorable for me has been his description of the crisis post-secondary students are experiencing.

Deneen writes:

The rising generation is indoctrinated to embrace an economic and political system they distinctly fear, filling them with cynicism toward their future and their participation in maintaining an order they cannot avoid but which they neither believe in nor trust. Far from feeling themselves to constitute the most liberated and autonomous generation in history, young adults believe less in their task at hand than Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountainside. They accede in the duties demanded of them by their elders, but without joy or love–only with a keen sense of having no other choice. Their over whelming response to their lot–expressed in countless comments they have offered to me over the years describing their experience and expectations of the r own education–is one of entrapment and “no exit,” of being cynical participants in a system that ruthlessly produces winners and losers even as it demands that they understand this system to be a vehicle of “social justice.” One can hardly be surprised that even the “winners” admit during frank moments that they are both swindlers and swindled. As one student described the lot of her generation to me:

“We are meritocrats out of a survivalist instinct. If we do not race to the very top, the only remaining option is a bottomless pit of failure. To simply work hard and get decent grades doesn’t cut it anymore if you believe there are only two options the very top or rock bottom. It is a classic prisoner’s dilemma to sit around for 2-3 hours at the dining hall “shooting the breeze,” or to spend time engaged in intellectual conversation in moral and philosophical issues, or to go on a date all detract from time we could be spending on getting to the top and, thus, will leave us worse off relative to everyone else…. Because we view humanity–and thus its institutions–as corrupt and selfish, the only person we can rely upon is our self. The only way we can avoid failure, being let down, and ultimately succumbing to the chaotic world around us, therefore, is to have the means (financial security) to rely upon our selves.”

Advanced liberalism is eliminating liberal education with keen intent and ferocity, finding it impractical both ideologically and economically. Students are taught by most of their humanities and social science professors that the only remaining political matter at hand is to equalize respect and dignity accorded to all people, even as those insitusmions are mills for sifting the economically viable from those who will be mocked for their backward views on trade, immigration, nationhood, and religious beliefs. The near unanimity of political views represented on college campuses is echoed by the omnipresent belief that and education must be economically practical, culminating in a high-paying job in a city populated by like-minded college graduates who will continue to reinforce their keen outrage over inequality while enjoying its bounteous fruits. Universities scramble to provide practical “learning outcomes,” either by introducing a raft of new programs aimed to make students immediately employable or by rebranding and reorienting existing studies to tout their economic relevance. There is simply no choice to do otherwise in a globalizing, economically competitive world. Few remark upon the fact that this locution becomes ever more common in advanced liberalism, the regime that was supposed to ensure endless free choice.

At the moment of liberalism’s culmination, then, we see, the headlong evacuation of the liberal arts. The liberal arts were long understood to be the essential form of education for a free people, especially citizens who aspired to self-government. The emphasis on the great texts–which were great not only or even because they were old but because they contained hard-won lessons on how humans learn to be free, especially from the tyranny of their insatiable desires–has been jettisoned in favor of what was once considered “servile education,” an education concerned exclusively with money making and a life of work, and hence reserved for those who did not enjoy the title of “citizen.” Today’s liberals condemn a regime that once separated freeman from serf, master from slave, citizen from servant, but even as we have ascended to the summit of moral superiority over our benighted forebears by proclaiming everyone free, we have almost exclusively adopted the educational form that was reserved for those who were deprived of freedom. And yet in the midst of our glorious freedom, we don’t think to ask why we no longer have the luxury of an education whose very name–liberal arts–indicates its fundamental support for the cultivation of the free person.


Partick J Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2018. p. 11-13.