Kozlowski: The changing meaning of an ‘education’

What does it mean to be an educated person?

There used to be a very good answer to this… What does it mean to be an educated person?

There used to be a very good answer to this question. Education in the West meant that you had read the classics, knew some Latin and Greek, were well-versed in Christian theology and appreciated the “right” kinds of artwork. Logic, rhetoric, literature, geography and geometry were also parts of the curriculum. Read old books or articles written for an educated audience and you’ll see what I’m talking about: They’ll feature random untranslated passages in French or Latin because they assume the reader knows what they mean. I’d consider myself reasonably educated, and I’m definitely confused by these quotes. When faced with this situation, I ask, “What’s my education really worth, and what does being an educated person mean today?”

The concept of being educated is now fuzzy to the point where it’s hard to assume an educated person knows anything at all. Even the concept of a solid liberal arts education encompasses a much larger potential curriculum. At Pitt, your education is liberal enough if you’ve read a little Descartes, know enough foreign language to pass high school exams, took a course on children’s literature, a course on history and enough foreign culture classes to realize that Japan and China are not the same country. It’s possible to graduate from Pitt after taking any number of different courses. It’s impossible to say “a Pitt graduate will know this list of things.”

There are several reasons that we’ve lost a clear sense of what constitutes an education. First, the classic liberal arts curriculum focused on things that were overwhelmingly old, dead, white and male — things currently seen as so yesterday, so lifeless, so racist and so sexist. The onward march of technology created the need for studying the one thing that a classical education largely ignored: the natural sciences. In fact, MIT was founded specifically to counteract this tendency. More emphasis on the STEM fields meant that there was less time and space for memorizing the Aeneid.

We also need to know more in this day and age than we once did. It is absolutely necessary to have basic literacy in computers, which didn’t exist 100 years ago. Some skills that were once vital, such as the use of a log table, are now obsolete. A language like French might have lots of panache, but something like Chinese, Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese is probably more useful. The function of education is different. While it used to be something that gave a gentleman that extra bit of polish and  admitted him into the Reform Club, it’s now a means to the end of gainful employment. Finally, we live in a very specialized culture and environment, where being the best at a particular narrow subject is more marketable than being reasonably good at a lot of things.

The changing definition of an education is both good and bad. It’s good in that our educations are more open-ended and allow for the study of interesting problems that used to be considered unworthy. And in this I include not only subjects some people might find irrelevant, like Uzbek agricultural policy, but also other subjects that few people probably would, like chemistry, which was once considered little more than a hobby of eccentrics and cranks.

However, there’s a very real disadvantage to not having a commonly accepted definition of an education. There’s the problem of lacking a common culture, which means the need to appeal to the lowest common denominator in both humor and drama becomes even more acute. Education can also be used as a kind of shorthand; it allows you to make your point by analogy to something everybody knows rather than having to explain everything ipso facto ad nauseam ab initio. Since we’ve lost this common jargon, we’ve lost the ability to use this kind of shorthand. We’re also less able to appreciate each other’s contributions, which can exacerbate the divide between the humanities types that think those in the sciences are a bunch of narrow-minded geeks and the sciences types who think that those in the humanities have mushy brains and only study English to avoid worthy subjects like Physics. Finally, there’s the problem of degree inflation. Everybody now has a degree, and nobody knows what that degree means anymore, which makes it less valuable.

To ameliorate those disadvantages, we need to move towards a new definition of education. However, because there are more institutions trying to provide an education, this is going to be much more difficult than in the days when Oxbridge was able to set the standard.

Write kozthought@gmail.com.