'A University Education, Uncorrupted'

A human being is “born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.” Aristotle didn't get it quite right when he thought we could be defined by our capacity for speech and even, on occasion, rational discourse. No, it’s learning that makes us human, and what we can learn is the ever-evolving body of knowledge accumulated by millennia of forebears: 

“What every man is born an heir to is an inheritance of human achievement; an inheritance of feelings, emotions, images, visions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, understandings, intellectual and practical enterprises, languages, relationships, organizations, religions, canons and maxims of conduct, procedures, rituals, skills, works of art, books, musical compositions, tools, artefacts and utensils.”

 

That’s Michael Oakeshott in his essay “The Character of a University Education.” (What Is History? and Other Essays, Imprint Academic, 2004). I quote him at some length because this passage and other portions of his essay sparked in me a rare flicker of a rare emotion: hope. News that Bashar al-Assad was bumped from power in Syria may have had something to do with it as well, though we know from experience not to be prematurely optimistic. I remember my Syrian-born former cardiologist whose parents, more than a decade ago, were trapped in Damascus and he hadn’t heard from them in more than a week.     

 

To conclude that we are born and formed from scratch, ex nihilo, is arrogant and foolish. No man is “self-made,” though we might accept that description when it comes to Abraham Lincoln or Louis Armstrong. Oakeshott is writing in 1970, my freshman year at a state university in Ohio. I didn’t know it at the time but the nature of a university education was already changing, and not for the better. I was fortunate to have several professors who were modeled along traditional lines, for whom books were the focus of education, and to have access for the first time to a university library. I scraped together a pretty good education, thanks to an autodidactic streak. Oakeshott defines his terms  and makes it clear that he speaks of more than narrowly defined “book learning”:

 

“Learning is the comprehensive activity in which we come to know ourselves and the world around us. It is a paradoxical activity: it is doing and submitting at the same time. And its achievements range from merely being aware to what may be called understanding and being able to explain.”

 

Specialization has significantly reversed this understanding. I know faculty members who specialize is a single gene or group of genes. There's little broad, liberal learning, the “inheritance of human achievement.” Oakeshott puts a lot of faith in human potential:

 

“The components of this inheritance are beliefs, not physical objects; facts not ‘things’; ‘expressions’ which have meanings or uses which require to be understood because they are the ‘expressions’ of human minds. The starry heavens above and the moral law within, no less than Dante’s ‘Divina Commedia’ and the city of London, are human achievements.”

 

Oakeshott is hopeful but not naïve. Learning remains an essential human activity. He writes presciently:

 

“Learning to the student of to-day, highly conscious that he is something on his own account and not particularly humble in his attachment to ‘self-expression,’ seems often a kind of imprisonment; what he seeks is emancipation from what he thinks of as the dead hand of the past.”.

 

I’m using “student” in the broadest sense to mean human. We all have more to learn, even in a non-utilitarian sense. Near the conclusion of his essay Oakeshott expresses the hope implicit throughout his writing:

 

“Universities still have some genuine and discerning friends, many of whom have never enjoyed the opportunities they offer; and there are students, alive to the enchantment of the pursuit of understanding, and for whom a university education, uncorrupted, and with all its ardours and severities, is an answer to their hopes, desires, and expectations. And to these friends, all who love learning and who do not believe that learning is the only thing in life, are humbly grateful.”