Reflections on Teaching and Learning Jacques Barzun

Reflections on Teaching and Learning Jacques Barzun Editor's Note: Jacques Barzun, one of the eminent scholars of our time, examines the current state of American education in a new book appearing this spring: Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (The University of Chicago Press). This collection of fifteen newly edited and introduced essays covers a wide range of subjects. What follows are the introductions to three essays that he felt would be of particular interest to our readers. We thank Prof. Barzun and The University of Chicago Press for their interest in having these pieces appear in our pages. Why Go to College? To the incoming freshman, college used to be a revelation-of freedom, of his own maturity, of high seriousness in things of the mind. In most cases the boy or girl had never been away from home and was now alone responsible for the use of time and resources, no longer pupil but student. He or she was called Mr. or Miss in class, without irony. The whole intellectual landscape was new: here were grave faculty members, friendly but not chummy, devoting a good many hours a week to teaching certain definite matters of agreed importance and also doing that mysterious thing "research." It seemed to give their words the authority they claimed and did not hesitate to exercise. This enchanting new atmosphere found its counterpart in the work to be done-many hours of reading in real books, written by adults for adults, who were deemed capable of understanding all the words and of singling out the important points to re- member. This description of the step up from high school as it was fifty years ago has lost all validity. The college--and the university around it-have been transformed into a morley social organism dedicated to the full life. It does include the mental life, but certainly makes no fetish of it. Rather, intellect weaves in and out of the main business, which is socialization, entertainment, political activism, and the struggle to get high grades so as to qualify for future employment. The new college is of this kind because incoming freshmen have long since achieved their freedom; they have known for years-parents, counselors, and advertisers told them so-that they are mature and entitled to endless options, Jacques Barzun is literary advisor to Charles Scribner's Sons and University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, New York, NY 10027. The University of Chicago Press is the publisher of Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning. 9 1991by The University of Chicago. All fights reserved Barzun 31 mental and physical; they are experienced in money matters, practiced in sex, and blas6 about studies. The last two years of high school have offered courses nominally like those once required of college freshmen, and "research" holds no mystery: they have been expert at it since the seventh grade. Everything else in the university has changed in parallel. The faculty does not see teaching as its principal task nor does it find any particular body of knowledge necessary for the degree. Its members look upon the institution as a convenience for their own ambitions, whose fulfillment lies outside the gates. If moved at all by loyalty, the professor directs it to his fellow specialists, to his source of funds- government agency, industry, or foundation- and possibly to one or two favored students who will follow in his wake. This turning of the academic effort from inside to outside has made university governance difficult at the same time as it has transformed central admin- istration into a bureaucracy-internal services and external relations demand it. The sprawling, anonymous crowd replacing the self-governed "company of scholars" is enough by itself to discourage institutional loyalty and to make teaching a chore instead of a calling. Attempts to counteract this downgrading by giving "Great Teacher Awards" only underscore the fact: great teacher now means simply "teacher"--rare bird. It is but fair to add that part of the distaste for teaching is a result of the students' lack of preparation. They are bright and willing, they have ideas, but they seem to know nothing firmly and nothing alike. Many, far too many, cannot read, write, count, think, or talk acceptably. Remedial courses take care of the worst; the rest, unrewarding to deal with, are ignored or else helped along by some philanthropic instructor in one or another subject, who left- handedly tries to patch up the failures of the past. For these failures the high academic profession must bear a large part of the blame. For generations the proud professors have refused to have anything to do with elementary and secondary schooling--except to criticize it on their own hearthrng. They scorn mere teachers without knowing any; they do not review textbooks below the freshman level; they despise-instead of reforming- the deparunent of education in their own university. In other countries all recognize that teaching has equal importance and merit at every rung of the ladder. The most highly trained scholars begin by teaching in the lyc3e or gymnasium or the English "public" and "grammar" schools. In the United States, college and university are undergoing the fitting pun- ishment of their snobbish neglect: all the ills of the lower schools have infected the higher-bureaucratic rules and paperwork; students incapable and beyond rescue, but promoted yearly; a curriculum without plan or direction; subject matter dictated by politics or current events. Tailored to youthful tastes, such courses lack order and substance-invertebrate data in place of "disciplines." Around these attractions the campus re-creates the whole of society: unions and strikes, protests, insults, violence, madness, and the agencies needed to cope 32 Academic Questions / Spring 1991 with these diversions. There must be a small army of security guards, a corps of psychiatrists and counselors, facilities for free artistic productions, a supply of contraceptive information and devices, and housing and subsidies for political and ethnic separatism. It is no wonder that tuition costs have soared. The campus has become a large village or small town committed to giving full social services. And no wonder, again, that to meet costs it must admit students visibly unfit, and to obtain these, advertise its wares in the language of trade. "To Expect the Best, To Achieve the Best, Come To------" Or: "Successful But Not Satisfied? A Graduate Degree Can Make a Big Difference." Madison Avenue obviously sets the tone when in a full-page ad by one of the half-dozen leading universities a sampling of subjects is grouped by kinds, and "Dutch Painting of the Renais- sance" appears under the heading "Esoteric." Of course, the pretence of higher learning continues amid the hurly burly, the sports corruption and scandals, and the ballyhoo of fund-raising. But as was asked by the head of a depamJ~ent in a large state university, not a nostalgic elder, but a ranking scholar in mid-career: "Sitting on my desk is a four-volume institutional self-study filled with charts, figures, 'mission statements' and the paper from half a forest, but nothing about education except jargon and plat- itudes. Where have we gone wrong?" This state of affairs raises two related questions: Should we return to the ivory-tower university? And: What do the young go to college for? Begin with the second. The American people decided a good while ago that it wanted to ape the Chinese Empire and set up a Mandarin system. A college degree is required for any well-paid job in business, as well as for government service and the professions. The popular propaganda in favor of heading for college is supported by the latest statistics, which show that the gap between college- graduate salaries and the rest is widening. "Mandarin" is here a courtesy word, for it hardly matters what the bachelor's degree is worth intellectually. The name college is magic by itself. Colleges abound and there is no assurance that the graduate from any of them knows anything in particular or knows it well. Mingling for four years in miscellaneous classrooms with a loosely selected group of boys and girls from other parts has value, and the usual extra-curricular activities may well "educate" in the wordly sense. But is it worth the crushing costs and the grand apparatus of scholars and deans and publications and curriculum committees? Higher education, advanced work, was meant to do more than confer the advantages just cited. Its task as defined by the great institutions was to put the next generation in possession of the social, political, and cultural heritage of the world. That heritage is not a secret formula; it allows some latitude in the choice of elements, but there is a core, defined by long reflection and practi- cability. It has been replaced by an offering that permits getting the degree with four years of freshman work, including Cinema Studies or Sexuality in Liter- ature. Details of a serious-minded program are out of place here, but it is a sign Barzun 33 that the needful criteria have been lost when we learn that 40 percent of college graduates have taken no history course and 77 percent no foreign language. To offset this vacuum, there are across the country 200 courses in "The Male Experience." But was the ivory tower of any real use in a world which changes so rapidly? which is increasingly democratic, which- fill in your own clich6 about what the world is like and is heading toward. Ivory tower is a question-begging phrase; its suggestion of dreamland is absurd.

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