The inscrutably vapid minds of college students
I am a philosophy professor at the University of Alabama. (Professor Beito asked me to introduce myself, but knowing that you won’t be interested in me, but only--possibly--in what I say, that should suffice. E-mail me at jroii@hotmail.com if you would like to know more.) I’m new to blogging, so apologies in advance if I struggle with the art. I’ll get better.
Mortimer Adler said in his classic book How to Read a Book that the purpose of college is to teach students how to read a book; the purpose of graduate school is to learn one book really well. He was thinking of a liberal arts college education, and of graduate training in a humanities field. Still, for being so simple, that is surprisingly insightful. Adler was right that reading a book is a far more difficult and labor-intensive task than it is routinely taken to be, and he was also right—already in the 1940s, when the book was first written—that reading was one of those skills that everybody thought he had but few in fact possessed. Like painting: as Hegel said, anyone can pick up a brush and make strokes on a canvas, but that does not make you a painter. My own observations lead me to believe things have only gotten worse, with people, students in particular, having become even more self-assured that they can read and yet their abilities in fact having declined.
Here’s why I bring it up. I’m currently writing a book outlining and defending the “classical liberal” moral and political tradition and applying that tradition’s principles to moral and political conflicts occupying our attention today. The book is pitched at undergraduates and aims to be a counterweight to books like Peter Singer’s influential and widely used Practical Ethics. My travails associated with writing this book, which lend anecdotal credence to complaints that a certain political bias has a firm grip on the academy, may be the subject of future postings. I bring it up now, however, because one of the criticisms the manuscript has received from reviewers is that it uses too many “big” words that undergraduates cannot be reasonably expected to know.
Here are some of the words singled out as being unreasonable to expect undergraduates to know: vapid, ineluctable, stultiloquence, oafish, fustian, salubrious, and inscrutable. Some of these words are obviously less common, thus harder, than others; and perhaps some of them count as “big.” But each of the words was used in a context that gave strong clues about its meaning. And we are talking about university students here, all of whom are supposed to have had several years of English classes. Is it really unreasonable to expect them to know these words? What is it reasonable to expect them to know, then?
But I would like to question the premise that we should drop use of a word if students aren’t likely to know it. Why? Why shouldn’t we challenge them? Why shouldn’t we expect them to make the effort to look up a word they don’t know? More pointedly, why should we talk down to them rather than expecting them to rise to higher standards? Goodness: consider just how many great works in Western history would have to be excluded on that criterion!
It is not a new argument that if you lower standards, students’ performance will descend accordingly. I think we should raise our sights and expect, even demand, students meet them. Why shouldn’t a college graduate be able to use a word like “inscrutable” or “vapid,” and decipher a word like “salubrious” from the context—or go look it up?