Potentiality

I found Anthony Kronman’s answer to character development in the Chronicle of Higher Education (September 27, 2007 … the <a href =”http://chronicle.com/blogs/footnoted/669/higher-education-and-the-meaning-of-life”>click here for full read</a>)

His presentation as a placeholder for non doctrinaire approaches to the formation of character. Character development isn’t, I am sure, memorizing or copying a complex of behaviors or things to say. His description of the Yale program shows recognition of this understanding at the level of Undergraduate education. I believe that such understanding could be pursued earlier, considerably earlier, with good result.

“At Yale, where I teach, incoming freshmen can apply
to the Directed Studies program, which begins in the fall with
Herodotus, Homer, and Plato, and concludes in the spring with
Wittgenstein, T. S. Eliot, and Hannah Arendt. These programs differ in
many ways, and inevitably reflect the culture of their schools; some
are mandatory and others, like Yale’s Directed Studies, are elective.
But despite their differences, all rest on a set of common assumptions,
which together define a shared conception of humane education.

The
first is that there is more than one good answer to the question of
what living is for. A second is that the number of such answers is
limited, making it possible to study them in an organized way. A third
is that the answers are irreconcilably different, necessitating a
choice among them. A fourth is that the best way to explore these
answers is to study the great works of philosophy, literature, and art
in which they are presented with lasting beauty and strength. And a
fifth is that their study should introduce students to the great
conversation in which these works are engaged – Augustine warily
admiring Plato, Hobbes reworking Aristotle, Paine condemning Burke,
Eliot recalling Dante, recalling Virgil, recalling Homer – and help
students find their own authentic voice as participants in the
conversation.

These are challenging works. But they are
accessible too, and an 18-year-old with some curiosity about life will
find much that is inspiring in them: the great battle scenes of “War
and Peace,” and Tolstoy’s meditations on the insignificance of the
individual in history; Descartes’ invitation to his readers to doubt
everything they think they know, at least once in their lives; Arendt’s
account of Eichmann on trial, and her chilling description of the
“banality of evil”; Virgil’s Aeneas and Jane Austin’s Emma, both in
love, but with more on their minds.

Though critics have attacked
“great books” programs as a kind of indoctrination into a
European-dominated intellectual canon, the students in my Directed
Studies class respond in the opposite way. They become rambunctiously
independent. For they learn that the greatest minds in the world are on
their side – or aren’t, and feel entitled to quarrel with them. A
college freshman who has read Descartes, and who crafts her own reasons
to reject his invitation to doubt, is on her way to an independence of
spirit that is surely one of the conditions to living a meaningful life.

For our humanities departments to make room for this
kind of study again, they need not repudiate the research ideal. Much
would be lost if they did. But they can insist that teachers in these
fields equip themselves to guide their students in an exploration of
life’s meaning, which can be done with confidence and honor only if the
research ideal is acknowledged to have limits.

There are hopeful
signs this will happen. The tide of political correctness is receding
on our campuses. There is an increasing demand among undergraduates for
courses that address the big questions of life, in all their sprawling
grandeur, without reticence or embarrassment. At Harvard, Michael
Sandel’s famous course on justice, which explores the meaning of the
concept from Aristotle to Mill and beyond, draws hundreds of students
each year. Ten percent of the freshmen at Yale now apply to Directed
Studies – more than can be admitted.

Most importantly, perhaps,
the great upsurge of religious fundamentalism outside our colleges and
universities is a sign of the growing appetite for spiritual direction.
These movements can be a source of danger and division, and
intellectuals may mock and despise them, but teachers also ought to see
in them the energy that will drive the restoration of the question of
life’s meaning – and, with that, of the humanities themselves – to a
central place in our colleges and universities. The fundamentalists
have the wrong answers, but they’ve got the right questions. We need to
learn to ask them again in school.

Our culture may be spiritually
impoverished, but what it needs is not more religion. What it needs is
an alternative to religion, for colleges and universities to become
again the places they once were – spiritually serious but nondogmatic,
concerned with the soul but agnostic about God.

Much depends on
this. America’s entire leadership class now goes to college – something
that was not true a century ago. Infusing higher education with a new
and vibrant humanism will produce benefits not only for the future
leaders of government and business, but for society at large: A richer
and more open debate about ultimate values; an electorate less likely
to be cowed into thinking that only the faithful have the right to
invoke them; a humbler regard for the mystery of life in a world
increasingly dominated by technocratic reason.

The most immediate
beneficiaries of any such revival, however, would be the young men and
women in school today. Instead of offering a disorganized reprieve
between the hard work of high school and the challenges of a career,
their college education will endow them with priceless materials for a
lifetime of struggle with the most important question anyone ever asks.

When this happens, a place in fall’s freshman class will be the prize it ought to be.

Anthony
Kronman is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale and author of “Education’s
End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of
Life.”