A Healer’s Geste

Classical Education: Cop-out

Alright, my “series” so far is pathetic. To make it more so, the second installment will merely be a selection of paragraphs from one of Doug Wilson‘s latest postings (italics are his):

[To persuade you to attend NSA] will necessitate an argument against the prevailing vocational paradigm in higher education. This is not to say that we are against students being vocationally equipped, but there will more about this shortly. Suffice it to say for now that there is a great difference between being vocationally trained and being vocationally prepared.
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A true liberal arts education is not a specialty education. It is not one “major” among many. It is not the “major” that trains future English teachers the way an engineering “major” prepares a student for a career in engineering. This important to emphasize because in our current vocational training paradigm it is often the case that a young Christian man might not apply to NSA because he knows that he not called vocationally “to be a poet,” say. He knows he is going to run a business, and so he thinks the thing for him to do is take a business degree at the closest state university. Meantime, his sister likes poetry and stuff and so she can go to NSA. But this is one of the central confusions created by the vocational paradigm over against the liberal arts paradigm. We are not comparing students trained for a job and students trained for sitting around talking about Herodotus.

If the traditional argument for a liberal arts education is correct (as I believe it is), then the best preparation for the future businessman is not a narrow business degree, but rather a liberal arts degree. Again, a liberal arts degree is not a vocational degree. Over the last century and a half, the transformation of the American university system from one of liberal arts preparation for life into a vocational mill has been a truly profound transformation. And while there have been some blessings that have come from it, over all the impact on our civilization has been destructive.

A liberal arts education prepares the student for all of life in a way that nothing else does. Of course, it is granted at the outset that graduates must make their way in the world and that they must at some point be prepared in the specifics of their calling to do so. Specialty training in medicine, engineering, forestry, etc. is obviously necessary. But if we want those disciplines characterized by intelligence and wisdom, this specialty training needs to go on top of a liberal arts education and not instead of it. A graduate’s vocational calling is a very important part of his life, but a liberal arts education is not to be understood as a special kind of vocational training. Rather, it is a preparation of the man himself or the woman herself, not the inculcation of a particular skill set.
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let me finish with what may seem like an inflammatory quotation on this subject from none other than C.S. Lewis. “You see at once that education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves . . . if education is beaten by training, civilization dies. That is a thing very likely to happen.”

But the inflammatory nature of this is only superficial. He is not saying that to have a vocation makes you a slave. Lewis is saying that to be equipped for nothing else than to be a vocational cog in the industrial machine is to be a slave. And that is something that has happened in a profound way to our culture at large. Here at NSA, we are engaged in standing against that prevailing paradigm. But this is not because we want no engineers, but rather because we want better engineers. It is not because we want no doctors — we want better doctors. In the long run, nothing is more impractical than vocational pragmatism. Pragmatism doesn’t work.

We know that your sons and daughters may not be called to become teachers in classical and Christian schools around the nation (although some are). But if you get the vision of recovering the liberal arts paradigm for higher education, that is not a reason to dismiss NSA as an option. Does your son want to be a businessman developing new software? If he comes here, we will not try to talk him out of it. Rather, we will prepare him for that calling in a way that is second to none. How? Three years of Latin and Greek. Herodotus. Biblical theology. Rhetoric. Art and architecture. Great literature. Learning how to live, love, and think as a Christian.