[Mb-civic] Harvard-Bound? Chin Up By DAVID BROOKS

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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March 2, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Harvard-Bound? Chin Up
By DAVID BROOKS

I've got great news! You're young and you're smart and next year you're
beginning college. Unfortunately, I've also got bad news. The only school
you got into is Harvard, where, as Peter Beinart of The New Republic notes,
students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd
expect from a good high school student," and required courses can be "a
hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes that cohere into nothing at all."

But don't despair. I've consulted with a bevy of sages, and I've come up
with a list. If you do everything on this list, you'll get a great
education, no matter what college you attend:

Read Reinhold Niebuhr. Religion is a crucial driving force of this century,
and Niebuhr is the wisest guide. As Alan Wolfe of Boston College notes, if
everyone read Niebuhr, "The devout would learn that public piety corrupts
private faith and that faith must play a prophetic role in society. The
atheists would learn that some people who believe in God are really, really
smart. All of them would learn that good and evil really do exist ‹ and that
it is never as easy as it seems to know which is which. And none of them, so
long as they absorbed what they were reading, could believe that the best
way to divide opinion is between liberals on the one hand and conservatives
on the other."

Read Plato's "Gorgias." As Robert George of Princeton observes, "The
explicit point of the dialogue is to demonstrate the superiority of
philosophy (the quest for wisdom and truth) to rhetoric (the art of
persuasion in the cause of victory). At a deeper level, it teaches that the
worldly honors that one may win by being a good speaker ... can all too
easily erode one's devotion to truth ‹ a devotion that is critical to our
integrity as persons. So rhetorical skills are dangerous, potentially
soul-imperiling, gifts." Explains everything you need to know about politics
and punditry.

Take a course on ancient Greece. For 2,500 years, educators knew that the
core of their mission was to bring students into contact with heroes like
Pericles, Socrates and Leonidas. "No habit is so important to acquire,"
Aristotle wrote, as the ability "to delight in fine characters and noble
actions." Alfred North Whitehead agreed, saying, "Moral education is
impossible without the habitual vision of greatness."

That core educational principle was abandoned about a generation ago, during
a spasm of radical egalitarianism. And once that principle was lost, the
entire coherence of higher education was lost with it. So now you've got to
find your own ways to learn about history's heroes, the figures who will
serve as models to emulate and who will provide you with standards to use to
measure your own conduct. Remember, as the British educator Richard
Livingstone once wrote, "One is apt to think of moral failure as due to
weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal."

Learn a foreign language. The biographer Ron Chernow observes, "My
impression is that many students have turned into cunning little careerists,
jockeying for advancement." To counteract this, he suggests taking "wildly
impractical" courses like art history and Elizabethan drama. "They should
especially try to master a foreign language as a way to annex another
culture and discover unseen sides to themselves. As we have evolved into a
matchless global power, we have simply become provincial on an ever larger
stage."

Spend a year abroad. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland believes
that all major universities should require a year abroad: "All evidence
suggests this, more than any other, is a transforming experience for
students that lasts a lifetime."

Take a course in neuroscience. In the next 50 years, half the explanations
you hear for human behavior are going to involve brain structure and
function. You've got to know which are serious and which are cockamamie.

Take statistics. Sorry, but you'll find later in life that it's handy to
know what a standard deviation is.

Forget about your career for once in your life. This was the core message
from everyone I contacted. Raised to be workaholics, students today have
developed a "carapace, an enveloping shell that hinders them from seeing the
full, rich variety of intellectual and practical opportunities offered by
the world," observes Charles Hill of Yale. You've got to burst out of that
narrow careerist mentality. Of course, it will be hard when you're
surrounded by so many narrow careerist professors building their little
subdisciplinary empires.

But you can do it. I have faith.

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