“We want to counter the anti-intellectual thread that runs across higher education, even [at] the best schools,” säger Freeman Hrabowski, rektor vid university of Maryland i en artikel på Christian science monitor. Det är tydligen illa ställt:
“Critical thinking, self-examination, and the questioning of assumptions are all widely genuflected to as part of any good college education. But that’s not what’s happening on many college campuses, he and others argue.
American higher education has long had a dynamic tension between intellectualism - represented by the humanities and elite colleges - and more ‘practical’ education offered up by land-grant universities, observers say.
But while the US university system is widely hailed for its quality, some fear the pendulum may be swinging toward an overall anti- intellectual approach.
‘You can party a lot, ski a lot, and still do well and not be that intellectual,’ says Michael Newton, a junior majoring in government at Dartmouth College. ‘At Dartmouth, it’s not that cool to be intellectual. It’s much cooler to be outdoorsy. At Yale, my friends say it’s cooler to be urban trendy.’”
Ack, ja. Det här är inget nytt problem:
“Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the university”
klagade Anthony Wood. Den gången var det Oxfordstudenterna som kritiserades och året var 1677. (Citatet från Atkinson, “Willliam Derham, FRS (1657-1735)”, Annals of science vol 8 (1952), 368-392, 371.)
[Länk till csmonitor via Arts & Letters daily.]
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