Inquiry or doctrine
Gargi Bhattacharyya considers the relationship between education and religion.
Universities in this country broadly champion secular ideals. Whatever the circumstances of their formation, higher education institutions value their independence from state and church (and temple and mosque and synagogue and gurdwara). This is part of what we think universities are – spaces of free debate and enquiry, free from the strictures of doctrinal thought. According to this view, good education cannot belong to any one tradition. There is no benefit to being taught among people like yourself, in fact this is a disadvantage to the interrogatory processes of higher education…There may be unspoken norms, but broadly, doctrinal thought is frowned upon and is considered insufficient to a proper education.
There it is again, as with the Edwards piece, Group A and Group B, rational inquiry versus unfalsifiable dogma. (Merlijn and John M point out that there are religious people who as Merlijn put it ‘have a certain degree of critical distance between them and their beliefs’ – religious people who are not dogmatic and who do value rational inquiry and belong to Group A rather than B, or perhaps to Group C. A fair point. Not all religious people are dogmatic. But to the extent that they’re not, their allegiance isn’t really to Group B. They’re not so much an exception to Group B as they are members of Group A with some B inclinations. In short, we can consider them as part of Group A if they like, because any dogmatic beliefs they are loyal to or fond of, are safely bracketed and/or put in question. The opposition remains the same. The point is not so much how to allocate all religious people, as it is how to think about doctrinal thought as doctrinal thought.) Good education, as Bhattacharyya says, needs ‘ interrogatory processes’ rather than doctrinal thought. Just so.
[T]he ideal of the university as a place of free thought is not a bad model for understanding how people might learn things…[T]he university ideal suggests that the most important thing in relation to education is access – to learning resources, to informed and inspiring teaching, to a variety of ideas and ways of thinking and to a mixed and unpredictable bunch of others who are all curiously trying to learn as well…The catch is that all must learn to hear and consider unfamiliar and, perhaps, unpalatable views and beliefs, not because becoming educated demands adherence to any particular view, but because becoming equipped to contemplate all views is what makes you educated.
Which is why ‘faith’ education is not education but something else.
“However, the university ideal suggests that the most important thing in relation to education is access – to learning resources, to informed and inspiring teaching, to a variety of ideas and ways of thinking …”
Originality is hardly this guy’s strong suit. Is Gargi Bhattacharyya (Senior Lecturer in Race and Racisms, Sexualities and Social Identities and Structures, and Director of the Centre for Post-Traditional Values and Transnational Culture at the University of Brimingham, BTW) saying much more than JH Newman wrote in his ‘The Idea of a University’ (1853)?
To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression….
Thus is created a pure and clear atmosphere of thought, which the student also breathes, though in his own case he only pursues a few sciences out of the multitude. He profits by an intellectual tradition, which is independent of particular teachers, which guides him in his choice of subjects, and duly interprets for him those which he chooses. He apprehends the great outline of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them.
Zzzzzzzz ….. Jesus H. Christ, when you read that stuff today, it sounds like self-parody.
But there is a difference between then and now. Then, at least, only the best and the brightest (along with a few wealthy dullards), made it to university. Today almost any dullard can cross the threshold. In other words, today’s mass universities are open to the uneducable as well as the educable. By definition, the former are academic basket cases.
Dream on, Gargi B. – until you put your admission standards back to 11-plus levels, you have a lot of dreaming ahead of you. It’s not access to university that matters — it’s exclusion of the untalented that makes the difference between a university and a ‘university’.
I hate to tell you, but Bhattacharyya’s not a guy. Why did you think she was?
A good one there, OB.
— I’d forgotten that if it’s got ‘sexualities’ in the title, it’s almost bound to be a she.
Actually, her style was definitely masculine — not enough florid adjectives or first person singular pronouns for a real lady writer.
Cathal Copeland: “But there is a difference between then and now. Then, at least, only the best and the brightest (along with a few wealthy dullards), made it to university. Today almost any dullard can cross the threshold. In other words, today’s mass universities are open to the uneducable as well as the educable. By definition, the former are academic basket cases.”
Well, I teach at a university and I don’t agree with these sentiments at all.
Well Keith McG, I agree with CC. The vast majority of students today go to uni simply to get the degree they need to move into their chosen field of employment. From this point of view they are most definitely uneducable to the high principles of university learning that GB mentions.
“The point is not so much how to allocate all religious people, as it is how to think about doctrinal thought as doctrinal thought.”
I think this is essentially the same as the critical distance to one’s own beliefs I raised in the other thread as fundamental, and I cannot but agree.
I think we have a tendency to define religion somewhat differently, which makes the apparent differences in our thinking bigger than they really are. It seems to me that you feel religion necessarily involves faith, and faith is necessarily blind and relating to a personal, prayer-answering God – which means that a theism/deism without such a component would not be religion. I’m not so sure here – I think reasoning and faith may mix to various extent in religion. But our attitudes towards dogmatism and lack of freedom of thought and imagination are the same.
“It seems to me that you feel religion necessarily involves faith, and faith is necessarily blind and relating to a personal, prayer-answering God”
Religion as commonly understood, yes. Religion of its essence, or necessarily and always, no, not – er – necessarily. But I pretty much always am talking about religion as commonly understood, when I talk about religion (to go all Raymond Carveresque). I think that’s fair. If religion is not commonly understood that way, then why has the word ‘faith’ become such a popular substitute for it lately?
A miracle! A miracle has occurred! The little 2*3 cm dust cover pic which I just posted has exploded into a giant full-page image.
Clearly, supernatural agents are at work in B&W.
FOR HOW CAN SCIENCE EXPLAIN THIS? GO ON, TELL ME THAT, YOU PSEUDO-INTELLEKSHEL SMARTASSES!
….
Has Copeland actually READ any of Dawkins’ work?
Does she really think that Dawkins cannot distinguish between facts and values?
Uh?
More to the point, I want to know how to post piccies into the comments box, or to make a statement “clicky” for that matter – I dare say it is simple, but I’ve not seen an instruction-set.
It’s interesting that the discussion has turned to the syndrome whereby education = giving me the credentials I need to get a good job.
I went to a church-affiliated college here in the US, and my feeling about the experience is less that it tried to indoctrinate me to Calvinist theology, than that it tried to instill an ethic of service to others and the need to be a good citizen, not just get a good job.
Not to say that religion and higher ed don’t sometimes have a problematic relationship. But nobody here ever acknowledges that the original universities could be called “faith schools,” Harvard and Yale and Oxford and Cambridge. Over the decades/centuries (and my college was “only” about 150 years old) the institution’s sense of doctrine and mission gets smoothed off or negotiated against its interest in maintaining quality and/or prestige, measured in secular terms.
Is *access* to books and smart people really the whole essence of university education? What about sound habits of thought, analytical tools, etc? Access to resources balanced with the discipline to use them wisely. There’s education and there’s formation (instilling discipline and character), and schools have a role in both, though here it makes a difference whether the student is 8 years old or 18 or 28.
Dix,
Bhattacharyya didn’t say access is the whole essence of university education, she said the university ideal suggests it’s the most important thing. Being the most important thing is far from being the whole essence. The second-most important thing could be very nearly as important as the most important thing; so could the next ten or twenty.
Also she was contrasting access to imposition, I think, which also makes a difference.
If you don’t have access, how do you learn sound habits of thought and analytical tools? Isn’t that what she’s saying? Access is the most important thing because how do you learn anything without it?
And it’s important to remember that a lot of people don’t have access; none at all. Wangari Maathai talked in the interview on ‘Fresh Air’ yesterday about the novelty of school in Kenya when she was a child, and the extra novelty of her going to school. Ruth Simmons was blissful when her parents moved to Houston (I think it was Houston) because she had access to a decent school and to a library. She had access to books.
Access matters. It sounds small, but it matters. Without it you’re screwed.
Oh, certainly. But the hook Bhattacharyya hangs this column on, is her university’s decision to publish a calendar of religious holidays. I wasn’t concerned (and I didn’t think she was) with the difference between a Kenyan primary school and an English university. It’s with the university before and after it published this calendar.
Pete D. “I agree with CC. The vast majority of students today go to uni simply to get the degree they need to move into their chosen field of employment. From this point of view they are most definitely uneducable to the high principles of university learning that GB mentions.”
There is a considerable difference between “uneducable” and “uneducable to the high principles of university learning that [Person X] mentions.”
It further presumes that going to university “simply to get the degree they need to move into their chosen field of employment” is an inadequate reason for pursuing higher education, something I also disagree with.
Individuals pursuing higher education qualifications are perfectly entitled to have different reasons for doing so.
Keith McG. writes:
It further presumes that going to university “simply to get the degree they need to move into their chosen field of employment” is an inadequate reason for pursuing higher education, something I also disagree with.
I actually agree with you on this point. My impression is that there is a good dose of hypocrisy in the reasoning of the ‘higher things’ brigade.
What they seem to be arguing is that:
(a) there is a bad, sordid reason for going to university (namely to get a good job and be real rich) and
(b) there is a good, noble reason (namely to improve one’s mind by reading the best of wot has been thought and said – and hence, as a result of all this, eventually getting a good job and being real rich).
That’s certainly the covert rationale behind Newman’s ‘The Idea of a University’.
I think a university student has a right to be a philistine, as well as to be a Muslim or Jew or Anglican. (Ideally, all these perspectives would be open to examination and discussion, and none of them imposed.)
there is a good dose of hypocrisy in the reasoning of the ‘higher things’ brigade
Whatever the ideals are, they are constantly under pressure from the need to attract fee-paying students (or grants, govt. subsidies, what have you).
Dix Hill wrote “I think a university student has a right to be a philistine”.
But what a waste – of the university’s resources and the student’s time.
But don’t do it.
(That cryptic command was about posting pictures in comments, and I forgot to delete it. But it’s curiously apt for the philistine comment. A university student or anyone else has a right to sit and watch tv 18 hours a day, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good way to spend your life.)(It’s a waste, as Paul says. Which is what I meant [and said] about the idea that truth matters because we’re the only species, as far as we know, that has the ability to find it out. It seems a waste not to. We have the right not to, but it seems a waste. The TLS reviewer said that’s not a reason. It’s not a conclusive or binding or ungainsayable reason – but I’m not sure it’s not a reason at all. I think it’s true that truth matters to humans partly for reasons of that kind. We think it’s a waste to let our bodies go slack and flabby. We think it’s a waste to sit in the car and read a comic while everyone else is looking at the Grand Canyon. So…)