Searle on university education

This text of the Berkeley philosopher John Searle, written 21 years ago, is still totally up to date - alas!

http://www.ditext.com/searle/searle1.html

The Storm Over the University (December 6, 1990)

The New York Review of Books

I cannot recall a time when American education was not in a "crisis." We have lived through Sputnik (when we were "falling behind the Russians"), through the era of "Johnny can't read," and through the upheavals of the Sixties. Now a good many books are telling us that the university is going to hell in several different directions at once. I believe that, at least in part, the crisis rhetoric has a structural explanation: since we do not have a national consensus on what success in higher education would consist of, no matter what happens, some sizable part of the population is going to regard the situation as a disaster. As with taxation and relations between the sexes, higher education is essentially and continuously contested territory. Given the history of that crisis rhetoric, one's natural response to the current cries of desperation might reasonably be one of boredom.

-        The student should have enough knowledge of his or her cultural tradition to know how it got to be the way it is. This involves both political and social history, on the one hand, as well as the mastery of some of the great philosophical and literary texts of the culture on the other. It involves reading not only texts that are of great value, like those of Plato, but many less valuable that have been influential, such as the works of Marx. For the United States, the dominant tradition is, and for the foreseeable future, will remain the European tradition. The United States is, after all, a product of the European Enlightenment. However, you do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others. Works from other cultural traditions need to be studied as well.

-        You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.

-        You need to know at least one foreign language well enough so that you can read the best literature that that language has produced in the original, and so you carry on a reasonable conversation and have dreams in that language. There are several reasons why this is crucial, but the most important is perhaps this: you can never understand one language until you understand at least two.

-        You need to know enough philosophy so that the methods of logical analysis are available to you to be used as a tool. One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.

-        Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly.

-        Just acquiring this amount of "education" will not, by itself, make you an educated person, even less will it give you what Oakeshott calls "judgment." But if the manner of instruction is adequate, the student should be able to acquire this much knowledge in a way that combines intellectual openness, critical scrutiny, and logical clarity. If so, learning will not stop when the student leaves the university.

See also: The Campus War (1971)

Promise or Terror?

Goya - O sono da Razão

Can it be that what seems to be happening in Brazil and in much of the world – the so-called ‘crisis of representation’, the distrust of institutions – may be a sign that ‘the masses’ are feeling that within the political rationality of capitalism and the rules of representative democracy they do not have and will not find their opportunity?

In his study of religions Max Weber notes existence in societies of a cycle that revolves between two basic forms of religion: religions of salvation - which aim at a transcendental goal by means of prophecies and charismatic leaders - and religions of acceptance, which encourage man to adapt to the world by means of rules and rituals.  The first type have the potential to cause revolution insofar as they aim at changing the world, or at least not accepting its reality and laws as supreme values. 

According to Weber a similar pattern is found in terms of the Law: a progression from traditional societies ruled by the sacred to the law of lawyers which is rational and impersonal.

Equally, in economics the universal rules of the marketplace have come to take precedence over previous economic regulations based on custom or religion.  We cannot say that the laws of the marketplace are unfair: the ‘injustices’ (acts of partiality or exclusion) that mark the differences between ‘classes’ arise out of rational rules (that are general and valid for all) and not from tradition such as the privileges of ‘castes’.

Television: a danger to democracy?

Rejane Xavier 

Television has come to threaten democracy through the excessive power it has gained and because, according to Popper, it corrodes the basic foundation of the rule of law, which is the rejection of violence.

The exaggerated proportion of scenes of sex and violence on television at times when children and teenagers form a large part of the audience has aroused in increasingly wider sectors of society a call for some kind of control measures on the part of some kind of responsible authority.

A similar situation in the USA has brought about a strong social reaction fuelled by a broad-reaching discussion on the code of ethics of the culture industry, the authority of parents to choose the type of psychological and moral influence they consider suitable in bringing up their children, and the most effective ways of ensuring the freedom of choice of everyone within a society that recognises and accepts ethical and cultural pluralism.

In Brazil the topic unleashes two opposing but converging types of reaction. On the one hand the unbending paladins of free enterprise feel it is absurd to impose any kind of interference, whatever its origin, with the "freedom of creativity and information" exercised by telecommunications companies. On the other hand, genuinely democratic and well-intentioned intellectuals and artists, scarred by the experience of the dictatorship, tremble before anything that seems to them to evoke the odious ghost of censorship, and rise up with one voice against the faintest shadow of a "threat to freedom of expression". In the face of this double, solid barrier, rational discussion on the influence and role of the mass media becomes an extremely delicate matter.

Economics and Culture - Production and Circulation of Values

SÃO PAULO - WORLD CULTURAL FORUM

2nd JULY, 2004

LECTURE 5 – LARGE AUDITORIUM

REJANE XAVIER

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(Representing the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP))

Prada shoes, with Burberry pattern

According to the old rule (‘the cultural good is that in which meaning is more important than usefulness’) today nearly all goods are ‘cultural goods’: the brand is worth more than the training shoe or the pair of jeans, the label is worth more than the spectacles, the design is worth more than the chair.

 The first question that we face when considering the title of this lecture is really to define what values we are talking about.  Economic value and cultural value are frequently placed in opposition to each other and the ‘mercantilization’ of culture has been seen as a threat in these times of accelerated globalization, when cultural production is increasingly thought of as merchandise that has to fit the same rules that apply to the international trade in goods and services.

The growing importance of cultural industries in an increasingly globalized marketplace is an unquestionable fact although it still creates doubts and conflicts of interest.  On the one hand the ability of these industries to generate value, work and income is celebrated; on the other, fears are generated concerning their effects on traditional cultures and the pressures they exert on the creativity and freedom of artists.  

Writers, musicians, cinematographers and painters justifiably aspire to seeing their work exhibited, recognized and well paid, and see in the cultural industry a chance of achieving these aspirations.  However, they either refuse or are reluctant to make their art conform to the ‘rules of the marketplace’: producing a new record album every year, even when they have no new work ready; making films that the follow the dazzling action sequences of American cinema (we may consider here those wonderful Iranian films that the public often feels are ‘slow’ and ‘tedious’ because their ways of seeing and appreciating films have been moulded by Hollywood productions); producing paintings and sculptures adapted to western decorative taste, and writing novels following publishers’ models of  best sellers.

It is about this tension between market value and cultural value that I would like to reflect, if possible broadening the scope of the analysis in order to bridge the contradiction between them without ignoring the differences and even the points at which occasionally their differences cannot be avoided.