Reading Pascal Probably Isn't Going to Teach You These Things, Either

Even when it comes to conservative critiques of academia, this is a strange opening paragraph, to say the least:

The egalitarian ideology of our time, writes the philosopher Philippe Beneton, in Equality by Default, cuts the human heart and soul out of the profession of the teacher. “Why give priority to classic literature,” he asks, “when Pascal is no better or no worse than any other author, when his style of writing is just one technique among others?” The teacher becomes a technician—and often a not highly skilled technician at that, as witness our millions of young people who cannot calculate a 15 percent gratuity for a restaurant bill, or who cannot name the nation south of the Rio Grande.

The snark in the title: I'm not sure how well Pascal would do at naming the nation south of the Rio Grande.

The great mission of education as “the formation of taste, of character, of will, of civic spirit” is set aside. “How can a school educate,” he concludes, “when it refuses to distinguish between an educated person and an uneducated person? How can it shape a human being when it no longer knows what a human being is?” (emphasis mine).

I don't think there's any great dispute about whether someone who can't calculate a 15% tip is well-educated (leaving aside the possibility that one might be educated in many other areas but not math; absent-minded professors presumably qualify as educated). The rest of the article seems to rest of the--prettily presented--contention that the Classics are More Valuable than Whatever It Is Kids Spend Their Time On Now (content left unspecified). Per the examples given, one is also not going to learn math or geography from Dante or Plato, and heaven help those who try to learn science from Aristotle.

Esolen focuses his essay on what might be broadly considered humanities education. At the very least the words "science" and "math" never appear. This is the problem: even accepting the contention that the humanities have sunk into a morass of relativistic judgments that fundamentally betray our youth, science and math have not. They are good, old-fashioned subjects where the teacher is presumed (usually correctly) to know more than the students, subjects in which there are tightly-defined correct and incorrect answers, subjects in which failure is possible and success, if it is to be had at all, must be earned through years of patient labor. (I have a friend in engineering who graduates when he gets his machine/experiment to work. Singular: it's just one experiment. He's in year eight at the moment. And if you've ever watched someone pipette or run samples for hours, it becomes obvious how intrinsically more interesting the humanities are.)

Instead of pointing to this as a continually successful model of good education, it comes in for criticism because science doesn't 'get it':

Where is that vision of homogeneity to be found? Wherever, Beneton suggests, we find the reduction of man to his constituent parts, or to his environment, or to whatever else will replace the mystery of the human person with a general and scientistic “law.” We would then be equal—in our unmeaning. The carbon that makes up my flesh, the calcium that makes up my bones, the iron that gives my blood its energy-delivering properties, are no different from those in anyone else’s body. The encounter with a particular being, the irreplaceable person, yields to indifference, as one lump of flesh is much like another. One family, like a molecule in the economic crystal that surrounds it, is no “better” than another such molecule. What has happened is that, instead of the object of knowledge determining the method of study, the method of study has determined and reduced the object of knowledge. “The great works thus lose their status of great works,” says Beneton, and are reduced to cultural artifacts, to be explained by the technician, the neutral archaeologist, and not honored for their beauty or wisdom.

So let's all appreciate the irony of someone beginning an essay complaining about the lack of objective standards to mark knowledge, and to separate the learned from the unlearned, eventually complaining about a surfeit of objective standards to mark knowledge, which somehow manage to reduce the overall body of that knowledge. Whatever learning science and math seem to represent, it doesn't count.

I am both a Great Books person and an avid reader. I don't disagree with the contention that most people would be better rounded as human beings if they read more, and read more of what's good. But this is not the argument for that position.