(10:48 AM) | John Emerson:

The College of My Dreams

What would I do if someone gave me a few million dollars to start a new college?

1. The new school would be a liberal arts college specializing in the humanities. Majors would be philosophy, history, and literature; majors in each field would be required to have some courses in the other two. Social science would be divided between philosophy and history; theology would be in philosophy. There would be no science majors, but all students would be required to be literate in basic math and science (including actual science and math work, not just “History and Philosophy of Science”). The arts would be extracurricular, with an emphasis on music. Every graduate should be expected to have a usable command of two foreign or classical languages.
2. Bright, motivated students would enter after tenth grade and attend for six years. The length of the program should make it easier for students from inferior programs to catch up with the others, and there should be full scholarships to make it possible for students to attend regardless of their family situation. Everything reasonable should be done to flatten out and suppress the distracting influences of youth culture, commercial pop culture, pop psychology, political fads, and family wealth. Counseling should be available, and the environment should be congenial, but making students feel good about themselves should not be a primary purpose of the school.
3. Talented graduates should not have to work in coffee shops or as temps: everyone who graduates from the school should be able to earn $15/hr (2005 dollars). This will not be vocational school, but it can’t be oriented primarily to preparation for grad school, given the problems with humanities graduate education. (There are a number of academic areas and useful academic skills which do prepare you for actual jobs, and these should be stressed; statistics, database, writing, etc.)
4. Because of the narrowness of the offering, cooperative relationships with neighboring schools should be established for students with special interests, as well as for those who decide not to finish the six-year program.
5. The weight of the program should be past-oriented more than present-oriented. No real effort should be made to directly address the issues of the day, though it should be assumed that many or most students will have an interest in politics.

My specific concerns about education can be deduced from the kinds of solutions I have proposed -- obviously this is a highly-specialized school, and not an answer to all the problems of post-secondary education. It can be seen that I belong to the “reactionary leftist” category, and that the program I describe is basically old-fashioned and elitist. But while my proposal does conflict with contemporary trends, there is really nothing unusual, extreme, or impractical about it. All I need is a few million.

LINKS

A. THE POSTS I'M RESPONDING TO:

Ian Welsh at BOP News:
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/005247.html#5247

B. MY EARLIER OPINIONS:

Crooked Timber:
http://www.crookedtimber.org/

The Valve:
http://www.thevalve.org/

Invisible Adjunct (defunct):
http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/

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