Christian Gonzalez/Contributing Writer
As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that the Scholarship Aptitude Test is a weapon of mass destruction. Never mind the untold stress it inflicts on millions of high school students throughout the United States each year, the SAT helps create a culture of schooling that says students are only as capable as their test scores indicate, only as intelligent as their grade point averages suggest.
It forces instructors to teach to the test and makes students spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for it, all the while forsaking the inherent benefits of receiving an education.
But what exactly does it mean to receive an education?
I sat down with professor John Bailly from the Honors College to hear his thoughts on what it means to be “educated” and how the Honors program approaches this question.
He explained that the Honors program tries to teach people by, “taking students and exposing them to alternative ways of thinking, of living … in an immersive manner … to show them that there are diverse ways of living our lives, of constructing our reality. I want to ask as many questions as possible, but provide no answers.”
With this approach, Professor Bailly says he would like to see “students take more … intellectual risks: Explore different ideas; don’t be afraid of a different idea; don’t be afraid of losing an argument. Don’t be afraid of starting an argument.”
The philosopher Allan Bloom also offered some insightful comments on the question of education when he wrote his stupendous book, “The Closing of the American Mind.”
The first problem, as he saw it, was that “the University now offers no distinctive visage to the young person … In short there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is.”
Bloom adds that, at best, “The student can pick up in elective courses a little of whatever is thought to make one cultured.”
Yet, unfortunately, “the student gets no intimation that great mysteries might be revealed to him, that new and higher motives of action might be discovered within him, that a different and more human way of life can be harmoniously constructed by what he is going to learn.”
Bloom proposed instead to make cultured individuals by giving students a “Great Books” education. In other words, he wanted to give students the moral and intellectual acuity of great authors, from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Rousseau. He wished to do away with the doctrinaire mode of teaching that stresses repetition over understanding, regurgitation rather than critical thinking.
This is precisely the sort of stuff I would like to see printed en masse and nailed to the walls of the headquarters of the College Board.
Education should not merely be a race to the top of the GPA scale. It should aim to engender in students an eagerness to learn, an insatiable curiosity, an unwavering desire to question all the things we take for granted.
To achieve this end, it should redirect its emphasis from standardized tests to teaching students how to think for themselves —about everything.
The best way to do this would be to focus on literature, philosophy, politics, art, culture, and history, particularly when some or all of those things intersect in the most intellectually stimulating of ways, as in books like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Hundred Years of Solitude” or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Brother Karamazov.”
There are, however, some objections to this line of thinking. What if students don’t care for philosophy? Why force them to read boring literary pieces, why teach them about irrelevant historical events?
The current system of education does not stand up to the scrutiny of those three questions. Students are already obligated to study subjects they may be entirely uninterested in, and they are made to do so on the currently false pretext that it will teach them necessary life skills, thus making them well-rounded individuals.
This justification would actually be applicable if there was a switch to a system such as the one advocated by professor Bloom. Ambitious programs such as the Honors College at FIU are certainly steps in the right direction.
Presently, in most universities, one graduates with a specialization, along with arbitrary splashes of knowledge —a math course here, a sociology elective there. In Bloom’s system, one would graduate from college not only with a specialization but also with an ability to think critically, to consider timeless moral questions, to analyze literature, to better participate in our democracy.
Christopher Hitchens, an intellectual hero of mine, brilliantly explained this notion when he wrote that “The life of the cultivated mind should be private, reticent, discreet: Most of its celebrations will occur with no audience, because there can be no applause for that moment when the solitary reader gets up and paces round the room, having just noticed the hidden image in the sonnet.”
Which brings me back to FIU and the Honors College in particular. Its method of teaching would make professor Bloom proud. It has an interdisciplinary approach which teaches students about topics ranging from Plato’s Republic, to theories about the nature of scientific revolutions, to works by Oscar Wilde.
Thinking critically about these works is then encouraged through the small group sessions which are crucial to the Honors program.
There is also another pivotal aspect to the Honors College and it is something professor Bailly is extremely passionate about —the opportunity to study abroad.
He says that, for example, “Students get as much from my lectures about the history of Rome as they do going to the grocery store in Rome, and talking to Romans, and trying to order mozzarella. That is because … the heritage, the living manifestation of it, is engaged in a way that makes you realize how important this is.”
Professor Bailly is right. I went to Paris this past summer and I completely fell in love with the city.
There is just something truly magical about having picnic in front of the Eiffel Tower, about speaking with French people about their political concerns, about sharing stories with students from across the Atlantic Ocean.
Put simply, there is as much to be learned from visiting a country as there is from reading hundreds of books about it.
With all this considered, the underlying principles behind the Honors College are commendable and they set an example that more schools ought to follow.
To do so would be to overthrow this awful educational regime of standardization in favor of something which, if the end of education is to educate, is self-evidently superior.
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The opinions presented within this page do not represent the views of FIU Student Media Editorial Board. These views are separate from editorials and reflect individual perspectives of contributing writers and/or members of the University community.
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