A College Degree Is Many Things; Literate Higher Education Is Something Else

Higher education in this country certainly has been knocked about lately. Prof. Bloom has lambasted the teachers for their pervasive anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, laying the blame largely at the feet of sinister German emigres. Prof. Hirsch has cudgeled the students for their lack of cultural literacy, as has Prof. Ravitch. A federal overseer has ominously indicated that accrediting agencies will take student achievement into account when an institution is audited. All this at a time when educational costs are going up almost as fast as medical costs.

The traditional concern with student achievement has real teeth in it today. In the past, good grades and a good degree from a good school would get one through almost any professional door. Now one must pass all kinds of cunningly devised tests covering various forms of knowledge, and we can expect even more of the same in the future.

What’s really going on, then, is not just an attack on the quality of American higher education; rather, it’s an attack on the traditional role of formal education as the only route to the social mobility represented by licenses, credentials and entry to professional schools. Thanks to this achievement-test movement, we now have two routes to social advancement: a formal good-grade route, and an informal self-study route focused on good performance in achievement tests. A few years ago, for example, a student on our campus, despite poor grades and low scholastic aptitude scores, was admitted into a first-rate graduate school because of her outstanding performance on the Educational Testing Service exam, for which she studied by reading the Norton Anthology of English Literature (4,000 pages) all the way through three times .

More recently on our campus, 29% of the students in an English as a Second Language remedial reading class equaled or surpassed the cultural literacy scores of 80% of the students in a graduate-level course, doing so simply on the basis of voluminous out-of-class general-interest reading (Barbara Tuchman, Carl Sagan, etc.). Lots of reading, lots of books--that’s all there is to it, and that’s where the payoff tomorrow will be as the current attack on formal education makes itself felt.

Formal education, after all, has very little to do with books, especially good ones. Its basic accounting unit is the credit-hour, which represents one hour per week per semester spent in the classroom, not the library.Since this unit determines tuition charges, along with taxpayer subsidies, education today is primarily a classroom matter involving lectures, discussion and a test every now and then, usually based on a few pages in a badly written textbook. Perhaps our educators are not as anti-intellectual as Allan Bloom claims in his “Closing of the American Mind,” but they are certainly anti-literacy, since they neither encourage voluminous reading nor do much of it themselves (as Michael Kinsley once pointed out, they keep up by reading book reviews, not books).

It is, of course, true that direct classroom instruction is necessary in subjects like mathematics, foreign languages and the physical sciences. But most of what’s in a university curriculum today could probably be mastered in less than a year, given a judiciously guided independent reading program. Education Secretary William J. Bennett has suggested that many young people who don’t go to college may well know as much after four years as the average college graduate with an expensive diploma in hand. Clearly, if Bennett and other supporters of achievement testing have their way, there’s a good chance that many young people in this country will be encouraged to bypass traditional credit-hour education in favor of reading books--lots of them and lots of worthwhile ones.

A movement like this is not just another attack on our leisure-class educational-Establishment citadels (we’ve always had plenty of that). What it really represents is a sustained assault on traditional monopoly power by making it possible for reading to be more valuable than sitting in class, for good books to be more valuable than barely competent professors, and for demonstrable intellectual growth to be more valuable than a transcript filled with inflated grades.

For parents especially, this trend is important, since it indicates that a library card and a little encouragement may be worth far more than a six-figure investment in a meaningless degree.

Educators today may not exactly burn books. But they’ve come pretty close to it in the last few years in their credit-hour classroom emphasis. Painful though it may be to some, the current attack on higher education reminds us once again that books should be cherished, not derogated, and that reading, lots of it, is still the best way for a human being to learn and grow.