Advanced Didaskaleinophobia: Fear of Higher Education?*
"How 'bout you? Wadda you do?"
"I write."
"Unh-UNH! You wrong!"
That priceless dialog comes from Warren Beatty's Reds, an over-the-top biopic of revolutionary journalist John Reed. These fightin’ words trigger a brawl when angry country folk come to break up a workers' strike led by big-city intellectuals. It’s pure filmic cartoon: the country folk are grubby, sneering, and missing a few teeth; Beatty’s nobly handsome Reed is trying to talk his way out of a beatdown.
Beatty’s point was about writers getting no respect from the common man, but I think there’s larger point. For too many people in the U.S., a fancy edjamacation ain’t worth a pitcher of warm spit.
Knowledge Matters… Within Reason
Transmitting knowledge is critical for civilization. It started with learning how to throw a spear and what berries not to eat. For the past few millennia, excessive education could become a disruptive force if it encouraged young people to think independently and challenge the status quo. In ancient Greece, Socrates was executed for corrupting youth and proposing false gods. Plato learned from this and fled when the Athenians started giving him the side eye. But the value of education depends on who’s learning and what’s being taught. For example, Petrarch and other 14th-century Italian scholars couldn’t find any written evidence of formal instruction after the fall of Rome (though it almost certainly happened), and they referred to Europe’s Early Middle Ages as the Dark Ages.
Indeed, Western Europe believed the darkness of ignorance was banished by the dawn of the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment, starting with the rise of great universities in Italy, England, Spain, and France in the 11th-13th centuries. The first major institution in the Americas, Harvard University, was founded in 1636, and the so-called Ivy League schools in the Northeastern U.S. rose as an elite bastion of enlightenment against the primeval darkness of the frontier.
Such high-flown ideas probably fostered the sentiment among ordinary Americans that maybe ruling-class arrogance hadn’t been driven out with King George’s redcoats. Even Justin Morrill’s land-grant colleges of the 19th century, focusing on agriculture, engineering, and other practical subjects, never quite erased the stigma of higher education as a morally corrupt delusion of grandeur.
This might have explained why Americans didn’t show much respect for primary and secondary education, either. There’s no denying that kids benefitted from learning the so-called “3 R’s” (reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic), but teachers were overworked, underpaid, and under-resourced. Idealistic young people still flocked to normal schools to learn the teaching profession, only to be grudgingly hired and treated as an afterthought in their real-world jobs.
A Buncha Wise Guys
It wasn’t just ancient Athenians and rural Americans who frowned upon intellectuals. Look at various totalitarian governments during the 20th century – Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China, Falangist Spain, Argentina’s National Reorganization – regimes that exiled, jailed, reeducated, or executed teachers, academics, artists, and anyone else with informed opinions running counter to the party line. Even in the U.S., early Cold War fears of communist subversion inspired the Red Scare and forced the resignation of many college faculty members and public-school educators.
We’re seeing echoes of this in 21st-century America when conservative voices call out our university campuses as elitist enclaves supporting politically unpopular viewpoints. Further complicating this picture is widespread uncertainty about the value of higher education in today’s economy and job market. Historically, it was easy to argue that research universities were engines of discovery and innovation, advancing our society in ways that private industry or government initiatives couldn’t do nearly as well. Yet for recent generations, it’s become just as easy to argue that a good education is less of a guarantee for better employment opportunities than a promise of lifelong student debt.
There have been efforts to combat this trend, such as the University Innovation Alliance. The UIA is a network of public research universities committed to increasing graduation rates and post-collegiate opportunities for historically under-represented groups – students of color, financially disadvantaged, or first in family to earn a degree. Initiatives like this can only help sway public opinion about the usefulness of higher education. (And obviously, a shift in federal priorities on education would be a giant step in the right direction.)
Art Mirrors Attitude
I’ve long been fascinated by negative portrayals of higher education in 20th-century art. Two short stories still loom large in memory: “How Beautiful with Shoes” by Wilbur Daniel Steele, and “The Watcher” by Guy Vanderhaeghe. In Steele’s story, published in 1932, an escaped murderer fixates on an uneducated country girl, spouting classical poetry as he pursues her through the night. He’s identified as a runaway mental patient, and it’s implied that his college education drove him criminally insane. In Vanderhaeghe’s story, set in 1959, an aimless, shut-down co-ed brings her beatnik boyfriend home from college. He’s an arrogant libertine holding her in sexual thrall, and he won’t go away until her grandmother calls in a few neighbors to rough him up. In both of these stories, higher education has somehow disturbed the natural order for how young people are supposed to conduct themselves.
The late 1960s gave us two iconic films, The Graduate and Goodbye Columbus. While neither was directly about the university experience, both expressed a resignation that pervaded upper- and middle-class families waking from the American Dream, something like, “We gave our kids the privilege and advantage of higher education, and for what? They’re just as confused and morally adrift as anyone else.”
Putting a humorous spin on the generational divide around education, we have “Working Class Playwright,” one of my favorite Monty Python sketches. It flips the script on British modernist author D.H. Lawrence, who rebelled against his pigheaded coal-mining father to pursue a university education and literary career. The Pythons reimagined a literary father outraged that his son was disavowing a life of letters to nobly pursue a career as a coal miner. Of course it’s absurd, but we know exactly what’s being satirized.
Benign Intent
As the product of an education-positive family, I saw college as an expectation rather than an aspiration. The quiet pressure to earn a degree wasn’t always pleasant, yet that path ultimately served me well. Working as an editor and writer in the world of progressive education confirmed and clarified my belief that educators are superheroes. And while I long ago outgrew my elitist programming that college is the only way to go, I’m still appalled to witness so many people eyeing higher ed with distrust and hostility. Whether or not you can afford to attend these institutions or comfortably speak their rarified language, thinking and learning are good things. Can we agree on at least that much?
*[Note: I took creative liberty with my blog title. Didaskaleinophobia (a.k.a. scolionophobia) is a clinical term for the anxiety disorder of perceiving extreme threat in a school environment. Thanks to the prevalence of psychological intervention and to the brain and personality developments as young people mature, this rare condition most commonly occurs among primary students. There’s probably a Greek construct better reflecting a society’s fear when its young people willingly pursue higher education. If so, I’ll leave that for someone else to correctly identify.]
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