Certain aspects of my college education at HBU have been demanding my attention--and unfortunately not because I find them engaging, enlightening, and beneficial! After almost two years in the HBU honors college, it is time for me to formally criticize it. The goal of education is to instill knowledge in students; this is the end of schools and universities. But, as educators should know, there are legitimate and illegitimate ways to teach if the objective is to enable or encourage students to find and seek truth.
The format of the HBU honors college that I will critique is as follows: students read excerpts from or the entirety of various classical works--starting in my case with The Iliad and The Odyssey and moving to works by Plato, Augustine, Calvin, Shakespeare, etc--and then discuss the contents twice a week in sessions lasting two hours and five minutes. There is nothing intrinsically flawed with using this format to educate, yet it is applied in a terribly inefficient way if the goal is to actually find truth about God, Christianity, and objective reality.
Here I will outline six problems with the honors college's approach to education about theology and philosophy and highlight why they are obstacles to an impactful education.
Honors college students and faculty have habits of:
1). Reading books too quickly.
First of all, the professors seem to expect us to spend more than two hours per book for two books a week when other classes and familial and personal obligations also exist in our lives. Second, they expect students to read and understand these books within just a few days before they move on to the next book. If these texts are truly so insightful, why not spend more time focusing on one and actually learning to understand it instead of constantly cycling through books at such a rate that it is perhaps impossible to absorb the contents of everything that we are assigned to read? But instead, students move from book to book at a speed that likely hinders a deeper appreciation or contemplation of some works--and in the process they even read poetry collections from poets like Petrarch, which are sometimes completely out of place among the philosophical works we read. Overall, we read up to around 20 books for this class alone, in addition to all of our other textbooks. It seems very irrational to expect all students to remember or care about the contents of each book read in the honors college when some of them might scarcely have time to even keep up with the reading as it comes.
2). Paying lip service to logic and reason while selectively living according to them.
Those inside the honors college enjoy telling people who say "I feel . . ." that they should instead say "I think . . .", as if everyone who uses the word feel instead of think literally mean that they are ruled by emotion. Sometimes people just use the word feel but mean that they are thinking something. Anyway, the real irony is that almost all of the people I have met inside this group base their core moral beliefs around natural law, otherwise known as conscience (in and of itself nothing but subjective, malleable emotion), and believe in God at least in part due to subjective experiences/sensations. So they want to imply that people who use the word "feel" are in some sort of intrinsic error as the very foundations of their worldviews are drenched in subjective feelings, assumptions, and emotional preferences? Oh, the irony!
Now, let me describe a more recent problem. In the honors college I have met people who astoundingly denied self-evident truths, including the reliability of logic and their own existences as conscious, thinking minds. Remember that by self-evident I do not mean arbitrary beliefs that subjectively strike me as obvious or preferable; I mean truths that cannot be denied without immediate contradiction. Some of the students have criticized me for attacking the logical fallacies of Socrates and then turned around later only to tell me that nothing is knowable at all, including logic, meaning they cannot know if they or Socrates are right, in turn meaning these students have no grounds to oppose my epistemology on. One student, within the same 24 hours, went from directly telling me that I cannot know with absolute certainty if I exist or am thinking to telling me that people who deny consciousness are irrational, because even if everything around me is an illusion my consciousness cannot be, or I couldn't perceive the illusion to begin with. Hilariously, she told me I can't know if my mind exists and then told me that to deny my consciousness (and therefore my existence) is stupid just a day later! At least some of these people honor reason with their words before arbitrarily using and ignoring it, telling me I cannot trust logic as they use logic to argue with me.
3). Focusing on just how to tell what texts say instead of how to verify or falsify truth claims.
There is extremely little emphasis in class on actually using logic to verify or falsify claims, as most of the focus is invested into relentlessly scouring various passages and debating their intended meaning. But what good is knowing Locke was an empiricist if you won't invest time into demonstrating that empiricism is or isn't true? Reading about Plato's forms and reincarnation (recollection) theory of knowledge, Descartes' rationalism, and Locke's empiricism without actually examining who was factually and verifiably correct can lead to great anxiety and even despair in the lives of students who do not know how to verify or falsify a claim properly. After all, Plato, Descartes, and Locke cannot all be right simultaneously about what the starting point of knowledge is. If all that philosophy classes amount to is a perpetual comparison of ideas, then no knowledge about reality is necessarily gained, only knowledge about what various conflicting ideologies say about reality. There is an enormous difference.
Also, intelligence can have absolutely nothing to do with one's knowledge of Shakespeare, Plato, or Augustine--knowledge of these authors is a sign of education, not intelligence, critical thinking, or rationality [1]. Just because someone knows about Socrates and Shakespeare does not make that person intelligent, as no amount of stored information about famous dead people alone will ever indicate the presence of a rational mind. I fear that some honors college students are unaware of this. No, I don't need to read the "classics" to be or become more intelligent, and no one else needs to either. I just need to grasp and utilize logic well to be intelligent.
4). Pursuing irrelevant or unanswerable questions instead of relevant or answerable ones.
Questions like "What lies between heaven and earth in Hamlet?" are asked by the professors in class--as if that question has any relevance to our lives or actual epistemology or spirituality. Now, this question has a simple answer. In Hamlet purgatory seems to be between heaven and earth, as the alleged ghost of Claudius hints. But that was not enough. Usually, as in this case, answering questions using logic and an example from the book being discussed only results in people denying or dismissing the obvious, hunting around the book for tangents, and trying to out-speculate each other with unverifiable hypotheticals in the name of the pursuit of knowledge! In this case, my class literally spent two hours searching for miscellaneous references to the words "heaven" and "earth" in Hamlet. A fellow honors college student that I trust has told me of a professor spending an entire class period (two hours and five minutes in this class) speculating why Shakespeare used the words "Hence, hence, hence" altogether in a triple usage of the word hence. How is this useful? How is this profitable? How does this qualify as intellectually stimulating, spiritually motivating, or a wise use of our time? Many of the questions class sessions are oriented around are either irrelevant or simply unanswerable, as any answer proposed will rest on unverifiable and unfalsifiable speculation and not actual knowledge of truth.
As someone who has deeply struggled intellectually and personally with the limitations of epistemology, the weight of selecting a worldview, and absurdism (the belief that meaning cannot be verified or falsified and thus human existence is absurd), I know how frustrating, embittering, and frightening it would have been for me to have relied on the teachings of the honors college professors to illuminate spiritual and metaphysical truths to me during such times. When someone who earnestly seeks after truth does not have understanding of the answers to crucial questions, despair is the often outcome of this ignorance. The professors of the HBU honors college may denounce my culture's postmodernism (while straw manning it and implicitly equating it with relativism [2]!), but their relentless comparison of ideas and epistemologies rarely, if ever, accompany actual proof or refutation of those ideas and thus they are subtly, perhaps even unconsciously, encouraging illegitimate types of skepticism and lack of ideological commitment. I am no longer surprised that I have encountered people in this environment who have both embraced the honors college mentality and denied that they can have absolute knowledge of anything--including the existence of the self and the reliability of logic.
5). Implying that most authors have concealed secret, esoteric knowledge into many of their sentences.
If an author is very difficult to understand all of the time because most of his or her sentences require intense examination, then that author is a deplorable communicator. Likewise, an author who intentionally uses ambiguous language is not making the purpose of his or her writings accessible to readers. If someone's books are as esoteric as the honors college sometimes acts, then I have no reason to believe that we even have any ability to discover the meaning. Jesus did use allegorical and esoteric language in some of his parables--but he often clarified and defined terms and meaning so that his listeners (and readers) would not have to speculate and invent nonexistent meanings for his words, like in the case of the parable of the sower.
6). Elevating philosophers and authors who were wildly irrational to high statuses just because of their impact on history.
For instance, Socrates and Plato are held in very high regard by many people in the HBU honors college, yet the beliefs and explanations of Socrates are full of logical fallacies, especially non sequiturs, a fallacy meaning a conclusion does not follow from a premise. One example is how in Meno Socrates sees a slave solve a math problem and concludes that this demonstrates that the slave is recollecting information from a past life--Socrates thought that a slave's ability to perform mathematical calculations verified his own beliefs about reincarnation and the recollection of knowledge from previous lives, when this does not follow at all! Yet, in Apology, alleged record of the trial of Socrates before his death, Socrates says he does not believe what he cannot know and claims that no one knows what comes after death, both of which completely contradict his claims in Meno. Another example of fallacious reasoning is in Meditations on First Philosophy when Descartes posits that God is not malicious and would never deceive him, a very question begging conclusion which deductive reasoning and natural theology alone cannot support. If I am a logical person, I will call out these fallacies and refute them, yet students and professors I am around have defended these absurd assertions.
No, I won't accept a proposition because of the renown or impact its proposer had; that would be to commit the fallacy of appeal to authority. No, it is not rational or intelligent to view people highly just for the sake of continuing an inherited scholarly tradition of honoring these people (appeal to tradition). No, the prominence of someone's books is not a reason for me to respect someone or care about their conclusions. No, a text is not "great" just because it had an impact on society. Richard Dawkins has had an impact on my culture, and no rational person would classify his books as "great works".
These are all things that either communicate to me that the HBU honors college faculty do not prioritize the pursuit of demonstrable truth or they do a very poor general job of applying their goals into the classrooms. The presence of these things seems to indicate that mere education is being emphasized over development of actual intelligence or verifiable knowledge (again, see [1]), much less spiritual renewal or the bringing of people directly to God. I hope that other philosophical Christian circles avoid these same mistakes!
[1]. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-difference-between-intelligence-and.html
[2]. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/postmodernism-clarifying-straw-man.html
No comments:
Post a Comment