Why the Educated Aren't Really

The academy substitutes hard work of forming hearts and minds with the easy work of validating them.

Introduction

This is the third installment in a three-part look at the dissolving of the traditional and effective college experience—undone by waves: of postmodernism, of political correctness (“woke ideology?”), and of collapse of expectations of students.

Three snapshots might help show what’s missing: a freshman lit class where allegory tries to crack the door and half the room won’t walk through; the spiritual drive behind science and possibly why so many dismiss it as “elitist”; and the humbling reality that the deepest truths sometimes live outside the academy, in the embodied knowing of those who repair waterlines, tame runaway electric turbines, and graft whole apple orchards.

These are windows into what education should be doing: forging minds and pressure-treating spirits for reality’s weight. Instead, our institutions are sending out lightweight souls in brittle casings, spared (by validation) from difficult realities.

1. Look Beyond the Literal

That moment in a literature class: a professor hints that All the Pretty Horses isn’t really about pretty horses. The room goes quiet. A few smirk. Some roll their eyes.

For some, it’s a burden. For others, it opens the door—to allegory, to irony, to truth. And that door is one of those opened by higher education to a key discovery that there’s much more beyond, below, and above the literal and the banal.

If students can’t learn to see beyond the literal in stories, they’ll never see beyond the surface in life—or in Truth Itself. And deep truths are often hard won.

2. Science as a Spiritual Quest

Real education demands something harder to fake: the reverence behind the disciplined pursuit of truth. Scientists and mathematicians abandon ego to chase principles, theorems, even glimpses of quantum forces that resist being tamed and may never have any practical use.

And while academia dangles recognition, many make profound sacrifices for rewards that are intensely abstract. There’s that word again: abstract.

Higher Ed’s deepest failure is failing to inculcate this reverence into students. A democracy that can’t recognize disciplined love of truth can’t preserve it.

3. Real-World Reality

The surfer surrendering to a Pipeline’s head high wave (and actually experiencing a force of nature). The farmer who can sense his crop’s calcium deficiency. The worker splicing in a new 10-inch waterline valve beneath a busy city street. These people don’t just know about reality. They know it.

Without graduates who can recognize that difference (between knowing and knowing about), we breed a class of confident (if brittle) shells—people who carry authority without humility and confuse credentials for character and true competence.

When a culture can’t tell the difference between “knowing” and “knowing about,” it’s not just an academic problem; it’s one that threatens civilization itself.

Cultivating the Spirit

What’s missing isn’t just intellectual rigor, (although it is that, for certain.) It’s the cultivation of the spirit. Real education can only happen inside prepared, deepened souls. The love of learning, the passion for truth, the reverence for what research can reveal—these are not merely intellectual matters: they are spiritual ones. And higher education, in its refusal to even acknowledge any Truth-with-a-capital T (and colleges’ skittishness about playing by its rules), is simply unfit for the task.

Higher education is at least partly about spiritual disposition: openness to truths beyond the obvious; seriousness about the consequences of too little learning; gratitude for the shoulders upon which all understanding stands. And beyond even these basics, there is a deeper humility that must permeate the entire student: the recognition that I am not spiritually superior. This is perhaps the greatest failure of our colleges, (what this author calls the “seminary syndrome”). And it makes the Right’s cry of “elite” somehow ring true. That constantly-validated sense of their own core Goodness becomes the biggest impediment to learning from others once their so-called “real life” has commenced.

In any case, perhaps the gravest spiritual problem is the dangerous arrogance that at commencement they are now “educated.”