Excellence Without a Soul by Lewis Harry

Excellence Without a Soul by Lewis Harry

Author:Lewis, Harry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-07-20T16:00:00+00:00


Discipline parts ways with education

If a child is viewed as flawless, or at least as having no flaws that anyone should know about, the most that can be hoped for in terms of personal development is that no blemishes will be added or uncovered during the four years in Cambridge. Freshmen, in this Rousseauian view of adolescent development, are perfect pre-adults. Moreover, they and their parents know what they should look like when they graduate. Their ontogeny is deterministic. They will come out as first-year law or medical students or investment bankers, depending on plans already laid down, but a larval doctor should not turn into a mature novelist, even a good one. College is not about self-discovery, not about openness to a fundamental re-creation of self. It is about execution of a prior design.

Since students are perfect as freshmen, they should not be imperfect as seniors. They should graduate with the same clean transcripts as the ones with which they entered, but one notch higher up the ladder of academic degrees. Any flaws discovered along the way must be the result of misunderstandings or unfairness or sabotage. Instead of taking responsibility for their actions, students shift responsibility to others. Efforts to press students to look inward to understand the source of their behavior meet stout resistance. Character growth and moral education are all but impossible under these circumstances.

Parental protectionism is not a new phenomenon. LeBaron Russell Briggs, dean of Harvard College in the late nineteenth century, complained of it:To the dean of a large college . . . it soon becomes clear that parents are accountable for more undergraduate shortcomings than they or their sons suspect.... “I have spent an hour today with Jones’s father,” said a college president in a formidable case of discipline. “I have conceived a better opinion of the son after meeting the father,” —and the experience is repeated year by year. Five minutes, or two minutes, with a father or a mother may reveal the chief secret of a young man’s failure or misconduct, and may fill the heart of an administrative officer with infinite compassion.... “I told my boy,” says a father, “that I did not myself believe in [vice]; but if he went into that sort of thing, he must not go off with the crowd, but must do it quietly and in a gentlemanly way.”



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