Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Paperback)

by Anthony T. Kronman (Author)
Key Phrases: modern research ideal, antebellum college, secular humanism, Civil War, Harvard College, Max Weber (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"'No question that the humanities are in a bad way in education at the present, and this book offers not just an argument that they should be more highly prized, but a carefully reasoned position of what happened, why it did, and what needs and can be done about it.' Alvin Kernan, author of In Plato's Cave 'Kronman... shows how colleges, in abandoning the profound questions that have perplexed philosophers and writers throughout human history, have betrayed their students, depriving them of disciplined rumination before they're caught up in the urgent business of adult life. In Education's End, he writes that in emphasizing the secular, professors offer no recognition of the spirit and spiritual values.' Washington Times"

Review
"Kronman unfolds here a sustained argument marked by subtlety, force, nuance, and considerable appeal."-Francis Oakley, President Emeritus, Williams College (Francis Oakley 20080401)

"In a brilliant, sustained argument that is as forthright, bold, and passionately felt as it is ideologically unclassifiable and original, Anthony Kronman leaps in a bound into the center of America's cultural disputes, not to say cultural wars. Although Kronman's specific area of concern is higher education, his argument will reach far beyond campus walls."-Jonathan Schell, author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People (Jonathan Schell )

"Just when we need them most, the humanities have relinquished their role at the heart of liberal education-helping students reflect on what makes life worth living. In this bold and provocative book, Anthony Kronman explains why the humanities have lost their way. With eloquence and passion, he argues that departments of literature, classics, and philosophy can recover their authority and prestige only by reviving their traditional focus on fundamental questions about the meaning of life."-Michael J. Sandel, author of The Case against Perfection and Public Philosophy (Michael J. Sandel )

"No question that the humanities are in a bad way in education at the present, and this book offers not just an argument that they should be more highly prized, but a carefully reasoned position of what happened, why it did, and what needs and can be done about it."-Alvin Kernan, author of In Plato's Cave (Alvin Kernan )

"An impassioned defense of the humanities."-Robert Messenger, Wall Street Journal (Robert Messenger Wall Street Journal )

"Kronman argues his case passionately. His discussion of the transformation of American higher education over the last century and a half is most illuminating."-George Leef, NationalReview.com (George Leef NationalReview.com )

"In Education''s End Kronman succeeds remarkably well, even movingly, in conveying the intellectual and spiritual joy that a serious student can find by participating in the ''great conversation.''"-Ben Wildavsky, Commentary (Ben Wildavsky Commentary ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (September 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300143141
• ISBN-13: 978-0300143140
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #144,407 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars * * * 1/2, Excellent argument, blandly written, November 7, 2007

By	John Grabowski (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Hardcover)

Kronman's book is very much needed in today's culturally- and spiritually-bereft age. He advances the argument that higher education has largely become a technical finishing school, where students are groomed for careers in their chosen profession like gears in a machine. Meanwhile their spiritual and emotional needs go un- or undernourished and the only forces that have moved in to take the place are science, to which many of the more educated types have a blind allegiance, and religious fundamentalism, which requires blind allegiance and a relinquishment of independent thought. Kronman advocates the humanities as they used to be taught, before the influx of 60s and post-60s revisionism and PC-curricula, as the answer. Furthermore, rather than apologizing for endorsing the allegedly "rigid, Eurocentric thinking" of Dead White Males, he demonstrates how the curricula of their works is actually more open and tolerant than much of the PC code of the last 30 years or so. It's a well-crafted argument, although of course he tends to idealize his side of the debate while showing us the worst of the PC side.

Kronman traces the route of higher education in America from the founding of the earliest colleges and universities to post-civil war instruction to the 60s revolution that ousted most of what came before it. The problem is that the deconstructionists, after they were finished deconstructing, didn't offer anything in place of what they had dismantled, at least beyond the hazy philosophy of cultural relativism and a reluctance to evaluate *anything* qualitatively. (Everything is equally good and equally valid; where you come down is merely a matter of taste and personal cultural prejudices.) We've heard this before. But then Kronman offers an ingenious insight and twist: the humanities, already under pressure in the post World War II rising tide of science and specialization--quantification and analysis--felt insecure and was already headed in the direction of measurement and other "objected" criteria. It felt uncomfortable making moral or ethical judgments. In order to save its own relevance and compete in the burgeoning environment of the social and natural sciences, it was adopting their modes of quantification and "objective" observation. If humanities couldn't tell you the meaning of life, in other words, it could at least measure aspects of life and report on them. That way it too would seem more like a scientific discipline and less like pie-in-the-sky thought.

Thus it fell over when the multicultural attacks began. Humanities professors felt almost embarrassed to defend the subjective assertions of Socrates, Aristotle, Kant, Goethe, et al, in the midst of accusations that they were just artificial constructs created to allow certain groups to remain in a state of cultural ascendancy.

Thus, in the last 30 or so years, religion and all sorts of "spiritual" movements have moved in to fill the emotional void left by the shrinking influence of the humanities. And colleges and universities have gone from being places where one went to feed one's soul to places one goes to get vocational training for law, medicine, business, or some other career. Educational institutions now feel it is not their job to deal with the state of students' souls. That is too personal and open to too many cultural and socioeconomic interpretations and stratifications. Rather than even make an attempt, they just abandon the mission altogether.

Kronman believes a reestablishment of the traditional humanities is vital if we are to escape the moral malaise we have been in for the last several generations. Yes, every generation talks about its moral malaise. F. Scott Fitzgerald's accounts of the 20s sound a lot like Tom Wolfe's accounts of the 80s. But at least in the 20s, if one wished, one could find a much stronger and broader program of, for lack of a better term, "the classics," than one can find at most universities today. Kronman passionately argues that a return to qualification as well as quantification--a balance--is the only answer to a truly educated mind and soul.

My problem with Education's End is not Kronman's argument, but his writing. He repeats, over-explains and takes many paragraphs to make a simple point. This book could have been half to a third of its length. Or, alternatively, if he's gunning for this length (about 270 pages) he could have dug deeper and gone further. I found myself reflecting on many of his observations and finding examples of them in real life--examples he himself could have examined. For example, the quantification obsession in colleges and universities, even in the humanities, could arguably be illustrated by the quality of entertainment we are getting. Every year artistic programs such as NYC's Tisch School of the Arts, USC's Peter Stark Producing Program, Julliard and Curtis music conservatories, and others, turn out robots who can leap the technical hurdles of their field while displaying no great gut feeling for it. We get folks who go into, say, film and television who can head production companies or turn out "product" for various "windows" of distribution, who can run numbers and predict what programs will rate the highest return, via all sorts of "scientific" focus groups and statistical compilations. How well does this approach work, ultimately? Well, open the movie page of your newspaper and take a look--there's the answer. The movie moguls of the past--the Warners, Selznicks, and Zannucks--didn't have these "scientific" marketing tools. We aren't turning out people with a *passion* for the philosophy behind art--there's passion for their own aggrandizement, but that's something different. The film programs of today could never contain a Fellini, a Bergman, a Truffaut, a Coppola, or a Welles, and some graduates who originally had promise, such as Spielberg and Lucas, instead have turned into the cold, calculating technocrats themselves. (Compare their 70s output with more recent works.) A Yo-Yo Ma plays with more technical security than a Casals ever could. Ditto an Emmanuel Ax vs. a Cortot or an Edwin Fischer. But guess who I would rather listen to.

Kronman's book never explores where this brave new world of preparing young minds has taken us, and there are examples everywhere you look. Instead the book reads like it was dashed off from some notes in a few short writing sessions. There is some poor and awkward wording that makes me wonder if he even went past the first draft--as an educator at Yale, would he have accepted such a half-baked paper from one of his students? I hope not.

Still, I recommend it for the cogent argument, one that more educators ought to be brave enough to make. But Kronman gets an "incomplete" from me until he polishes his writing style, chops the redundancy and fleshes out his argument to give it more strength and relevance. Class dismissed.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fills a lamentable gap, August 16, 2008

By	Joseph Avant - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Hardcover)

Professor Kronman's book fills a lamentable gap in the literature pertaining to higher education, to the extent that most of what is written on higher education today is rather empty. This is the kind of book that a thoughtful person, having finished college, would come across and, after having read it, would realize that they were utterly misguided in their undergraduate career. That being said, I feel the book should be required reading for anyone considering graduate school regardless of the field of study. His analysis of the "modern research ideal" seems to me right on. I would, however, agree with some previous reviewers that the book could have been shorter, and at times I found myself painfully aware that he was making a point he had aready sufficiently made. Nonetheless, the final chapter is quite profound and alone worth the cost of the book.

Yet, as a side note I find it striking that no mention of St. John's College in Sante Fe and Anapolis was made in the book. The "great books" programs at Yale, Columbia, etc simply cannot begin to compare with that of St. John's College. This omission is difficult to reconcile considering that the author sees the "great books" tradition and its secular humanism as the best way out of the current education crisis, and, quite simply, no other college or university better represents secular humanism than St. John's.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Addressing life's meaning for some., September 29, 2008

By	EPCIII "EPCIII" (Texas) - See all my reviews

Education's End is fascinating and provides a persuasive argument for the restoration of liberal education. Kronman argues that the central role of the humanities should be to enable undergraduates to address the question of the meaning of life. He traces the historical development of colleges and universities as they have moved from the antebellum colleges with their theistic answers to this fundamental question and through the phase where secular humanism offered alternative answers. According to Kornman, the humanities in our institutions of higher education have recently been neutered by the dual domination of the academic research ideal and political correctness. His book concludes with an optimistic chapter predicting the return of secular humanism with the diminution of political correctness, the increasing hunger for answers to the question of the meaning of life, and the inability of traditional religions to provide answers to this question.
Kronman's central arguments are insightful and persuasive but some of his supporting arguments are overly simplistic. A minor point is that he states that nineteenth century German universities were first and most influential in promoting research as an academic ideal. In fact, academic specialization began in Scotland when the regenting system was abandoned at the University of Edinburgh in 1707 and at the University of Glasgow in 1727. Some of the chairs at Glasgow supporting specialization and the dates of their establishment were: mathematics (1691); botany and anatomy (1704); and medicine (1713). The discipline of chemistry flourished in Scotland during the second half of the eighteenth century.
A major point is that Kronman uses a rather broad brush in dealing with those who believe in God, at one point casting into one group "the fundamentalist Protestant churches in America, the jihadist wing of Islam and the Pope." Jihadists are as Islamic as the IRA were Roman Catholic. Elsewhere, he suggests that members of organized religion cannot participate in the great conversation because their bigotry prohibits them from recognizing the positions of those of other religions or of secular humanists. Some of his general statements may lead the reader to believe that this characterization applies to all believers of all the world's great religions. Yale may be an exception but the majority of students at many universities who profess a faith in God would find themselves excluded from the dialogue Professor Kronman so passionately promotes.