The Great Conversation

Higher education in the U.S. is chaotic and is bogged down in makeshift adjustments to environment, too much vocational specialization and lack of a basic philosophy. This is the theme of Robert Maynard Hutchins' new book, The Conflict in Education (Harper; $2), published this week. Educator Hutchins, longtime (1929-51) head of the University of Chicago and now associate director of the Ford Foundation, warns that unless the universities begin preparing students to participate in the "Great Conversation that began with the dawn of history and continues at the present day," the outlook for Western civilization is indeed grim.

What worries Dr. Hutchins most is the pressure on higher education to adjust itself to the prevailing social and political mores of the majority. Says Hutchins: "Everybody is supposed to be like everybody else. The doctrine of adaptation has won the day." All wrong, he says: "The history and tradition of our country make it plain that the essence of the American way of life is its hospitality to criticism, protest, unpopular opinions and independent thought."

Specialization, or what Hutchins calls "the doctrine of the ad hoc," is another plague afflicting higher education. Courses are offered in everything from how to be a beautician to how to drive an automobile, while the bases of the oldtime classical education receive less and less attention. "The process of specialization has . . . turned out to be a process of inhibition ... In the United States, we have discovered that [a specialist] can be a man who learns less and less about less and less."

The third great evil, says Hutchins, is the concept of education as a means of furthering this or that social doctrine. Hutchins uses the same paddle to wallop both John Dewey and T. S. Eliot, who espoused opposed educational philosophies. Dewey held that education should be used to further social reform. Eliot, while disapproving of "reconstructionalism," is just as bad, Hutchins says, because he proclaims that "education should help to preserve the class and select the elite."

The conformists, the specialists, the pragmatists and the reconstructionalists are all wrong, says Hutchins. Education should be neither a means toward earning a living nor of promoting social reform. Education should be liberal, its object "to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives." With such an education, a man can take part in the continuing Great Conversation, and himself seek the answer to the overwhelming question: "What is the nature and destiny of man?"

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