I have been reading about the plans of the University of Leicester, England, to drop medieval literature and English from the curriculum in favor of “a range of modules which are excitingly innovative,” such as courses on race, ethnicity, sexuality and diversity.  The University is calling this a “decolonized curriculum.”

Dr. Shazia Jagot, a Leicester alumnus of South Asian and working class background, asks “"What happens when you remove the opportunity for students, particularly black and ethnic minority students, to read Beowulf, Chaucer and Milton?”

Such developments shouldn’t astonish anyone.  They merely continue trends well advanced on both sides of the Atlantic, replacing a broadening education with a narrowing indoctrination.

In some ways, more educated people are better informed, even today.  In an era of ideological education like ours, though, in other ways they are less so.  Unsurprisingly, the honors students in my classes are much more eager to please their teachers than my other students are.  So, by and large, they are more susceptible to indoctrination – and by this time in their lives, more thoroughly indoctrinated -- than students of middling ability.  They believe what they’re told, if told by the right sorts of persons, but they may not talk at all to the other sorts of persons.  One would think they would always be better at critical thinking, but they are often more naïve and closed-minded.  They may have more numerous sources of information, but their sources are often less intellectually diverse. 

Being young, they have too little self-knowledge to recognize themselves in such a description, and tend to believe exactly the opposite of themselves on all counts.  As one told me when I asked what she was learning, “We can do everything.”

Providing promising students with the opportunity to become liberally educated without merely puffing up their egos and setting them up to be brainwashed is hard and getting harder.  Finding ways to teach the liberal arts outside of colleges and universities is of the first importance to civilization.

Related:

Which Diversity Matters (If Any)

A few fortunate persons really are ahead in almost every intellectual category, and a few unfortunate ones deficient.  Whether there exists a single quality we should call general intelligence – rather than a large collection of very different intellectual qualities – is an altogether different matter. 

In fact, an awful lot of what we call general intelligence is merely having certain very narrow intellectual traits that are admired or considered unusual.  For example, persons who are good at mathematics or scholarship are generally regarded as “smart,” and persons who are good at building cabinets aren’t usually given that label.  But a fellow who can build a cabinet may be good at lots of things, including learning how to do other things -- and a genius at manipulating abstractions or writing research articles might be a dope in every other way.  Mind you, I am not dismissing mathematical genius or scholarly excellence.  I admire them.  But they are special, not general, mental traits.

It also seems that a great many supposed differences in intelligence are really differences in personality.  Consider innovators.  We suppose that a person who often does something original has more of some hypothetical intellectual quality called “originality,” and perhaps he does, but I am not convinced that any such quality exists.  Perhaps he is just more easily bored by doing the same old thing, or less afraid of being mocked for following a different path, or more persistent at explaining to other people why the odd thing that he’s doing ought to interest them too.

Finally, intelligence isn’t the same as wisdom, which is not a kind of intelligence but an intellectual virtue.  One would expect the two to go together.  After all, if you haven't the equipment for forming good judgments or for readily drawing inferences from premises, you may have a hard time perceiving the shape of things or grasping how to live.  But it doesn’t always work that way.  Innovators are often so obsessed that they can do something that they fail to ask whether it should be done.  Intellectuals are more likely than others to be arrogant.  Persons who live badly, or who deceive themselves, may bend each of their substantial intellectual talents to maintaining their self-deceptions, rather than seeking the truth.

On the other hand, a person who is not very clever himself, but who has the moral virtues, may possess among other good qualities the old-fashioned intellectual virtue called “docility to counsel,” enabling him to exercise good judgment about who he should listen to, and who he shouldn’t, concerning matters that he understands poorly.  Wisdom comes in degrees, more and less, but in all its degrees, it is more about having a rightly ordered intellect than a big one.

None of this is an excuse for anti-intellectualism.  It does oppose a certain kind of meritocracy.  We ought to be ruled by wisdom, not by the particular sort of intellectual talent that happens to be admired in our circle.

Just because disorder is so spectacular in public life, it is easy to confuse causes with symptoms.  I am all for political reform, but our decline cannot be cured just by better policies, strategies, candidates, inventions, or techniques, for its ultimate causes are moral and spiritual.

On the whole, these causes are no better understood by the various factions of reformers than by those whom they are trying to reform, and they affect them just as strongly.  This is why our choices become less and less attractive, and why more and more of the things that pass under the name of making things better actually make them worse.

“All right, wise guy.  If our disorder can’t be cured by politics, what’s your big idea?”  I haven’t one.  But I can suggest a place to start.

Let each of us resolve, once and for all, I will not do evil so that good will result.

Think it over carefully.  Consider all the things that a person must stop believing, start believing, or remember, just for the resolution to make sense.

Reminder:  On Tuesday, March 2nd, at 1:30pm Central Time, I’ll be speaking about “The Flavors of the Common Good.”  This will be the second in a series of Conversations offered by the Common Good Project, a new initiative of the Law School, University of Oxford, England.  Anyone who would like to hear it streamed can sign up here.

I happen to be on the board of advisors for the Common Good Project, a new initiative of the Law School, University of Oxford, England.  On Tuesday, March 2nd, at 1:30pm Central Time (that's night in Oxford), I’ll be speaking about “The Flavors of the Common Good,” which will be the second in the Project’s series of Conversations.  Anyone who would like to hear it streamed can sign up here.

For those who read my longer items, the next of my commentaries on Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Divine Law, will be published in May by Cambridge University Press.  This is not the same as my earlier Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law.

Three new articles and book chapters of mine have also just been posted to the Read Articles section of this website:

Of Course Human Law Develops. Can Natural and Divine Law Develop?  In a symposium on “Aquinas on the Development of Law,” Aquinas Institute, held at the Blackfriars, Oxford University, Oxford, England, March, 2019.  Published in Law and Justice, No. 183 (2019).

Thomas Aquinas on Marriage, Fruitfulness, and Faithful Love.  In Theresa Notare, ed., Humanae Vitae 50 Years Later: A Compendium (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019).

’The Same as to Knowledge’.  In Christopher Wolfe and Steven Brust, eds., Natural Law Today: The Present State of the Perennial Philosophy (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018).