I’ve often felt in 2025 that I’m beating against the current, trying to stick with the schedule I planned, but repeatedly being borne back into the past — both to the polemics that drove The Recovering Academic
I'm conflicted on your phrase "advanced literacy" you are clearly right, I doubt the average graduate of a typically underfunded high school could parse that. And I found the primary difference between teaching authors like Arendt to students in a large public university compared to a highly selective private was that most of my time in the former was spent on translation and comprehension, while in the latter on substantive debate. But should we hold that as an *advanced* skill? Or should we push high schools to do better? While it risks a certain elitism that i generally dislike, one advantage of the old "gifted and talented" programs was identity building around arts, language and inquiry. Kids got status and self worth for being smart. The cost, of course, was that identification of such is fraught and often biased, particularly in heterogeneous classrooms. But finding a way to instill early a sense of positive identification with being smart seems a necessary prerequisite to escaping the mess we are in now, and the technological tide of mind numbing social media crossed with GPT as a substitute for craft is hard to resist.
On the deep anti-intellectualism amongst the right-wing working class, I think much of it has to do with a fundamentalist religious grounding. My mother thinks the biggest mistake of my attending college was that it educated religion out of me, and she's harped on that repeatedly to the one other kid (her grandchild, but long story) to go, i think effectively robbing her of what her college experience could have been. If you believe the Earth is 6000 years old, that even the most poetic elements of the psalms are to be taken literally, that education is memorized chapter and verse, then Universities are a threat. I gave her a copy of the social theory text we wrote at one point, and all she took was affront that Marx was included (so was Adam smith and Locke, for the record). Our former 5th grade teacher just informed me they are taking a trip to the Noah's Ark theme park/propaganda site...that's not a milieu in search of complex realities. That brand of religious right sees task-training as the only value in education, which you really do not need a liberal arts university to do. And that feeds directly into the cost-benefit calculation and sales pitch of STEM and business education at university. So it feels more and more like an uphill battle.
Jim, one thing I loved about our schooling in Troy was that we had a real taste of what a high quality public education could still look like. That included high-caliber teachers, but it also included families with high standards for their kids. There were plenty who struggled, but many of them also tried to reach the high bar that our peer group set. That dynamic required some economic prosperity from logging and mining and other contextual factors that are harder to replicate now. But it was possible, even in our little backwater town, to build a sense of the commons, where differing views could meaningfully engage. The literacy that emerged from THS was advanced -- I know of 4 PhDs from my class alone. As you said once, our cohort is more than making rate. Elitism really only comes from a lower standard or lower rates of access. Most kids will rise to expectations if challenged and if surrounded by a cohort that buys into the premise. Hence Edwards' ability to preach sophisticated sermons to his congregation, knowing that they'd be able to understand.
I agree about fundamentalism. That is true in all religious traditions: extremism and puritanism are synonymous with an incurious mind. The Noah's Ark theme park is an abomination. However, there are many religious traditions with deep intellectual histories. Islamic scientists and philosophers do not fear education; all truth is welcome. My Catholic students were consistently among the best prepared for college and genuinely viewed our discussions as carrying high personal stakes. Similarly, my Jewish students and colleagues have always respected scholarship and truth seeking. So there is no necessary antipathy between learning and faith. I plan to write more on this in the future.
Fundamentalism in the way that you describe is self-defeating. By trying to limit examination of truth, that view only makes itself more vulnerable to scrutiny once a child gets a taste of free inquiry. If it's really truth, it has nothing to fear from serious study.
Thank you for this amazing essay. I have been feeling this for years. When people exclaim, "Where did we go wrong?" regarding our country, my response is, "We turned our back on education!" I am sharing this with everyone!
Thank you! I'd only add that education in America and elsewhere only reaches its full potential when it's available to everyone. That's how we create a sense of the commons, of shared cultural knowledge and shared responsibility for governance.
I wonder if the tension rests in the puzzle posed by belief itself. Before knowledge became the purview of the sciences, 'knowing' and believing were essentially the same thing. And even though experimental knowledge requires some smaller leap of faith in both its enactment and its accumulation - we presume upon that previous in an 'as if' relation, for instance - science declaims any apodeictic condition; is ever open to being mistaken. Religion does not have that ultimate openness, even though we do hear most theologians remind us that human knowledge of Godhead must be, and by definition, incomplete. Is it possible as well that Americans, and others, not only reject thinking but as well faith itself? I ask this because what passes for faith in much of modern Christianity appears to be composed of self-serving rationalizations that either depart from the Kerygma of its Gospels or engage in strained alchemies of old and new testaments. Beyond this, faith does not itself proclaim any absolute status to its knowing, relying upon what William James famously referred to as 'the sacrifice of the intellect' which all religious belief n demands. In this sense even the term 'Christian College' would be an oxymoron. Having taught at a Catholic liberal arts college for many years, I relied upon its vast intellectual tradition to expand and enhance my own pedagogic work. At the same time, in each discourse of belief, there is a backstop whereupon the intellect can take refuge from the pressing void of non-conscious presence; the cosmos anonymous and sentience happenstance. This is what I take to be James' deeper meaning: as long is there is belief, the intellect is itself limited. His sub-title to his 1901 Gifford Lectures suggests that this is, after all, our human condition ('a study in human nature'), but that in turn suggests that the intellect may itself be but another object of faith.
I hear what you're saying, Greg, but I think I disagree. This is the distinction Edwards draws between truth and excellency. Reason can carry you so far, but it cannot be enough on its own to account for our apprehension of beauty or laughter or poetry. That appreciation completes itself beyond the reach of reason, even if reasoning leads to religious or intellectual epiphanies.
I've been considering this recently while reexamining my own spirituality. Even secular philosophies are not perpetually open to falsification in the way that science is. The true origin of the universe necessarily remains a mystery. A purely scientific view simply takes the Big Bang as the starting point and doesn't inquire about anything before that because it's unknowable. So I think atheism or humanism includes plenty of limits on the intellect, too. Even science is not pure in that regard, as Helen Longino suggests in her book "Science as Social Knowledge." The questions that get asked (through funding or other means), how they are asked, and how the results are received all take place within cultural contexts. There are plenty of scientific questions and studies that remain unfinished or unexplored because of lack of access or resources. So the theoretical idea that there are no intellectual limits on science doesn't matter much if those contextual constraints limit the practice of science.
I was thinking about something related to James's point the other day and will likely write about it soon. It's related to a verse in the Qur'an about those who deny the truth -- how that denial, over time, hardens into blindness. At that point, the choice to see differently has vanished. C.S. Lewis captures this idea in "The Last Battle," when all the faithful Narnians enter Aslan's country, but the dwarves -- who are also in that paradise -- insist on seeing only the stable where they had been formerly imprisoned. So this is true of pretty much any philosophical premise or belief: it can become an inflexible prism that makes a person only seek confirmation of the a priori proposition. "There is no God" becomes a filter for evidence; or "God created the earth in 7 days" or whatever.
If our philosophical commitments and belief require an element of faith -- that we're not perpetually returning to our foundational reasons for thinking or believing a certain way -- then the question becomes whether a particular strain of thought or belief is producing good fruit in the individual. I'm mindful of some problems with this thinking (it's too close to Pascal's Gambit), but it's something I've been meditating on of late.
I am definitely not expressing any personal sensibility upon this point, but merely wondered about the source of the 'anti-intellectualist' suasion within a specific culture history. Certainly, as a thinker, I give equal credit to the human imagination as I do human reason, and the limits of one are oft mitigated by the gifts of the other. My question was rather, 'what is it about the character of belief itself that tends to act against that of thought?'. As you have stated, related issues such as the 'gallery', to use Latour's (1986) term, within which science operates, or the distinction between meaning and meaningfulness, are of interest, but I do not think them to be front and center to such a query as your piece made me muse upon. I suppose I would be fronting a kind of Weberian view, which might ask, 'how do people interpret their beliefs so that they lend some kind of cantor against thinking?'; that sort of thing. At the same time, I do think there exists in philosophy as a practice, an open-endedness that does not suffer the same kinds of built-in limitations that certain religions - those committed to a specific cosmogony, for example, rather than merely to a more amorphous cosmology; this difference characterizes agrarian versus pre-agrarian systems in general - find themselves abiding by. Hermeneutics is one example. Pragmatism may be another. These are at once 'schools' or departments in the history of philosophy, but as well, embody the essence of what it means to work and think 'philosophically'. In this, they differ from both science and religion. I suppose as well it might be too romantic a notion to acquit science of any kind of limit, even as an abstraction, but I wonder if the scientific credo of 'seeking truth', genealogically based as it is upon that religious, allows for a certain kind of practitioner to avoid the aleatory implications of science; for instance, if a Christian engages in science, 'knowing' that at the end of the day, they are simply revealing the details of creation to a humanity which is more than curious, but as well anxious in very much the Pauline sense.
The important parts of this article were the one alluding to the diversion of resources/prioritizing by the education industry away from teaching students towards administration/entertainment/research and on the part of students to a lack of motivation which often reflects a lack of preparation predating school enrollment. The cost of education as a burden seems to be borne on those who received a poor ROI which is a function both of society poorly preparing the students and the students not realizing that what you get out of something has to do with what you put into it. Resentment occurs when taxpayers are asked to pay for a poor investment. Remember the uproar over too big to fail bailouts.
Can't do anything about the attitudes of those whose lives are stuck on the lower rungs of the Erickson life stages. The rest of this is, well, academic.
This is like saying practice makes perfect when it's really more like perfect practice makes perfect. Crappy education offered to unmotivated students is indeed a waste of money. The underlying problem to all of this are the forces producing unmotivated students and the resistance of the ruling class to allocate resources to the lower 80%. Lest I sound like a silver spoon type, I grew up as an ESL in So. Central LA and my parents were working class. I was fortunate that my family received assistance by the Catholic school system and that I spent several of my formative years in Mexico in a nurturing social setting. Also my wife was an elementary school educator now retired who saw the decline in her public school system over four decades.
I think Freire answered this puzzle fairly well. It is a matter of summoning a kind of 'class consciousness' to overcome the sense that praxis is to be treated as a mere extension of hexis, which is what higher ed. mostly does today. I too grew up in a barn, as it were, but my parents, though middle-brow philistines, were for all that not barbarians. My mother taught ESL, as a matter of fact, my sister a veteran of 50 years as public school teacher and principal, and my father taught the building code to inspectors in training at a local Tier 5. I have admired Joshua's work here as it is direct and diligent departure from all things 'academic', so I would like to defend it along those lines.
Neglected to thank you for this piece. Along with Hilarius Bookbinder's article which you referenced, this article provided much food for reflection. The Odyssey begins by characterizing Odysseus as polytropos which Wilson translates as complicated. American attitudes towards education and learning certainly qualify. It's the country that produced Trump but also Jefferson, Franklin and- in what may have been it's greatest achievement- Abraham Lincoln.
Outstanding piece, thanks for writing it.
I'm conflicted on your phrase "advanced literacy" you are clearly right, I doubt the average graduate of a typically underfunded high school could parse that. And I found the primary difference between teaching authors like Arendt to students in a large public university compared to a highly selective private was that most of my time in the former was spent on translation and comprehension, while in the latter on substantive debate. But should we hold that as an *advanced* skill? Or should we push high schools to do better? While it risks a certain elitism that i generally dislike, one advantage of the old "gifted and talented" programs was identity building around arts, language and inquiry. Kids got status and self worth for being smart. The cost, of course, was that identification of such is fraught and often biased, particularly in heterogeneous classrooms. But finding a way to instill early a sense of positive identification with being smart seems a necessary prerequisite to escaping the mess we are in now, and the technological tide of mind numbing social media crossed with GPT as a substitute for craft is hard to resist.
On the deep anti-intellectualism amongst the right-wing working class, I think much of it has to do with a fundamentalist religious grounding. My mother thinks the biggest mistake of my attending college was that it educated religion out of me, and she's harped on that repeatedly to the one other kid (her grandchild, but long story) to go, i think effectively robbing her of what her college experience could have been. If you believe the Earth is 6000 years old, that even the most poetic elements of the psalms are to be taken literally, that education is memorized chapter and verse, then Universities are a threat. I gave her a copy of the social theory text we wrote at one point, and all she took was affront that Marx was included (so was Adam smith and Locke, for the record). Our former 5th grade teacher just informed me they are taking a trip to the Noah's Ark theme park/propaganda site...that's not a milieu in search of complex realities. That brand of religious right sees task-training as the only value in education, which you really do not need a liberal arts university to do. And that feeds directly into the cost-benefit calculation and sales pitch of STEM and business education at university. So it feels more and more like an uphill battle.
Jim, one thing I loved about our schooling in Troy was that we had a real taste of what a high quality public education could still look like. That included high-caliber teachers, but it also included families with high standards for their kids. There were plenty who struggled, but many of them also tried to reach the high bar that our peer group set. That dynamic required some economic prosperity from logging and mining and other contextual factors that are harder to replicate now. But it was possible, even in our little backwater town, to build a sense of the commons, where differing views could meaningfully engage. The literacy that emerged from THS was advanced -- I know of 4 PhDs from my class alone. As you said once, our cohort is more than making rate. Elitism really only comes from a lower standard or lower rates of access. Most kids will rise to expectations if challenged and if surrounded by a cohort that buys into the premise. Hence Edwards' ability to preach sophisticated sermons to his congregation, knowing that they'd be able to understand.
I agree about fundamentalism. That is true in all religious traditions: extremism and puritanism are synonymous with an incurious mind. The Noah's Ark theme park is an abomination. However, there are many religious traditions with deep intellectual histories. Islamic scientists and philosophers do not fear education; all truth is welcome. My Catholic students were consistently among the best prepared for college and genuinely viewed our discussions as carrying high personal stakes. Similarly, my Jewish students and colleagues have always respected scholarship and truth seeking. So there is no necessary antipathy between learning and faith. I plan to write more on this in the future.
Fundamentalism in the way that you describe is self-defeating. By trying to limit examination of truth, that view only makes itself more vulnerable to scrutiny once a child gets a taste of free inquiry. If it's really truth, it has nothing to fear from serious study.
Interesting…I think fundamentalist religious ideology is, like all forms of authoritarianism, deeply opposed to education.
“Outrage in search of purpose is a deadly thing. This, too, is the whirlwind we now reap.”
Indeed…and we surrounded by it 🙄
Thank you for this amazing essay. I have been feeling this for years. When people exclaim, "Where did we go wrong?" regarding our country, my response is, "We turned our back on education!" I am sharing this with everyone!
Thank you! I'd only add that education in America and elsewhere only reaches its full potential when it's available to everyone. That's how we create a sense of the commons, of shared cultural knowledge and shared responsibility for governance.
I agree fully! Inclusion is vital.
"Maypole" is one of Hawthorne's best stories.
"Rappaccini's Daughter" is perhaps the best of all, but, yes, a tight little sketch.
I wonder if the tension rests in the puzzle posed by belief itself. Before knowledge became the purview of the sciences, 'knowing' and believing were essentially the same thing. And even though experimental knowledge requires some smaller leap of faith in both its enactment and its accumulation - we presume upon that previous in an 'as if' relation, for instance - science declaims any apodeictic condition; is ever open to being mistaken. Religion does not have that ultimate openness, even though we do hear most theologians remind us that human knowledge of Godhead must be, and by definition, incomplete. Is it possible as well that Americans, and others, not only reject thinking but as well faith itself? I ask this because what passes for faith in much of modern Christianity appears to be composed of self-serving rationalizations that either depart from the Kerygma of its Gospels or engage in strained alchemies of old and new testaments. Beyond this, faith does not itself proclaim any absolute status to its knowing, relying upon what William James famously referred to as 'the sacrifice of the intellect' which all religious belief n demands. In this sense even the term 'Christian College' would be an oxymoron. Having taught at a Catholic liberal arts college for many years, I relied upon its vast intellectual tradition to expand and enhance my own pedagogic work. At the same time, in each discourse of belief, there is a backstop whereupon the intellect can take refuge from the pressing void of non-conscious presence; the cosmos anonymous and sentience happenstance. This is what I take to be James' deeper meaning: as long is there is belief, the intellect is itself limited. His sub-title to his 1901 Gifford Lectures suggests that this is, after all, our human condition ('a study in human nature'), but that in turn suggests that the intellect may itself be but another object of faith.
I hear what you're saying, Greg, but I think I disagree. This is the distinction Edwards draws between truth and excellency. Reason can carry you so far, but it cannot be enough on its own to account for our apprehension of beauty or laughter or poetry. That appreciation completes itself beyond the reach of reason, even if reasoning leads to religious or intellectual epiphanies.
I've been considering this recently while reexamining my own spirituality. Even secular philosophies are not perpetually open to falsification in the way that science is. The true origin of the universe necessarily remains a mystery. A purely scientific view simply takes the Big Bang as the starting point and doesn't inquire about anything before that because it's unknowable. So I think atheism or humanism includes plenty of limits on the intellect, too. Even science is not pure in that regard, as Helen Longino suggests in her book "Science as Social Knowledge." The questions that get asked (through funding or other means), how they are asked, and how the results are received all take place within cultural contexts. There are plenty of scientific questions and studies that remain unfinished or unexplored because of lack of access or resources. So the theoretical idea that there are no intellectual limits on science doesn't matter much if those contextual constraints limit the practice of science.
I was thinking about something related to James's point the other day and will likely write about it soon. It's related to a verse in the Qur'an about those who deny the truth -- how that denial, over time, hardens into blindness. At that point, the choice to see differently has vanished. C.S. Lewis captures this idea in "The Last Battle," when all the faithful Narnians enter Aslan's country, but the dwarves -- who are also in that paradise -- insist on seeing only the stable where they had been formerly imprisoned. So this is true of pretty much any philosophical premise or belief: it can become an inflexible prism that makes a person only seek confirmation of the a priori proposition. "There is no God" becomes a filter for evidence; or "God created the earth in 7 days" or whatever.
If our philosophical commitments and belief require an element of faith -- that we're not perpetually returning to our foundational reasons for thinking or believing a certain way -- then the question becomes whether a particular strain of thought or belief is producing good fruit in the individual. I'm mindful of some problems with this thinking (it's too close to Pascal's Gambit), but it's something I've been meditating on of late.
I am definitely not expressing any personal sensibility upon this point, but merely wondered about the source of the 'anti-intellectualist' suasion within a specific culture history. Certainly, as a thinker, I give equal credit to the human imagination as I do human reason, and the limits of one are oft mitigated by the gifts of the other. My question was rather, 'what is it about the character of belief itself that tends to act against that of thought?'. As you have stated, related issues such as the 'gallery', to use Latour's (1986) term, within which science operates, or the distinction between meaning and meaningfulness, are of interest, but I do not think them to be front and center to such a query as your piece made me muse upon. I suppose I would be fronting a kind of Weberian view, which might ask, 'how do people interpret their beliefs so that they lend some kind of cantor against thinking?'; that sort of thing. At the same time, I do think there exists in philosophy as a practice, an open-endedness that does not suffer the same kinds of built-in limitations that certain religions - those committed to a specific cosmogony, for example, rather than merely to a more amorphous cosmology; this difference characterizes agrarian versus pre-agrarian systems in general - find themselves abiding by. Hermeneutics is one example. Pragmatism may be another. These are at once 'schools' or departments in the history of philosophy, but as well, embody the essence of what it means to work and think 'philosophically'. In this, they differ from both science and religion. I suppose as well it might be too romantic a notion to acquit science of any kind of limit, even as an abstraction, but I wonder if the scientific credo of 'seeking truth', genealogically based as it is upon that religious, allows for a certain kind of practitioner to avoid the aleatory implications of science; for instance, if a Christian engages in science, 'knowing' that at the end of the day, they are simply revealing the details of creation to a humanity which is more than curious, but as well anxious in very much the Pauline sense.
The important parts of this article were the one alluding to the diversion of resources/prioritizing by the education industry away from teaching students towards administration/entertainment/research and on the part of students to a lack of motivation which often reflects a lack of preparation predating school enrollment. The cost of education as a burden seems to be borne on those who received a poor ROI which is a function both of society poorly preparing the students and the students not realizing that what you get out of something has to do with what you put into it. Resentment occurs when taxpayers are asked to pay for a poor investment. Remember the uproar over too big to fail bailouts.
Can't do anything about the attitudes of those whose lives are stuck on the lower rungs of the Erickson life stages. The rest of this is, well, academic.
I'd like to think that education, if offered to all, can do a great deal to move people along from the early life stages.
This is like saying practice makes perfect when it's really more like perfect practice makes perfect. Crappy education offered to unmotivated students is indeed a waste of money. The underlying problem to all of this are the forces producing unmotivated students and the resistance of the ruling class to allocate resources to the lower 80%. Lest I sound like a silver spoon type, I grew up as an ESL in So. Central LA and my parents were working class. I was fortunate that my family received assistance by the Catholic school system and that I spent several of my formative years in Mexico in a nurturing social setting. Also my wife was an elementary school educator now retired who saw the decline in her public school system over four decades.
I think Freire answered this puzzle fairly well. It is a matter of summoning a kind of 'class consciousness' to overcome the sense that praxis is to be treated as a mere extension of hexis, which is what higher ed. mostly does today. I too grew up in a barn, as it were, but my parents, though middle-brow philistines, were for all that not barbarians. My mother taught ESL, as a matter of fact, my sister a veteran of 50 years as public school teacher and principal, and my father taught the building code to inspectors in training at a local Tier 5. I have admired Joshua's work here as it is direct and diligent departure from all things 'academic', so I would like to defend it along those lines.
Quality is key, I agree.
Neglected to thank you for this piece. Along with Hilarius Bookbinder's article which you referenced, this article provided much food for reflection. The Odyssey begins by characterizing Odysseus as polytropos which Wilson translates as complicated. American attitudes towards education and learning certainly qualify. It's the country that produced Trump but also Jefferson, Franklin and- in what may have been it's greatest achievement- Abraham Lincoln.
Oh dear, that sounds almost 'anti-intellectual'! Fittingly ironic.