Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In the halcyon days of the British welfare state, even the poor had the opportunity to go to university. Anyone who had been offered a “place” could apply to the local Education Authority for support — not to cover the fees (there were none), but to meet the expenses of living. But when I took the form to my parents for the necessary signature, they hesitated. Having left school at twelve and fourteen, respectively, they wondered why I wanted “more study.” With my background in mathematics, I was already qualified for “a good job,” one beyond anything they could have imagined for themselves. I might become an accountant, even an actuary. That sort of thinking is still too much with us. It dominates the decisions of powerful people who, unlike my parents, have had ample opportunity to appreciate its shortcomings. The assault on public goods, carried out on both sides of the Atlantic, has bequeathed to nations, in varying degrees, an economic conception of education. Politicians as different as Margaret Thatcher and Barack Obama have played variations on the same theme. We need programs to prepare the young to do their bit in maintaining financial health. Perhaps we are not yet at the stage where embryonic citizens are viewed as raw materials, to be hammered into shape, fitting the available slots in the powerful economic machine that the nation will send to do battle in the Global Demolition Derby, but that vision is on the horizon. From Plato on, most people who have reflected seriously on education and its aims have not adopted the economic conception. Their attitude towards it is the one adopted by Rick Blaine to the petty crook Signor Ugarte: they would despise it if they thought about it. To be sure, many of them are concerned only with the elite, with people who do not have to worry about earning a living. Yet even Adam Smith, very much occupied with eliminating waste in the classroom or lecture-hall — sweeping away “the cobweb science of ontology,” for example — worries about the intellectual and moral decline of the minimally educated worker, confined by the division of labor to a lifetime of repetitive tasks. W.E.B DuBois eloquently strips the common disdain for market-oriented education of its limitation to class: “The object of education is not to make men carpenters but to make carpenters men.” Today, in many affluent nations, the Economic Menace slouches towards the schools and colleges and universities. The funds for public education need to be cut. When school budgets are tight, administrators decide to cut back on “the frills.” The arts and the humanities are the prime targets. Classes in music and the visual arts disappear. Instruction in the “less important” languages, including the dead ones, is abandoned. In the remaining humanities classes, teachers are urged to concentrate on the basics. Less time for literature, more emphasis on functional literacy. Such attitudes are also echoed at higher levels of educational policy. Governments decide to slash the already meager budgets for the humanities and the arts. In the United States, scientists often bewail the reduction of funds to support research, but American humanists can only envy American scientists: although the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health may be pinched by policymakers apparently bereft of any sense of the value of basic research, the scorn directed at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts has been far more intense. Those agencies are permanently threatened by the barbarians within the gates. (It was almost miraculous to read that the Biden administration has proposed to increase these agencies’ funding.) Increasingly, education means training and training means vocational training. Although it is entirely reasonable to identify a capacity for self-maintenance as one of the goals of education, two others ought not to be discarded. Young people should learn how to be citizens and how to be individuals. They should be taught how to be a member of a community, a society, a state, and they should also find their own distinctive place, their own distinctive voice, their own way of contributing to the lives of others, their own projected path to fulfillment. Perhaps tens of thousands of years ago, the small bands of hunter-gatherers of the later Paleolithic reasonably socialized the young by concentrating on the skills required to survive in a precarious world. During recorded history, the vast majority of human beings have been treated as disposable material for rulers bent on maintaining the wealth and power of their domain. Occupations have been routinely assigned by caste or class or gender or race, and their occupants have been efficiently honed to suit the appointed role. Thanks to political and economic developments that are rightly celebrated, some twentieth century societies demonstrated the possibility of doing more than that. They showed, for a time, how all three major aims of education — creating people who are simultaneously workers, citizens, and individuals — were broadly achievable. Why, then, the extraordinary regression, the return to a world in which training substitutes for education? What justifies the penny-pinching and the celebration of economic efficiency above all else? Let us suspend, for a moment, the assumption that what young people need — that all they need — is preparation for “a good job.” In one of the greatest essays on liberty ever written, John Stuart Mill explains what he takes to be fundamental. “The only freedom deserving of the name,” he instructs, “is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.” Mill’s vision of fulfillment, of the worthwhile life, centers on autonomy. Each of us should choose the pattern of our existence, setting the goals we view as most important, and, if we have a tolerable amount of success in attaining them, we shall have lived well. But is that enough? Some projects for a life