The Decline of Literacy and Liberal Learning

Abstract

This paper examines the decline in performance standards on the part of both students and faculty in higher education today, a decline which is closely correlated with the rise of the “new practicality” in the college curriculum. The presumptive quest for what Veblen called “scholastic efficiency” has, the author argues, “transformed professors into ‘professional entrepreneurs,’ students into credential hustlers, and the curriculum into a wasteland of trivia and pseudo-scientific pretense ” The decline of literacy and liberal learning is not, as the conventional wisdom suggests, attributable to voluntarism. Both students and faculty are subject to a variety of external pressures, constraints, and inducements (financial and otherwise) which condition their choices for the expedient, the experiential, or the entrepreneurial. The author goes on to criticize those faculty who, in the name of a radical pedagogy, promote a “benign permissiveness” in the classroom, deflate expectations, and inflate grades. On the contrary, “intellectual discipline is necessary to the development of incisive critique and ultimately radical thought and practice.” Authentic radicals “have, to their great credit, consistently understood this.” Such a quest for, in effect, “critical literacy” demands exacting criteria of scholarship and a breadth and depth of knowledge found in the bedrock of the liberal arts and sciences curriculum.