Scholarship & Sanctity - St. John's Catholic Newman Center

CathIlliniAUG09R 7/31/09 3:19 PM Page 15
Institute News
Vocational Training or Liberal Education?
Dr. Kenneth J. Howell
Education is a costly business.
Every year billions of dollars are spent
on educating and training people from
five to fifty, from preschool to Ph.D.,
with countless human hours spent on
helping young people to prepare for
daily life in the modern world. Americans
believe in the value of education
and Catholics are no different. Education
has clearly been central to the mission
of the Church. It is not too far a
stretch to say that western education, as
we know it today, might not have existed
had it not been for a culture of learning
shaped by the Catholic Church.
Certainly, it is true that universities were
born in a medieval Europe shaped by
Judeo-Christian values transmitted
through the Church.
The true cost of education, however,
cannot be measured in dollars and
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cents. There is another sense in which
education today is costly. Universities
in the United States have been transformed
in the course of the twentieth
century. I recall reading an introduction
to a translation of ancient Greek
mathematical works in which the
translator noted the increasing specialization
that was occurring in
modern universities. The date of the
preface was 1937. What was a growing
phenomenon in universities of
the 1930s has become accepted fare
today. Today’s research universities
have become bastions of narrow fields
of knowledge in which liberal education
is patently lacking. Their task
largely consists of vocational training
in which students learn very little
outside their chosen specialization.
I believe that at the beginning of
this new millennium vocational training
in our universities has cost us
dearly in the ability of people to collect,
analyze, and synthesize knowledge.
Many educated people know
how to gain knowledge in their own
fields of study but few truly rise to the
level of genuine understanding of how
their specialized field relates to wider
human concerns. There are gaping
holes in educated people’s ability to
think outside a narrow range of questions.
There are many examples of this
lacuna but let me chart one which
may be counterposed to the idea of a
truly liberal education advocated by
the Church. One of the deleterious
effects of specialized vocational training
has to do with the susceptibility of
educated people to intellectual fads
and passing ideologies. I have found
that most students today, as well as
many faculty, often assume that faith
and reason are in contrast and opposi-