For more than 7 years, I’ve shepherded students into higher education and taught literature and philosophy courses at colleges and universities. During my itinerant tenure (an oxymoron, I know), I’ve seen how education has come to be identified almost exclusively with the career path. The trends in majors in higher education bear this out. Since the 1970s, we’ve seen a decline in the number of students majoring in the liberal arts (the humanities, the qualitative branch of the social sciences, and the natural sciences) and a concomitant rise in the number of students majoring in the “practical” arts such as finance, engineering, nursing, pre-law, and accounting. The reasons scholars cite in order to explain this phenomenon–increased tuition, defunding of public universities, the collapse of the job market, the corporatization of higher education, the demand for ‘symbolic workers’ in the ‘new economy,’ and so on–should give us pause, compelling us to reflect upon the ends of education.

This general trend has led to the replacement of the Big Questions by technical and procedural ones. Students working with me on any number of standardized tests–everything from the SAT up to the MCAT–have, by and large, sought to acquire a narrow range of cognitive skills necessary for achieving competency in reading comprehension, elementary mathematics, logical reasoning, and analytical writing. While I believe these skills are necessary, they are by no means sufficient for turning out reasonable persons, moral beings, and committed citizens.

In my college courses, I’ve observed very similar concerns. In fact, I got paid–nauseatingly little, mind you–to teach students the craft of instrumental reason: if they want to achieve a certain end, then what means should they select and pursue to do so? Rarely did we reflect upon whether these ends were ultimately choiceworthy.

The general point is clear. In our models for public education, we’ve moved more and more toward teaching a discrete set of formalized skills and further and further away from teaching “thick” virtues such as courage and humility, those indispensable for making us into considerate, well-meaning moral persons. As educational historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education Dianne Ravitch (as well as many others) have shown, since the 90s the accountability movement has picked up momentum by attaching itself to the standardized testing movement–this despite the fact that the best evidence we have indicates that standardized tests are not an excellent measure of student intelligence or overall achievement. While they are not nothing (in this I disagree with Romantic liberals), they are hardly everything.

The conclusion to this story is that we’ve lost our way. As Americans, we like to bemoan our failing public schools, to worry that we’re being outflanked by China, and to look on in horror at the growing achievement gap. As a graduate of a public high school in rural Wisconsin (yes, dear reader, this is an appeal to pathos) as well as a couple of land grant research universities where I completed my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., I think it’s time, once again, to do philosophy. What we need is a more humane philosophy of education, one anchored in a telos (the nature of the student’s soul once it is educated) and tied to a curriculum (a set of stepping stones marking out a path toward this telos).

What we need is to begin exploring alternative educational models.