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Karen Gahl-Mills's avatar

Thoughtful, as always. An observation: in the ethics class that I teach, students haven’t built the muscles needed to express a point of view on the material. They seem convinced that their job is to spit back the “right”answer as I have defined it, which, of course, I haven’t done; having to come up with a personal point of view and then defend it is foreign. So while I agree with you about *what* college can or can’t teach, I wonder if we have some work to do with *how* we teach.

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Timothy Burke's avatar

I think frequently attacks on colleges and universities for not responding to a "skills gap" or preparing students for the labor market are an attempt to divert attention from the failures of public and private actors to intervene in labor markets to make them fairer and more responsive (or even, perhaps, in some cases, to protect them on behalf of one's own citizens). Higher education has accepted being a scapegoat in that long-running discourse because until recently that has been a role for which we were heavily compensated--that it was our job to be blamed for the failure of other institutions. At this point, that has become an unfavorable bargain but it's an old habit.

I think much the same is going on in any attempt to say that we have failed to teach ethics or civics. (The right's version is that we are actively 'indoctrinating' the wrong ethics or civics.) This move is principally made by people who are operating within the vast ethical void that is public and commercial life today, produced primarily by people aged 50-80. If the lack of ethics originates from what colleges teach or do not teach, the colleges we should be blaming are those of 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Colleges cannot teach what their society does not otherwise uphold--this is no different than the clergymen of the late 19th and early 20th Century attributing all sorts of social changes to higher education in that moment, when the social changes they were responding to were the result of the preceding three or four decades. There is no teacher so charismatic and wise that they can teach a student to live within an ethics that the student can see being blatantly violated all around them.

It is as you say: people who follow some kind of ethical constraint usually do so according to lived-in, emotionally experienced wisdoms that don't require an education in ethics. What an education in ethics gives us, perhaps, is greater facility for speaking about and recognizing an ethical life when we encounter it, and perhaps therefore some greater probability of following that example. But that doesn't happen right there and then, in the classroom. It only happens by experience--including making mistakes. You're more likely to recognize the human advantages of following ethical guidelines if you've lived through situations where they're often breached, or breached them yourself. No morality has force when it's just a catechism memorized and dutifully repeated.

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