Bruce Christensen, Dean, College of Fine Arts and Communications, Brigham Young University sent the following letter

First, I think you were a bit hard on teachers and the education system. Like car mechanics, we're not perfect, but to condemn millions of educators just because of a few hundred thousand rotten apples seems a bit extreme!

Now for the answer to your question, which is one that we spend a good deal of time thinking about, since that is what we are paid to do. It's not as exciting as looking at new-model cars, but it is far more rewarding.

The best definition of education I have found comes from S. I. Hayakawa. Here it is:

"The Goals of Education," from Through the Communications Barrier by S. I. Hayakawa, Harper and Row, 1979.

Basic goals of education are those that apply to everyone--men and women, rich and poor.

Goal One: To learn to understand, appreciate, and take care of the natural world we live in. Most people go through life unaware of the fascinating complex of events around them, of climate and terrain and vegetation and animals and people and their interrelatedness. Civilized people need to know not only what the environment is like, but how to keep it habitable.

Goal Two: To understand, appreciate, and learn to live with the fellow inhabitants of our planet. Every child must learn about the races and peoples of the world and the rich variety of the world's cultures. He must know something of the history of men and of nations. He must learn that there are many people in the world who differ profoundly in habits, ideas, and ways of life. He must perceive these differences not as occasions for uneasiness or hostility, but as challenges of his own capacity for understanding.

Goal Three: Every student should have an area of aesthetic experience--and I would include the religious and spiritual with the aesthetic. The aesthetic experience is the organization of our feelings--the search for and the creation of order in our affective life. The significance, the meanings that we perceive, are private. To give ourselves, for at least a part of the time, to the lonely contemplation of some kind of beauty and order is also to enrich ourselves so that we have something to contribute to the lives of others.

Goal Four: Everyone should be capable of earning a living. This can be learned in school or out, and at any level from humble work to highly paid, professional skills. Each of us needs to feel, sometime in life, that his services are important enough so that someone other than the welfare department is willing to pay to keep him alive. Those who have never proved their usefulness remain forever at a disadvantage, because work is the basic way in which most of us relate to the world.

But work is, in a profound way, held in contempt by our educational system. Students believed to be low in academic talent are steered into vocational programs, while academically more gifted students are steered away from them, as if they were too good to be made to work. Such an arbitrary and invidious distinction inflicts an injustice both on the academically slow and on the advanced. All high schools and colleges should maintain an active relationship between the academic world and the world where people earn a living.

Goal Five: The last I regard as the most important of all--the learning of some kind of critical or intellectual method. We have all learned that we live in an age of an information explosion. But we are also in the middle of a misinformation explosion. With the proliferation of mass communications media, we are surrounded by hawkers, pitchmen, hard and soft sells, persuaders hidden and overt. Bombarded daily with millions of words by print and electronic media, we all have to have some kind of critical method by means of which to decide whom and what to believe, and to what degree.

How is propaganda evaluated? It cannot always be analyzed by scientific method, since propagandistic statements are rarely capable of proof; but it can be approached with a scientific attitude. Some kind of discipline in the orientations of science is necessary to inculcate a critical attitude towards words, our own as well as those of others, so that our lives may be governed by that skepticism and respect for fact that characterize the rational mind, though without the pervasive cynicism that disbelieves or doubts everything. We are living in a time when rationality has suddenly gone out of fashion. In the world of hip literary intellectuals, there are cults of mysticism; fads for such things as the I Ching, an ancient Chinese system of fortune-telling, divination by tarot cards, and astrology. The political left fostered a cult of violence, devoid of any serious social analysis, yet capable of producing followers cross-eyed with mindless fanaticism. Never has rationality been so badly needed as in this period when intellectuals themselves are spearheading the drive toward anti-intellectualism.

Thanks for the opportunity to contribute.

Bruce Christensen.

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