Jamie Smith offers some thoughts on the instrumentalization of education.
As a graduate school prof, I respond: Oh, bladey bladey blah. There is a time in everyone’s career when one gets curmudgeonly. Yet, much of what he says is true — probably even more so in law schools, which are expressly offering career-centric training. But consider the alternative: an elitist system in which only the (male) children of the very rich get to spend a few years at Harvard or Yale (or Oxford, or the Imperial Court) before rejoining the real world while everyone else labors without any education at all?
I think the time we live in now is so unprecedented in terms of education that we take it for granted. I was reading Wired magazine this morning with my coffee, an article about a guy who was sequencing his own daughter’s genome to try and figure out her disability, and thinking: “how can the Church remain relevant in a world where a mid-level employee at a biotech company has enough knowledge and technology to sequence his own child’s genome? What could we say to a guy like that to convince him that Christianity is intellectually credible and satisfying and the Bible isn’t just a collection of ancient Hebrew fairy tales?”