What Education, At What Cost?

In “The Big Uneasy“, the New Yorker explores what some students are taking away from their liberal-arts educations:

If you are a white male student, the thought goes, you cannot know what it means to be, say, a Latina; the social and the institutional worlds respond differently to her, and a hundred aggressions, large and small, are baked into the system. You can make yourself her ally, though—deferring to her experience, learning from her accounts, and supporting her struggles. You can reach for unity in difference.

It also profiles some of the students who are learning these important concepts:

Eosphoros is a trans man. He was educated in Mexico, walks with crutches, and suffers from A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder. (He’d lately been on suicide watch.) He has cut off contact with his mother, and he supports himself with jobs at the library and the development office. He said, “I’m kind of about as much of a diversity checklist as you can get while still technically being a white man.”

The epistemology of this paradigm appears to be relativism, which is to say that it is a subscription to denial of a universal human reason. It’s hard to understand what the point of attending an institution of learning is if it has nothing to teach you because your personal experience is the only truth to know.

It’s also hard to accept that this paradigm is representative of a universal truth and thus part of an enlightened human knowledge, not just because that would be a contradiction in terms according to the paradigm itself, but because so many of the correspondents seem to suffer from a multiplicity of dysfunctions.

It seems many of today’s students really need help sorting out their personal problems, not “access to higher education.” When they arrive at even the most accommodating, out-there institutions like Oberlin and find the curriculum is not about them but about something else, they develop severe inferiority complexes that result in frustrated, emotional outbursts.

But, imagining for just a moment that the common mainstream trope that “access to higher education” really is a missing social panacea, are these the students such supporters have in mind and are these the ideas they think are important that they receive as part of their program?

“Students believe that their gender, their ethnicity, their race, whatever, gives them a sort of privileged knowledge—a community-based knowledge—that other groups don’t have,” O’Leary went on.

[…]

“People are so amazed that other people could have a different opinion from them that they don’t want to hear it.”

What is the value “to society” in these factionalizing lessons, and are they really worth borrowing money, in many cases, to have them taught?