Pope on Higher Education

One of the troubling trends in Higher Education today is the call to make it predominantly about providing technical skills to future workers. Lost in this discourse of essentially vocationalizing post-secondary education are more holistic notions of education as a means to expand the mind, do independent research, think critically about contemporary problems and future solutions and, hopefully, develop a love of learning that will follow you as you embark on your adult life. Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech to university professors in Madrid last Friday that captures the essence of my own critique of the movement toward instrumentalizing education in colleges and universities today:

"At times one has the idea that the mission of a university professor nowadays is exclusively that of forming competent and efficient professionals capable of satisfying the demand for labor at any given time. One also hears it said that the only thing that matters at the present moment is pure technical ability," he said. "This sort of utilitarian approach to education is in fact becoming more widespread, even at the university level, promoted especially by sectors outside the university. All the same, you who, like myself, have had an experience of the university, and now are members of the teaching staff, surely are looking for something more lofty and capable of embracing the full measure of what it is to be human. We know that when mere utility and pure pragmatism become the principal criteria, much is lost and the results can be tragic: from the abuses associated with a science which acknowledges no limits beyond itself, to the political totalitarianism which easily arises when one eliminates any higher reference than the mere calculus of power. The authentic idea of the university, on the other hand, is precisely what saves us from this reductionist and curtailed vision of humanity."