Education, Reduced

“Me! Me! Me! Me! Don’t you ever get tired of thinking about your dull, greedy, small self?” — Dave to his brother Frank, from Vincente Minnelli’s film Some Came Running, 1959

1 A Short History of America, in the Statements of Five Presidents

1941: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressing Congress: “…we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor — anywhere in the world.”

1961: John F. Kennedy, in his inaugural address:  “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” To be fair, in most of that speech he expresses concern for the whole world, though not with the inclusive equality that FDR did.  Also to be fair, how unlikely would it be for us to hear a politician say anything like that today, emphasizing what a citizen might offer their country rather than what a citizen might wish to receive from it?

1980: Ronald Reagan, in a television debate with Jimmy Carter during the presidential campaign: “…ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?  Is it easier for you to go and buy things in a store than it was four years ago?” He posed the electoral choice in his closing remarks as a question of the economic well-being of voters. This was a key moment in the national collapse in our care for others, which has only grotesquely transitioned into actual hatred with presidential falsehoods such as “They’re eating the dogs” today.

2001: George W. Bush right after 9/11, on how Americans can help their country:  “Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed….Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down and see America the way you want to see it….The American economy depends upon you going about your business.”

2021, in January: A president who famously puts himself first above all others mounted a violent insurrection against the Capitol and his own government to reverse the results of the election and hence destroy the Constitution. His Vice President, Mike Pence, had decided correctly that he did not have the power to cancel the election results, as the president had been urging him to do. At a time when the president’s mob was trespassing its way through the Capitol chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” while a noose was already installed on a tree branch outside, and  just after the president was told in a phone call that the lives of Pence and his family were in danger, he tweeted,  reportedly further inflaming the crowd with  “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Note the extreme narrowing, from a concern for the whole world, to what one can offer their own country, to  what the country can offer its citizens, to voters being advised to spend money and enjoy their lives in the shadow of almost 3,000 murdered by terrorists,  to a violent assault to benefit the president himself.

2 Higher Education Today

I took this photograph of an advertisement on a Chicago bus on May 26, 2026. “NIU” is a State of Illinois public university. Admittedly an ad in a bus cannot offer much detail. Still,  professors might be at least a little bit miffed to see their function configured solely in terms of offering a reference. Indeed, the wording seems to equate the professor with the reference they might give, as if that is their sole value.

In smaller type, we read “Your Story.” This is perhaps even more consequential. Colleges seek students by speaking to, and implicitly praising,  their identities. The implication is that the student enters college as a fully developed human, and the job of the college is to validate, to support, to confirm, as if “identity” were a static consumer object. This also must be considered in the context of the consumerism that, aided by technology, has taken over our culture.

American businesses have become expert at extracting money from consumers by selling products that cater to the consumer, creating and then satisfying biological urges. Cigarette companies internally called their product a “drug-delivery system.” Hollywood filmmakers have become ever more skilled at using plots organized around sex and explosions to get viewers’ hormones pumping. Snack food makers use phrases internally such as “sensory appeal optimization.” For a person who reaches their late teens thoroughly conditioned by such appeals, having your professor represented as useful by being equated to a reference may not seem so strange. Imagine, instead, a college advertisement such as, “Our students will learn how to spend part of their lifetimes helping others.” I would like to think  this unusual pitch could actually work for  one or two  small colleges whose curricula fit the description, but it seems unlikely to work for most. JFK’s statement, which impressed me positively at age 14, seems weirdly anachronistic today.

The identity issue is complex. We should  understand how members of marginalized groups have suffered severe oppression for decades — in some cases  even forbidden, due to  the certainty of losing one’s job and being unable to find another, from  speaking a word that would best define a large part of who they are. It is good news that we may now celebrate the speaking of such words, studying the groups’ histories, singing their achievements. The problem is that the whole of one’s “identity,” which should generally not be reducible to a few words,  is too often conceived of as a static resting point, one which should only be validated, rather than the starting point it ought to be at age 18 — and indeed, to some extent at any age, and I write this as a 78-year-old.

What education does at its best is change us for the better. I was changed by my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Seeley, whose assignments to memorize one poem each week taught me the best way of understanding  poems; by the new kinds of thinking required for learning serious math — the kind that comes with definitions, postulates, and theorems and doesn’t necessarily have immediate practical applications — in high school; by the data-driven rigors of physics lab in college; by my own discoveries through processes analogous to memorizing a poem, supplemented by some readings, of classical music, the visual arts, and cinema. And then there is reading itself. Challenging texts can be a struggle at first, but can ultimately reorient how one thinks in a manner far more useful than the ways our mass culture’s distractions train our brains for instant pleasures — and I am only now adding video games, the most drivingly manipulative examples of pop music, and the scrolling through bits of short texts and images on the Web, as I will admit to doing myself.

Real learning can change each of us into active and creative participants in life, encountering each visual experience as an “adventure of perception” (in the words of Stan Brakhage), learning to see the beauty and  different kinds of meaning in a structured mathematical system, experiencing the elevating complexity of polyphonic classical music. The things I find most worthy of attention cannot be consumed as objects, not in an instant, not in a minute. Properly engaged with, they offer a dance with the mind that leaves you altered for the better, and help you engage more actively and deeply with other humans, with the products of our culture, with the things of the world. There is to my thinking no justification for the way we humans have been  destroying our planet, but doing so for the sake of momentary pleasures, leaving nothing worthwhile in our wakes, seems doubly indefensible.

I have no idea of what to suggest to the college’s marketing department as a replacement for “Your story.” “See how positively your story can change as we educate you with Plato and Shakespeare” both lacks punch, and seems unlikely to make the sale. And are college teachers today even trying to achieve such a change? Many are. I attempt to offer ways of seeing cinema that go beyond instant gratifications based on characters and plots. I know many other instructors are trying similarly in their own ways. But a “module,” supposedly on “critical thinking,” imposed on instructors in a basic intro course at a college where I once taught, proved to be the opposite, offering objections to mass media with no space left for discussion afterwards — thus contradicting its own terms.

Instead, we read that entering  students at elite colleges are mostly interested in high-paying careers. The  learning you might do in order to make a lot of money is rather different, and surely narrower in scope, than the learning you would be doing to explore ideas in history, philosophy, anthropology, any of the arts, even most approaches to the sciences.  And it’s not as if all students entering college know much about history, or other fields. I have taken anonymous polls in classes asking what year cinema was invented, and have seen answers as wrong as  the 1600s, and 1981. To make such guesses, what you have to not know about  history would fill many volumes. Students do remain curious and understand the value of learning; are we even encouraging them as much as we should? Some  colleges have renamed official positions in fields such as “student affairs” as “Vice President of Student Success,” narrowing the focus toward results-oriented thinking. Their goals appear to be positive ones, but exploring modes of thinking and modes of being should include trying and failing and then failing again, and learning from those failures. I don’t think spending a lifetime creating work in any of the arts that is unappreciated in one’s lifetime, only to be recognized as “great” after one’s death, is what those Vice Presidents — or most students today — would consider “success.” I know that I do.