240. Why Didn't Postmodern Theory Ruin College Education?

 

We expect practice to be consistent with theory, don't we?  Well, parents, if the practice of college teachers in the closing decades of the twentieth century had been consistent with the theory that became dominant in those decades none of your children would have come home from college able to think straight.  Now that they are home you have had a pretty good view of their postgraduate thinking.  You have seen that it's no crookeder than ours was.  I'm guessing that you would like to have somebody up there in higher education explain this to you.  I'm going to try.

First, theory.  Here's a sample that's bound to have been influential.  It's from the president of the Modern Language Association and it comes under the category "Theory" that another president had already declared victorious ("The Triumph of Theory," Presidential Address, 1986) in that organization.  The victory had been gained over those the winners called "foundationalists," people who believed in (among other things) objective standards of rational enquiry, commonly referred to by Theorists as "traditional epistemic norms," then said (by a leading anti-foundationalist, Stanley Fish) to be "lying in ruins around us." The most stubborn of the losers were those who thought they needed at least one of those norms, logic, in order to have a dialogue with students.  "Without rules for passing from one belief to another how can we develop ideas?"  The president, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, is, the passage below, trying to reassure foundationalists of that kind.  She says that their needs will be taken care of by

the innumerable, subtle, continuously operating, nonformalized, usually unrecognized, but nonetheless strong behavioral tendencies [Smith's emphasis] that emerge from individual and social practices themselves.  These are not, as terms such as "rules," "norms," "standards," and "constraints" suggest, external forces that operate upon agents to direct and control their actions but are, rather, the recurrent inclinations of the agents themselves: inclinations, to act in certain ways rather than others, that are corporeally inscribed traces of the differential consequences of their own prior and ongoing actions and interactions (Contingencies of Value, p. 162).

I think that after you straighten that passage out you get a belief in natural rationality.  The young already have in them the capacity to choose and follow the practices from which what we call rationality will emerge.  I have quoted the passage in full so that you can see whether or not I have straightened it out right.

That's the theory.  Do you see all that it, logically, cuts out from under teachers in a university?  Nobody in the whole place, facing a fragmented essay, has anything outside the student to appeal to to get him to glue it together.  The teacher has to stand by waiting for an inclination to recur.                                                                                         

You can imagine what this does, logically again, to all those composition teachers (at least 10,000 of them at the time Smith wrote) working their tails off to get students to be more rational.  And, beyond those teachers, to every teacher of every advanced course requiring that students adhere to logic in their essays.  College teachers have no support, nothing to appeal to, nothing they could call a foundation.

The ones Smith's theory really leaves planted in air, though, are the Socratic interrogators, who depend on the student's ability and willingness to connect her answers and so build a structure of belief that will stand up.  You already know what we Socratists most want to preserve: our students' respect for the rules of speech that let us get somewhere in our office or classroom dialogue.  Half of it is working out the implications of what a student tells us she believes — about a poem, or a piece of criticism, or a statement by another student.  You can't get anywhere in that kind of conversation without respect for logic, rules for passing from one belief to another.  The main thing is not to contradict oneself.  That takes some attention and enforcement, more than you'd think, but I myself have never had to go beyond the traditional norms.

Does that seem so serious, losing support for the law of non-contradiction?  Aren't there a lot of gotcha players who ought to lose their support?  No doubt.  "Let it pass, nit-picker, let it pass."  But if a Socratic teacher lets pass a contradiction then the structure he's got the student building could fall down.  If a student gets used to passing over contradictions his character (or, to Socrates, his soul) could fall apart.  He could be a Euthyphro, a mess, or a Yossarian, a sentimentalist.  (Surely I have by now quoted to you G. K. Chesterton's definition of a sentimentalist: "one who enjoys every idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.")  The whole purpose of Socratic education, to produce a person of integrity (or, for Socrates, a soul in harmony), is defeated.  Such a person accepts and takes responsibility for all that he believes and wills (that is, accepts the sequences attached to his ideas and the consequences attached to his pleasures).  If that describes an adult then the sentimentalist is a juvenile.  And if postmodern theorists are right then Socratic teachers are no help turning juveniles into adults.  Which, parents, I think is what you wanted college teachers to help with when you sent your children to them.

All right, that's what's cut out from under teachers.  And what, logically still, is the world stuck with?  What are all the informal teachers — parents, friends, officials — helpless to do anything about?  Well think of all the destructive behavior that results from failure to connect P to Q — smoking tobacco to dying of cancer, texting at the wheel to cracking up the car, all that.  What is the nation stuck with?  The same failure to connect appearing in citizens, who will want from their government benefits without cost, rights without duties, war without sacrifice, victory without casualties, battle without gore, attractively humane intervention without repulsively inhuman behavior.  Constant surprise at the ugly means required by the good ends they vote for.  In the world, every democracy ruled by sentimentalists.

Logically, with all that support removed, all those epistemic norms lying in ruins, all that trust that juveniles were naturally rational, we should have by now experienced all those bad effects.  I don't think we have.  We weren't experiencing them in 1997 when I retired and from what I can see we are not experiencing them now.  Fragmented essays are still put back together, logic is still respected, composition teachers still have acknowledged ground to stand on, Socratic teachers still get students to check, and test, and draw consequences, students still internalize the process, sentimentality is no more a threat than it ever was, and young people are no more irrational than they ever were.  Your children are probably coming home from college able to think as straight as you did.

I am at a loss to explain this.  Why did the logical consequences of postmodern theory, a theory declared to the academic world by one of its leading professional organizations to be the victoriously governing theory, not show up as actual consequences?  I can think of some possibilities but I am open to suggestions.