Moral education just as valuable as technical one

Suddenly it’s fashionable for governors to question the usefulness of whole fields of academic study. Rick Scott of Florida has attacked anthropology. Patrick McCrory of North Carolina has called out gender studies. Here in Kentucky, Matt Bevin has gone after French.

These gentlemen want to reallocate public funding away from such disciplines toward more technical ones that command relatively high starting salaries, notably engineering.

This new line of critique is not surprising. As state support for higher education declines, tuition continues to rise and long-term value for money becomes an ever-more potent consideration for students and parents. Still, it’s a troubling trend for a couple of reasons.

For one, these criticisms insinuate that there’s little vocational value to majoring in a humanistic discipline. Employers themselves beg to differ. Ninety-three percent of business leaders surveyed by the Association of American Colleges and Universities agree that “a demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than [a candidate’s] undergraduate major.”

Humanistic disciplines develop transferable skills that greatly enhance this capacity: the ability to collect and make sense of a variety of data, the ability to read and write with analytical precision, and the ability to speak clearly and compellingly.

But the more troubling suggestion implicit in the recent criticisms is that students’ training for the workforce is virtually everything, and that the development of their moral imaginations counts for next to nothing. I respectfully but emphatically disagree. Most of my faculty colleagues do so as well; this is why we support robust requirements that oblige all University of Kentucky students to probe more deeply into what it means to be a citizen while we prepare them for the job market.

The beautiful reality is that there’s no dichotomy between practical and moral education. We strive to give students both of them at the same time.

There’s a day toward the end of every semester when I feel especially blessed to teach college students. It’s that day during finals week when I take stock of everything they’ve done for my class and realize that most of them have become better readers, writers, talkers and thinkers.

Just as importantly, as they’ve developed these broadly transferable skills, their sense of empathy and ethical judgment has also been given a thorough workout. This is why I’m enjoying a new course called “Witnessing World War II.”

Yes, my students are learning how to read more critically, how to write more persuasively and how to speak more fluently. But because they’re reading E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed they’re also learning how one marine managed to hold on to his moral compass throughout the savage fighting in the Pacific.

They’re learning from Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man how a long-time POW subjected to routine torture learned to come to grips with his trauma, and even to forgive his captors.

They’re learning from Nella Last’s War how coping with the daily struggles of life during wartime made one English housewife a much stronger and more assertive person.

They’re learning from Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz how to maintain one’s humanity in the most dehumanizing of circumstances.

The point is to provide students with a better understanding of the great human drama and their role within it while we prepare them for jobs. Virtually all of us who’ve had the good fortune to go to college understand this. Let’s not forget it.

This story was originally published March 4, 2016 at 7:29 PM with the headline "Moral education just as valuable as technical one."