Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (review)

This volume has an ambitious agenda: to argue reasons why American colleges and universities should assist students through curriculum and teaching to pursue for themselves the question of what living is for.

Kronman has an appropriate background for launching such an inquiry. He is Sterling Professor of Law, and former Dean of the Yale Law School. Since 2004, he has been teaching in the Directed Studies Program at Yale University, where he has devoted himself to instruction in and, through this book, the defense of the humanities. The Yale Directed Studies program is a one-year freshman program in the humanities.

Kronman guides the reader through an exploration of the humanities, their role in U.S. higher education, and the challenges to their status. He offers several theses. One is that the undergraduate years are the appropriate time to “reflect on the curious and inspiring adventure of life before they [undergraduates] have gone too far in it and lost the time and perhaps the nerve for such reflections” (p. 41)—by which he means the pursuit of answers to the question about to what living is for. Another thesis is that the humanities, as expressed through liberal arts programs, are appropriate and logical places for sustained and structured pursuit of the question of what a life worth living is. And a third is that U.S. higher education has lost its ability to support the exploration of this question by drifting away from secular humanism and by disempowering professors of the right, duty, expertise, or reason to provide organized instruction on the values and purposes of living.

Chapter 1 lays a foundation for the book by exploring what a life worth living is for undergraduates. It provides a context for why this is a uniquely personal question and why the humanities are the best place to explore this question. Kronman laments that few of today’s liberal arts programs provide organized curriculum and teaching to support pursuit of this key question.

Chapter 2 introduces the concept of secular humanism, which Kronman describes as the identification of “the elements of our common nature and . . . an understanding of the consequences that flow from them” (p. 77). This chapter provides two excellent discussions. The first is considers the assumptions, challenges, and meaning of secular humanism. If, as he posits, U.S. higher education has forsaken secular humanism, then this section provides an excellent introduction and rationale to the topic for those who missed the exposure in their own undergraduate studies.

The second half of the chapter explores how U.S. higher education began with a secular humanism focus. It then traces how, through the evolution of colleges and universities, secular humanism was lost.

Chapter 3 and 4 explore what Kronman sees as the main wedges that have separated secular humanism from U.S. higher education, leaving the humanities adrift. The first wedge was the research ideal that gave primacy to the sciences and secondary status to the social sciences because of the way they could answer questions through research methods in precise terms. The research ideal also changed the currency of the academy to research from teaching, so that humanities faculty had to pursue research in order to stay competitive in an academy where research had become the coin of the realm, which left no time or value for the teaching skills necessary for leading young minds through the tough questions of the humanities.

The next chapter explores how the 1960s with their advent of multiculturalism and political correctness undermined the authority of the classics that are the foundation of the humanities. This is a particularly interesting chapter in that Kronman explored other philosophical and literary traditions and the aid they can provide to answering the question about what life is worth living for. Then he provides a nuanced and well-balanced rationale in...