What David Brooks Doesn't Know About College

The teaser for a recent New York Times column by David Brooks argues that universities, faced with alternative (and cheaper) online courses should envision a streamlined future for their educational missions:

“The promise of online education lies in taking care of the technical knowledge so that universities can focus on transmitting practical knowledge.”

Brooks thinks higher education should offer two brands of learning: technical information and practical fine tuning. The technical education is, in Brooks’ scenario, the introductory curriculum, all those courses where students receive the formative knowledge of their chosen disciplines. Since these foundational courses can be offered at cheaper rates on the Internet, saving students substantial sums, Brooks argues the old fashioned four year college should offer classroom learning only for upper division students, who, presumably are ready for what he calls practical knowledge.

There’s nothing wrong with this idea if the goal of society is create young people without dramatic or comic irony. One wonders, since American colleges and universities are already the best in the world, what precisely is Brooks imagining?

First let’s think about comic irony. The term comes from literary criticism and it describes the trick used by Shakespeare when he allows his audience to know more about his characters than the characters know themselves. In “The Tempest” all the players are dazzled by Prospero’s magic and fail to recognize each other. Only the audience knows what’s happening. Comic irony affords a powerful kind of aesthetic pleasure but its also a metaphor for what what we now call “emotional intelligence” or EQ. Removed from the play and practiced in our personal work and days, we learn to ask “what do I know now that I did not know before I began?” I’m leaving out the direct object because it can be so many things: before I began the essay, before I began the journey to the Adirondacks, began the literacy tutoring program, before I read the Grapes of Wrath–you see the antecedent of emotional intelligence can be almost anything.

In the workplace EQ means you possess the capacity to listen, evaluate, pause a bit, often liberating yourself from the fight or flee emotions of customary professional discord. Emotional intelligence is a product of literacy because it requires the same cautionary discernment as reading–to ask in effect, “What’s wrong with this argument?” Or: “What’s wrong with my emotional response to this situation?”

It may be David Brooks thinks critical thinking comes later in an education, that it happens in a student’s junior or senior year. In that version of epistemology a student absorbs facts as tonnage, then later he or she learns what to do with variorum chemistry or architecture or philosophy.

I should say I love digital gizmos. Indeed, as a blind person (for whom the talking computer was a godsend) I’m a huge believer in technology in the classroom. When I came to Syracuse University to direct their renowned undergraduate honors program I promptly purchased iPads for all the staff. We are working assiduously to bring technology into many areas of the honors program.

No matter what Brooks thinks, college is about learning how to think, not about utility. Critical thinking isn’t a rococo picture frame made of facts. Most students, especially those from historically marginalized backgrounds find their interaction with students and faculty is transformational–in a hallway outside the classroom a professor asks you to lunch, a student group invites you to join, you volunteer with your classmates at a local inner city school. These all teach the inestimable qualities of emotional intelligence, qualities that can’t be learned from online courses because acquiring them requires conversation, questions, and being tricked out of your small comfort zone. Learning how to learn is often about spontaneous talk.

It may surprise David Brooks to know that learning academic EQ happens in the first two years of college for most students and it involves living with and talking to people.