The fundamental fact of our time is the gradual encroachment of principled individualism, or unregulated personal freedom, into all areas of our lives. Every moral and communal certainty, except those that can be justified through contract and consent, has heen transformed into a question. Every human attachment seems basically voluntary. The great institutions that shape the character of human beings- the family, the church, the community, and the country are weakened and still eroding.【F1】
Young people who have grown up in this cultural environment are deprived of what it takes to develop firm moral bearings, and, with them, a sense of purpose.
New students arrive at college not knowing who they are or what their lives are for.
【F2】
Professors, meanwhile, used to believe their primary responsibility was to shape souls: to pass on the truths embedded in a religious tradition or other moral code that should thoughtfully define the lives of educated men and women.
【F3】
At the very least, they believed they had to open students" eyes to the varied forms of human excellence displayed in the greatest works of philosophy and literature: the saint, the sage, the poet, the warrior, the inventor, the entrepreneur, the scientist, the statesman.
By means of these models of human greatness, professors could offer guidance to students discerning who they are and what they want to do. But, arriving at college with characters already formed, those students were less in need of direction than are students today. In those days, the real experience of professors was often a kind of blithe irresponsibility that came with moral impotence. They could say what they wanted without the fear of doing much harm, or much good.【F4】
In many cases, students 1 bought(with good reason)that their professors were basically reinforcing what they already knew from more firsthand, or not merely bookish, communal experience.
College seems to have inherited the job that religion used to do.【F5】
Today"s colleges at their secular best—at, say, Great Books schools like St. John"s approach education by articulating perennial questions of human identity and purpose.
But even the Great Books model of education has morphed into a celebration of the questions in the absence of real answers. Who can be satisfied with merely reveling in Socratic indecision about who we are and what to do? Great Books education seems to present us with the alternatives of being a self-knowing philosopher or losing oneself in either fundamentalist dogmatism or aimless relativism. But the searcher neither needs nor wants to be told that the point of life is searching.