§75 Towards a true university — resuscitating the passion of uselessness
Further to a previous note ( “§72 Bluffing human sciences”) diagnosing the illiterate university the following provides George Steiner’s specific reform proposal:
1. “We must purge our vocabulary.”, consisting in acknowledging that the “true university” is a “custodian and engagement with the living past”, that “thrives to advance knowledge and clarify critically the processes of thought”.
2. A cleaning up which involves a rebuking of all censorships:
“A true university serves neither political purpose nor social programmes — necessarily partisan and transitory. Above all, it rebukes censorship and correctness of any kind. What we have done through political correctness, the lies we are teaching or having to accept, the questions we are not allowed to ask… makes impossible great fields of comparative study.”
3. The housing and honouring of “anarchic provocation and the passion of the useless”. The latter being the “most wonderful passion in the world” and “the highest form of human activity”.
4. An insistence on “recapturing some of the ground the humanities have yielded to the sciences”, implying the remedying of the “total ignorance of elementary mathematics, of the concept of numeracy — which organise and determine the world around us.”.
5. The elevation of the quality of teaching by drawing on Stalin’s example, where “over night” school maths teachers were paid “as much as university professors and honoured throughout society”.
6. The introduction of architecture at the heart of school curriculum, as it abolishes the “notorious gap between the two cultures” of natural and social sciences.
7. The re-instalment of learning to read as learning by heart. : “No secondary texts…No criticism. No comments on comments on comments… The …opening motion is that of memorization. We learn by heart. Par cœur. To memorize is to thank for what a text has given us. It is the only effective way of saying merci. Thank you, danke. For the inexhaustible liberality of meaning, for the miracle of sense. What we know by heart cannot be taken from us.” (Steiner 2013)
A lesson from one of the masters?
References
Steiner, George. 2013. Universitas? [Part III]. Tilburg: Nexus Instituut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyAqh4-18nQ&t=24s.
Originally published at anowmedia.com on November 16, 2018.
