Read Online Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton - Free Book Online
Authors: Alain de Botton
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tower which houses, along a series of corridors painted a vivid purple and yellow, the lecture theatres and seminar rooms of the Department of the Humanities.
Across the university, 200,000 undergraduates are enrolled on 400 different degree programmes. This particular department was inaugurated just a few months ago by a minister for education and a cousin of the Queen, in a ceremony now commemorated on an engraved granite block embedded in a wall near the toilets.
âA home for â
The best that has been said and thought in the world
â â, reads the plaque, borrowingMatthew Arnoldâs famous definition of culture. The quote must have struck a chord with the university, for it reappears in the undergraduate admissions handbook and in a mural by the drinks dispenser in the basement cafeteria.
There are few things that secular society believes in as fervently as education. Since theEnlightenment, education â from primary level through to university â has been presented as the most effective answer to a range of societyâs gravest ills; the conduit to fashioning a civilized, prosperous and rational citizenry.
A look at the degree courses offered by the new university reveals that over half are intended to equip undergraduates with practical skills, the sort required for successful careers in mercantile, technological societies: courses in chemistry, business, microbiology, law, marketing and public health.
But the grander claims made on behalf of education, the sort one reads of in prospectuses or hears about in graduation ceremonies, tend to imply that colleges and universities are more than mere factories for turning out technocrats and industrialists. The suggestion is that they have a yet higher task to fulfil: they may turn us into better, wiser and happier people.
AsJohn Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: âThe object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated
human beings
.â Or, to go back toMatthew Arnold, a proper cultural education should inspire in us âa love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human miseryâ. At its most ambitious, he added, it should engender nothing less than the ânoble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found itâ.
2.
What unites such ambitious and beguiling claims is their passion â and their vagueness. It is seldom clear how education could turn students towards generosity and truth and away from sin and error, though it is typically hard to do anything other than passively lend oneâs assent to this inspiring notion, given its familiarity and its sheer beauty.
Nevertheless, it would be no injustice to examine the high-flown rhetoric in the light of certain realities on the ground, as revealed by an ordinary Monday afternoon in the Faculty of the Humanities in the modern university in north London.
The choice of department is not coincidental, for the transformative and lyrical claims made on behalf of education have almost always been connected to the humanities rather than endocrinology or biostatistics. It is the study of philosophy, history, art, the classics, languages and literature that has been thought to yield the most complex, subtle and therapeutic dimensions of the educational experience.
In a corner classroom on the seventh floor, a group of second-year history students are following a lecture about agricultural reform in eighteenth-century France. The argument made by their professor, who has spent twenty years researching the subject, is that the cause of declining crop yields between 1742 and 1798 had less to do with bad harvests than with the relatively low price of agricultural land, which encouraged landlords to invest their money in trade rather than farming.
On the floor below, in the classics department, fifteen students are
Across the university, 200,000 undergraduates are enrolled on 400 different degree programmes. This particular department was inaugurated just a few months ago by a minister for education and a cousin of the Queen, in a ceremony now commemorated on an engraved granite block embedded in a wall near the toilets.
âA home for â
The best that has been said and thought in the world
â â, reads the plaque, borrowingMatthew Arnoldâs famous definition of culture. The quote must have struck a chord with the university, for it reappears in the undergraduate admissions handbook and in a mural by the drinks dispenser in the basement cafeteria.
There are few things that secular society believes in as fervently as education. Since theEnlightenment, education â from primary level through to university â has been presented as the most effective answer to a range of societyâs gravest ills; the conduit to fashioning a civilized, prosperous and rational citizenry.
A look at the degree courses offered by the new university reveals that over half are intended to equip undergraduates with practical skills, the sort required for successful careers in mercantile, technological societies: courses in chemistry, business, microbiology, law, marketing and public health.
But the grander claims made on behalf of education, the sort one reads of in prospectuses or hears about in graduation ceremonies, tend to imply that colleges and universities are more than mere factories for turning out technocrats and industrialists. The suggestion is that they have a yet higher task to fulfil: they may turn us into better, wiser and happier people.
AsJohn Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: âThe object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated
human beings
.â Or, to go back toMatthew Arnold, a proper cultural education should inspire in us âa love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human miseryâ. At its most ambitious, he added, it should engender nothing less than the ânoble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found itâ.
2.
What unites such ambitious and beguiling claims is their passion â and their vagueness. It is seldom clear how education could turn students towards generosity and truth and away from sin and error, though it is typically hard to do anything other than passively lend oneâs assent to this inspiring notion, given its familiarity and its sheer beauty.
Nevertheless, it would be no injustice to examine the high-flown rhetoric in the light of certain realities on the ground, as revealed by an ordinary Monday afternoon in the Faculty of the Humanities in the modern university in north London.
The choice of department is not coincidental, for the transformative and lyrical claims made on behalf of education have almost always been connected to the humanities rather than endocrinology or biostatistics. It is the study of philosophy, history, art, the classics, languages and literature that has been thought to yield the most complex, subtle and therapeutic dimensions of the educational experience.
In a corner classroom on the seventh floor, a group of second-year history students are following a lecture about agricultural reform in eighteenth-century France. The argument made by their professor, who has spent twenty years researching the subject, is that the cause of declining crop yields between 1742 and 1798 had less to do with bad harvests than with the relatively low price of agricultural land, which encouraged landlords to invest their money in trade rather than farming.
On the floor below, in the classics department, fifteen students are
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