BasilI ran across a wonderful quote from Alasdair Macintyre in a footnote in Stanley Hauerwas’s The State of the University, which seems especially apt for the university I attend, from my experience of its undergraduates (half of which seem to enter their freshman year with dreams of private equity dancing in their heads):
No CommentsThere is a widespread conception among our students that to learn … is to acquire means to implement desires and goals which the student had already, which the student brings to his or her education from outside it. Sometimes students are asked by their parents or their advisors “What do you want to do?” And when they have produced some kind of stumbling answer to this, they are then advised as to what they should learn to achieve what it is they want…. Against this, I want to suggest that what education should be about is the transformation of students’ conceptions of their goals. The desires, the needs, the goals that people bring to their education are in general going to be as corrupt as the culture that produced them. So they are going to have to be transformed as persons. Aristotle pointed out that what pleases and pains the virtuous person is very different from what pleases and pains the vicious person, and both again are different from what pleases the merely immature person. Morality is thus in a very important way educative of desire. ~ in “Values and Distinctive Characteristics of Teaching and Learning in Church-Related Colleges”
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