Minerva Is The Future Of Education. Here's What's Good About It And What's Not So Good.

Minerva is one of the most interesting startups in the world today. Minerva hopes to revolutionize higher education, not just by putting courses online, but by becoming itself an institution of higher education, albeit one that uses technology to make in-class education more efficient and effective.

The Atlantic's Graeme Wood has a characteristically excellent story on what Minerva is actually like. I couldn't encourage you enough to read it in its entirety.

What to make of it?

On the plus side, Minerva's technology platform, which makes small-group seminars a lot more engaging and a lot more effective, looks like it will be a smashing success, and it looks like future universities will use something like it. Students from everywhere around the world, with a professor located anywhere, can take part in a discussion. The professor can give the students pop quizzes, pop up material, and so on. And Minerva, or others like it, will iterate upon the technology. That education is, and ought to be a science, should be taken for granted, as it was in the 19th century, and has now completely been forgotten. Minerva sounds like a tremendous experience for the right student.

(The fact that Minerva turns down federal student aid, and thereby can provide much lower tuition, and admits foreign students who would like a US-style liberal arts education, is also wonderful. How I wish Minerva had been around when I was about to graduate high school!)

On the minus side, for all of Minerva's talk about providing a "liberal arts education", Minerva actually does no such thing. The problem is that because almost no other "liberal arts" institutions (or high schools) do that anyway, the way in which this is true is unlikely to be grasped. Minerva's core curriculum focuses on inculcating ways of knowing, and ways of thinking. In this regard, Minerva is very "traditional" in the sense that it conceives of the goal of its "liberal arts" curriculum in much the same way as Harvard does. The point is that Harvard sucks at it, and Minerva intends not to. But "ways of knowing", as important as they are (it's unacceptable that so many "liberal arts" graduate suck at math, or don't understand basic epistemology, or, worse, that this outrages nobody), are a how. A liberal arts education, properly understood, inculcates not only a how but a what.

As I have written, in American society there has been a total forgetting of the basics of the thought that undergirds our civilization, and that our civilization's self-understanding regards as essential for its own self-preservation. To put it more clearly, a liberal arts education should involve not just education in "ways of knowing" (again--very important; Harvard sucks at it; Minerva will do much better), but also things to know, and specifically, the history of thought and culture that undergirds our civilization. In other words, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Plotinus, Shakespeare, Bacon, Kant, Dostoevsky, and, for America, the Federalist Papers, Tocqueville, Du Bois...

All of American culture has been taken by a strange fundamentalism that facially regards the Big Questions as irrelevant and unimportant--because it is quite certain of its own answers to these Big Questions. But the problem (tautologically) is that if we do not ask these questions, we will not be able to answer them, and the by-default answers we give will be wrong (and idiotic). In its assumption that the Big Questions need not be coherently approached, Minerva is hopelessly conventional, hopelessly in accord with the Ivy League that it seeks to challenge.

MORE: It's Urgent To Put The Liberal Arts Back At The Center Of Education >>>