Let's Make a University!

I keep coming across organization after organization, national organizations and state organizations, which are interested in education reform. But is reform what we truly need? To reform something means that there is a substance there that has a bad form, and which we can fix by simply re-forming it. But what if the substance itself is no good?

Now most of the organizations I have come across of late have been libertarian and conservative in nature. They have all been pro-free markets (to my mind, being pro-free markets in economics is a lot like being pro-atomic theory in chemistry, but that's another post for another time) and, thus, have a fundamentally pro-Western, Aristotlean orientation. This is generally a good thing, as it promotes individualism and competition -- but what we need right now is competition's complement, cooperation.

What these groups need to get together and cooperate to make is a new university. Rather than attempting to reform a currently-existing university, what we need is an example. And what kind of example do we need to create? One that has extremely high standards -- standards that put Harvard and Yale to shame. These standards cannot be the ones currently available, though. SAT and ACT scores won't do it. It will have to be a test applicable only to that new university, and it will test such things as grammar, vocabulary, logic, geometry, arithmetic, and the sciences. Plato's Academy had a sign that read "None May Enter Unless You Have Mastered Geometry." That is the kind of entry requirement this new university should have. Further, there should be a written essay for acceptance, and none should be allowed in who have not mastered writing. That means, there cannot be a single ungrammatical sentence in the essay, let alone the kinds of word salads I have seen in student writing.

Once students are in, these should be the basic requirements:
1) literature -- no student should be allowed to leave who has not read The Iliad, The Odyseey, the Aeneid, Oedipus tyrranus, the Oreseteian trilogy, Hippolytus, Dante's Divine Comedy, something on the Arthurian legend, a significant portion of Shakespeare, something on the Faust legend, and significant representation of European and American literature from the 18th, 19th, and 20th Century.
2) religion -- no student should be allowed to leave who has not read The Bible, the Koran, and significant works from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism.
3) philosophy -- no student should be allowed to leave who had not read Plato's Apology, Symposium and Republic (at least), Aristotle's Poetics, Rhetoric, and Nicomachean ethics (at least), something from the Stoics, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hume, Locke, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Rousseau (know your enemy), Sun Tzu, Marx (again, know your enemy), Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger (enemy, again), and Sartre. Students should be required to take logic and ethics classes.
4) language -- everyone should be required to take classes on linguistics, grammar, and rhetoric/composition
5) math -- none may leave until they have mastered geometry -- with special emphasis on time series, complexity, and fractal geometry so students can be prepared for the future and won't make the mistake of thinking the world is mostly linear, predictable, and simple.
6) science -- all students should be required to take physics, chemistry, and biology, to have a full understanding of the world
7) social science -- all students should be required to take economics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology, to have a full understanding of the world and themselves.
8) arts -- all students should be required to take an art class and to learn a musical instrument.

Now, one may object that there would be no time for "major" classes. Perhaps. Perhaps we would have to change major requirements. In any case, those students would definitely receive something they would not get at any other university: a liberal education. And they would be prepared better than any other student to know what they want to do and to go to graduate school in whatever field they choose.

One thing this university would emphasize is that it is not a trade school. It is a liberal arts school. It is designed not to train up accountants, but to train the leaders of the world, leaders in various disciplines, but also social and community and perhaps even governmental leaders. And anyone who wanted to get in would have to be properly educated first. Which would result in changes in high schools and middle schools, because what person is going to put up with their child not getting into the best university in the world because of the bad education their child is receiving?

This also means that the teachers hired would have to have a certain kind of educational philosophy. They would have to believe that their job is to educate the best and brightest, not "everyone." They would have to have the strictest, highest standards of measurement. Therre would have to be strict discipline (along those lines, for the P.E. requirement, I would also require martial arts of everyone, for at least several semesters, if not the duration). There would be no political correctness, no anti-Western (or anti- anything except falsehoods) bias. This university would teach the best about the best -- regardless of race, sex, or religion. Virginia Woolf and Claude McKay and Andre Gide would be taught in literature classes, not Women's Studies or African-American studies classes or Queer studies classes, respectively. This university would be interested in the content of character -- and creating that content -- and not the color of skin (or variations in sex organs or sexual preferences or religious practices or lack thereof). This university would be interested in one thing only: excellence.

This is the goal. If I had the millions of dollars necessary, I'd do it myself.