Countering the achievement society (2018)
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The only thing that is different now is that purchasing an education has become more common, and more of a prerequisite for a job.
The idea that you can simply counter it by convincing universities, which exist to profit from this fact, to slow down and give students more time for leisure in learning, is wishful thinking.
Or a possible alternative is to retract some of the credentialism gatekeeping regarding jobs. This could transform education from its current predominant role as vocational training and back to the pre-Morrill Act roots of educating a populace in terms of understanding and appreciating culture.
To your point, though, this would undermine the consumer base of universities so I would expect them to push back in one way or another. But having employers scale back credentialism can occur irrespective of university policy.
(I’m not denying that the need for higher education has increased as industrial production became more complex , but this seems like an adjacent process, and not applicable to all types of study)
Credentialism will only be undone over a long period of very low unemployment where employers will be forced to train employees themselves and will not require as many credentials to sort candidates.
P1. It is well-known that the working classes during the industrial revolution engaged in learning for learning’s sake, sometimes going so far as to hire people to read to them while they worked. The intellectual cultures which have existed during different historical periods are more nuanced than you think. For ancient cultures, we have exceedingly little information—-discoveries are consistently made which reveal to us that our intuition about what these societies were like is usually incomplete or wrong. It’s tempting to extrapolate the current cultural moment but this isn’t always a good idea.
P3. Universities which are wholly funded by the state do not necessarily need to focus on profiting by maximizing the amount of job-focused career training they provide to students. The current incarnation of universities may make it seem like this is the case, but this is a pretty contingent viewpoint. In Europe, it is possible to get a college education for free or next to nothing. Although, there are also private universities which recognize that it is not always strategic to hit the rails with profit maximization: NYU decided to make their medical school free recently. There’s also the example of Walter Reed’s medical school. Clearly, there is also a difference in degree here: back in the 70s it was possible to get an excellent college education and pay for it with money made working over the summer. Not the case so much anymore.
I’d also say that having universities mostly or wholly funded by the state does not remove their profit motive or make it a better place to study: the demand for credentials by the job market will shape their offerings to tailor to it, even if the state can make it a more tolerable experience by sinking more money into it (which would be politically unpopular in the current climate, like the college loan forgiveness proposals floating around)
I don't know much about this author but it's clear she is well acquainted with Pieper's ideas.
Not one of them - not a single one - was a lazy do-nothing who watched Netflix (or birds, or whatever) all day and consumed mindlessly.
If you want to be a person who doesn’t accomplish anything of note, there is nothing wrong with this. Being a good person who loves their family and friends and helps their community is a wonderful thing and is an achievement in of itself.
But if you want to become one of your heroes - someone who accomplishes great things - then you must work very, very hard at your craft. There is no alternative.
It provides a very lucid explanation of modern western society's obsession with achievement and self-improvement, and the harm that this can cause.
It can be a little dense if you (like me) aren't used to reading philosophy, but it's not too bad.
Ah, yes, because Eastern countries like South Korea or Japan are not obsessed with achievement and tainted by heavy doses of burnout.
Still, this is a story of the past, and these days they're all suffering this "achievement society" issue.
There are differences in the origins of the drive to succeed, however, and these are still worth examining.
In modern Western society, the pressure to succeed is largely internalised. People are encouraged to be their "best selves", to strive for endless self-improvement. This pressure doesn't come from familial or societal obligations, but an obligation to oneself. I'll just quote the book:
"The achievement-subject stands free from external instances of domination forcing it to work and exploiting it. It is subject to no one if not to itself. However, the absence of external domination does not abolish the structure of compulsion. It makes freedom and compulsion coincide. The achievement-subject gives itself over to freestanding compulsion in order to maximize performance. In this way, it exploits itself. Auto-exploitation is more efficient than allo-exploitation because a deceptive feeling of freedom accompanies it. The exploiter is simultaneously the exploited. Exploitation now occurs without domination. That is what makes self-exploitation so efficient."
> "The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. It might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. At present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a byproduct. This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live in an academic milieu tend to be unaware of the pre-occupations of ordinary men and women; moreover, their ways of expressing themselves are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where every one outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits."
https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
The image of academic students as show ponies doing specified routines (with plenty of meaningless busywork) for their degrees fits with that structure.