Who are the educated?

After the Brexit referendum, the election of Donald Trump, and the electoral victory in the UK of the Conservatives and Boris Johnson, many in the media have argued that there is a growing political split between the educated and the uneducated. Polling does show a statistical divide between those who have and do not have university degrees, the former tending to oppose Brexit, Trump, and Johnson. But is this divide actually between the educated and the uneducated?

The answer depends on how we define education. In The Lessons of History, Will and Ariel Durant adopt the perspective that "education is the transmission of civilization." More specifically, they write, "Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, nor merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and esthetic heritage."

There was a time when universities at least respected this view of education. Science majors would be required to take core courses in Western civilization, world history, philosophy, literature, and the arts. In addition to the core, there were electives in these areas. Faculty understood the value of such enrichment for both the individual and society. My freshman physics professor suggested reading Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. It had a life-long influence, greater than that of Isaac Newton's laws. A good education will furnish an understanding of modernity's greatest affliction, nihilism. Nietzsche provides the fundamental moral conclusion: "Nothing is true, all is permitted."

Moral and cultural issues are played out in society via politics. The United States was founded as a republic, based to a great extent on principles expressed by John Locke in the "Second Treatise of Government." One would expect that American students would read the Second Treatise. Few do.

As a striking example, Michael McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, writes:

"I have taught law students for more than thirty years. In recent years I have noticed that many students have little or no familiarity with the political, intellectual and cultural history that shaped the American legal tradition. I've encountered students who have never heard of Hobbes and Locke, do not know the causes of the American Revolution.…"

A key aspect of science and engineering education is a rigorous understanding of the epistemology that constitutes the basic underpinning of modern science. Yet rarely does one meet a graduate who has read David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. More generally, few outside departments of philosophy read Hume. Beyond science, without Hume, there is no Kantian critique, and without

Immanuel Kant, it is impossible to interpret much contemporary thinking, whether it be moral, political, or philosophical. Little remains of the Durants' "transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and esthetic heritage."

Do universities even succeed in directions they champion? Administrators and faculty never tire of boasting of their interest in other cultures. Thus one would expect them to take seriously the philosophies of other great civilizations, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Do they?

Consider Islam. At minimum, students should be exposed to al-Ghazali, the great Islamic philosopher who bridged the 11th and 12th centuries, and who like Kant centuries later, argued that reason cannot prove the existence of God or immortality, without which there is no moral order and civilization's survival is perilous. Ask graduates of our multicultural bastions if, in defense of secularism, they have engaged the arguments of al-Ghazali. Moreover, have they heard of the great Islamic physician Ibn Rushd, known to the West as Averroes, who brought Aristotle to Europe in the 12th century, setting off an age of reason in Europe?

There are many great minds with whom an educated person would have had more than passing acquaintance. A bare minimum would include Locke, Hume and Kant. They are central to the West's transformation into modernity, which is incomprehensible without them. And they are incomprehensible without some understanding of important prior thinkers, the contemporaneous decline of the Catholic Church, and the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

There are many great minds with whom an educated person would have had more than passing acquaintance. A bare minimum would include Locke, Hume and Kant Will and Ariel Durant starkly describe the cost of educational impoverishment: "Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again."

We are now halfway through a century of interruption and the signs of savagery, or at least of significant civilizational decline, are commonplace. At the University of California at Berkeley, students displayed their Socratic dialectic to a speaker by chanting, "F**k Ann Coulter." At the University of Ottawa, amid shouting and banging resembling a childhood tantrum, someone demonstrated his technical acumen by setting off a fire alarm to cancel a talk by Janice Fiamengo.

At Middlebury College in Vermont, social scientist Charles Murray was to speak and be questioned by a professor. A mob blocked the entrances to the building. The live talk was canceled and the two of them went to another building to broadcast the talk. When they tried to leave, the mob found them, hassled them, pulled the professor's hair and twisted her neck, and then surrounded, pounded, and blocked their car. Later, the professor went to the hospital for a neck brace.