Too long away. Sometimes I get burnt out, Maybe that has something to do with what I’m writing here, now. My experience last weekend may be implicated as well.

I’ve acquired a stake in Oberlin College. My beloved and I are de facto god parents to a rising sophomore there. I’ve written about Emma before in these pages. Last weekend we accompanied her mother to Oberlin to collect her and her things for the post-freshman year return home to Iowa City. It was good to see Emma in “her place,” as she called it a couple of times, good to meet her Oberlin friends and to get a first hand impression of the college.

Its quality stands out: four libraries, a world class art museum, a large and beautiful campus that is the chief feature of the town surrounding it, a highly qualified and well-compensated faculty (Oberlin has a 9:1 student faculty ratio), all for three thousand students each year, some six hundred of whom study in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, a world class institution in its own right. It was also nice to speculate that the college seems not to take itself too seriously.

On the first floor of Mudd Library, one encounters The Reading Girl, “a statue created by John Adams Jackson (1825–1879) in 1869,” according to OberWiki. Apparently no one interferes with students (or others) who adorn that marble lady with a variety of items of clothing and/or jewelry from time to time. One campus source considers the sneaker (size six) to be a permanent part of the statue. Indeed, my beloved purchased a tee shirt at the library circulation desk featuring an image of the statue, sneaker and all. What relation, if any, Oberlin’s Reading Girl may have with other reading girls, such as Pietro Magni’s La Leggitrice, now in the National Gallery, I’m unable to say.

But Oberlin does take itself seriously, and that seriousness is reflected in a news story carried in The New York Times on the very Sunday we were wandering around the Ohio Campus as Emma packed her things. Somebody at the Times should have been fired for writing the headline: “Warning: the Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm.” Oberlin and several other colleges and universities around the country are considering whether to mandate trigger warnings on syllabi that contain material some students might find threatening, a trend that is getting a good deal of attention in the popular press.

Proponents of the idea stress that the intent is not to proscribe any and all material any student might find offensive. The idea of the first such policy (at UC Santa Barbara) was simply to provide students with a headsup warning about the possibility that a particular book or film might “tap into memories of trauma.” But the argument about such policies has tended towards framing as a rights discourse (free speech vs. the right not to be harmed) or an argument about the values of liberal arts education. Unfortunately both framings are easily coopted into already large structures of cliché.

So before it gets to be impossible to talk about trigger warnings in ordinary academic contexts without automatically entering the house built by culture war, perhaps one might pause to say that there is a very old question at issue here that has almost nothing in common with the familiar issues of present academic culture. The idea of education as therapy is neither new nor radical. It isn’t the same as the old-fashioned idea that education shapes character, but it is a cousin to it. Education as therapy conceives that souls can be restored to health by right learning. Sorry about the old-fashioned lingo; we’re talking about a very old idea here.

When The Lady Philosophy first appears to Boethius in in his prison cell as he awaits trial for treason, she finds the philosopher medicating himself with poetry, which (as she contends) only makes him worse. Boethius has forgotten who he is and hence needs reeducation in the basics of Neoplatonism, his former grounding. He needs particularly to reunderstand why it is that nothing bad can happen to a good person. I speak here of Boethius the character in The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524 C. E.). Boethius the author may have needed to reinhabit the house of Socrates as well, especially since he was eventually put to death in a particularly gruesome manner.

So–education as therapy isn’t new. It wasn’t invented by feminists or others who can easily be dismissed as calling for the latest iteration of political correctness. And the point of Boethius’s reeducation shouldn’t be seen as a blanket rejection of poetry, especially since much of The Consolation of Philosophy, itself, is poetry. Not to speak of psychoanalysis (particularly the Jungian kind) one might remember as well John Stuart Mill’s claim in his autobiography that he cured himself of depression by reading the poetry of Wordsworth: the point being that different times and conditions might arguably call for different remedies, and that use of any particular remedy might entail avoidance of others.

Unfortunately, the Oberlin trigger warning guide (which mercifully has been withdrawn) seems made to order for deconstruction by anti-PC critique. Here’s a part that’s been widely referenced. I’m quoting from a Jenny Jarvie piece in The New Republic:

Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” to remove triggering material when it doesn’t “directly” contribute to learning goals and “strongly consider” developing a policy to make “triggering material” optional. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”

Ironic that students might need to be inoculated against Things Fall Apart, which we all read in the last century as an antidote to our colonial prejudices, nourished by Joseph Conrad and others. Part of the difficulty here is the reduction of education to things called learning goals, the darling of today’s assessment driven school environment. If assessment is all that matters, education becomes a process of ticking off items on a list. But the real trouble with trigger warnings is that their use sets up a filter that may impede students’ engagement with a broad range of learnings that have a transformative potential. Here education as character formation and education as therapy may cross, but it is important not to blur the distinction between them.

The trouble with reading Achebe when we did is that we stopped reading Conrad. I’m not talking about specialists, now, but about the broad range of college students who as a matter of general education need to understand the sensibilities of the age of Conrad and E. M. Forster if they are to understand their own. It is as important to read Conrad as it is to read Achebe contra Conrad if one’s goal is a discourse that recognizes that even oppressors have sensitivities, experience guilt, etc. Achebe’s portrayal of Okonkwo’s British antagonists is perhaps as limited as Conrad’s portrayal of the Fang people. Both have the character of ex parte.

Dropping Conrad in favor of Achebe was an exercise in Education as therapy. We wanted to be sure our students didn’t become colonialists; hence, therapy for their immersion in post-colonial culture. But in depriving them of Conrad we may have deprived them of a serious opportunity to think about what it means to be “one of us,” potentially a character building experience. I realize that’s Lord Jim, not Heart of Darkness, but you get my drift. And there is a sense in which humanistic education (what we’re talking about after all) must entail immersion in the destructive element. From what Emma tells me, Oberlin (her place) is not only aware of that necessity but is also aware of its risks.

And if the Oberlin trigger warning policy is at this point a failure, or perhaps even a remedy seeking a wrong, there is another therapeutic education program reported in last week’s New York Times Magazine that seems to be destined for success. In an essay entitled “Who Gets to Graduate” Paul Tough reports on a program of small interventions at the University of Texas at Austin designed to help students from working class families overcome internalized cultural expectations that seem to retard their academic progress.

[W]hether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

The chief reason for this trend seems to be that low income and working class students tend to over-interpret small failures as meaning that they are inferior and don’t belong at college. Developmental and remedial programs seem to reinforce the trend rather than arrest it. Researchers at Austin have designed a series of small interventions intended to foster in these students a sense of being part of a community of high-achieving scholars so that they can more easily take small failures in stride in the same way that their more privileged peers do.

Can souls be returned to health by right learning? Ought we to think of humanistic education as a search for the soul’s weal? No matter how instrumental our conception of education becomes, such questions seem unavoidable. The difficulty is, as always, that our conceptions of the soul’s weal are guarded by fierce ideological angels. It’s refreshing to encounter these contemporary resolves to wrestle with such ageless angels who visit our dreams sometimes when we least expect them.