Is Missing the Crucial Point Characteristic of Newly Minted American Leaders? — An Important Observation from the Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee’s Heather Wilson

© 2011 Peter Free

 

23 January 2011

 

 

If you can’t think, and you can’t see context, what good are you in nationally difficult times?

 

Heather Wilson, who has been a member of Rhodes Scholarship selection committees for most of 20 years, wrote an essay that parallels the criticism I repeatedly make about modern American leadership’s vanishing ability to think and act intelligently under even the most trivial circumstances.

 

Former Representative Wilson (Republican, New Mexico) is a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a Rhodes Scholar herself.

 

Here are excerpts of what she said:

 

Even from America's great liberal arts colleges, transcripts reflect an undergraduate specialization that would have been unthinkably narrow just a generation ago.

 

As a result, high-achieving students seem less able to grapple with issues that require them to think across disciplines or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why.

 

We are looking for students who wonder, students who are reading widely, students of passion who are driven to make a difference in the lives of those around them and in the broader world through enlightened and effective leadership. The undergraduate education they are receiving seems less and less suited to that purpose.

 

An outstanding biochemistry major wants to be a doctor and supports the president's health-care bill but doesn't really know why.

 

A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral.

 

A young service academy cadet who is likely to be serving in a war zone within the year believes there are things worth dying for but doesn't seem to have thought much about what is worth killing for.

 

A student who wants to study comparative government doesn't seem to know much about the important features and limitations of America's Constitution.

 

[O]ur universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why.

 

© 2011 Heather Wilson, Our superficial scholars, Washington Post (23 January 2011)

 

 

I’ve noticed the same thing from a different end of the microscope

 

I began medical school at 47 and law school at 52.  Like Heather Wilson, I noticed a remarkable lack of perspective and thoughtfulness among most classmates.  That disappointing experience continued afterward, as I practiced law in corporate and government settings, mostly with much younger colleagues and supervisors.

 

I see the same deficiencies in conversations with young people from all backgrounds.  It is as if their thought-and-context button has been permanently turned off.

 

 

Part of the problem is cultural

 

It is not just education that is amiss.

 

We seem to be living in an American era in which opinion — no matter how disconnected from facts, demonstrated understanding, and rational integration — is acceptable and equally valuable.  In fact, the more stupid a celebrity is, the more attention he/she seems to attract.

 

It has always been difficult for me to understand how looking at a bad example of human behavior is developmentally superior to being modeled an excellent one.  Looking “down” does not set standards for striving “up.”

 

 

Thinking quality may not be directly tied to a liberal arts education

 

Requiring kindergarten through twelfth-grade children and young adults to support opinions with explicitly expressed assumptions, factual foundations, and persuasive analysis makes a difference in intellectual development.

 

An evidentiary habit of mind enforces fact and knowledge-gathering by itself.  Exposure to a “liberal arts” environment is probably not strictly necessary (except insofar as someone is inherently narrow-minded).

 

Someone raised according to this opinion-provability standard will be motivated to discover necessary background material on his/her own initiative.

 

 

Flights of fancy, escapes from reason

 

The key problem underlying Heather Wilson’s observation is this nation’s continued flight from facts and reason.  We are overcome by a tide of intellectual sub-mediocrity, combined with the popular culture’s magical thinking.

 

Continued battles over evolution and sex education are indicators of the persistence of reality-denial among the population.  The prevalence of fantasy-based movies and superheroes indicates, to my mind, a willful escape from things-as-they-are by much of the nation’s population.  Addictive consumerism seems to aggravate the trend.

 

 

It is no wonder that we are in a leadership mess

 

Perspective is product of thoughtful analysis founded on actual or probabilistically-likely fact.

 

When analytical step-skipping and magical thinking come culturally together, it is no wonder that we lose our way.

 

Heather Wilson’s background and Rhodes Scholarship selection position give her an excellent forum with which to sound the warning regarding the rot that affects this nation’s future leaders.

 

Will we listen?