What Should Universities Teach?

 

Shai Goldman’s “Ignorance and Conviction at Columbia” rightly dings the modern educational obsession with “critical thinking,” which in practice is “analytical thinking” with a bolshie chip on the shoulder. I am certainly willing to believe that Columbia students are trained to speak confidently from superficial knowledge. I will say, however, that family lore holds that criticisms of superficiality at Columbia go back at least to the 1920s, when the content of their superficial knowledge was somewhat better.

But I think there’s more to be said about what universities—and K-12 schools—should teach, beyond pointing out the flaws of “critical thinking.” Universities should focus on two pedagogical keywords: understanding and proportion. These, not “critical thinking,” are crucial for undergraduates.

Students need to be taught to understand—the Iliad and the Crusades, the Bible and the anthropology of the Yanomami. They should know historical facts and literary texts; they should understand the motivations of historical participants, and they should understand the intentions of artistic creators. They should understand both objective truths and subjective intentions.

Teaching understanding should not be reduced to subjective intentions. Communists may have intended to create heaven on earth, but students should know that they actually created an archipelago of hells. But understanding must include a knowledge of fact and intention as a prerequisite to analysis—and, indeed, critique.

Analysis is a useful tool by which to achieve understanding. Critique is a plausible outcome of learning to analyze, as is appreciation. But what teachers should provide is the backbone of fact needed for understanding, taught in such a way as to disseminate understanding. Analytical thinking and critical thinking are only means to the end of understanding.

Students, as Cardinal Newman wrote in The Idea of a University, also need to be taught a sense of proportion.

Anyone can and should study by himself, but autodidactic study characteristically lacks proportion, which fails to give students a sense of the place and importance of what they learn. University education should give students this sense of proportion. The point of teaching exemplary masterpieces in survey courses is meant to provide that sense of proportion when students read on their own. Students who have read Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, and Yeats will begin to be able to judge the importance and the quality of the latest novel. The point of teaching a core curriculum is to provide a sense of proportion about the importance of each discipline within university knowledge as a whole.

Then, too, a central point of teaching analytical—and critical—thinking is to equip students, not least as potential future professors, to argue for changes to the core. What we know and value does change, generation by generation; a core curriculum should be Burkean, amenable to reform. But students should learn what the core is, to understand what it aims to convey, as a prerequisite to proposing amendments to it.

Professors can abuse the principle of proportion: a proportionate education includes Foucault but not the Bible. But any principle can be travestied. Colleges and universities should aim to teach a sense of proportion, and citizens should keep an eye on universities to make sure they’re not using the word as camouflage for radical bilge.

When we criticize university teaching, we should have clear principles in mind of what universities should aim at when they teach. Understanding and proportion are those aims. “Analytical thinking” will help with these goals; “critical thinking” may be a product of acquiring understanding and proportion; but understanding and proportion are what universities should aim to teach students.

David Randall is Director of Research at the National Association of Scholars and Executive Director of the Civics Alliance.

https://mindingthecampus.org/2026/09/02/what-should-universities-teach/