From Essays After Montaigne
Whereto serveth learning, if understanding be not joined to it? Oh would to God, that for the good of our justice, the societies of lawyers were as well stored with judgement, discretion and conscience, as they are with learning and wit. We learne not for our life, but for the schoole. It is not enough to joyne learning and knowledge to the minde, it should be incorporated into it: it must not be inckled, but dyed with it; and if it change not and better her estate (which is imperfect) it were much better to leave it. It is a dangerous sword, and which hindreth and offendeth her master, if it be in a weake hand, and which hath not the skill to manage the same: So as it were better that we had not learned.
Knowledge is an excellent drug, but no drug is sufficiently strong to preserve it selfe without alteration or corruption, according to the fault of the vessell that contained it. Some man hath a cleare sight, that is not right-sighted, and by consequence seeth what good is, and doth not follow it; and seeketh knowledge, but makes no use of it.
According to U.S. News and World Report, Amherst College is currently the best place to seek an undergraduate liberal arts degree, on the basis of things like graduation and retention rate, class size, student-to-faculty ratio, standardized test scores of incoming students, high school grades of incoming students, acceptance rate (lower apparently being better), and alumni giving. None of the factors measured have much to do with what you might learn while you're there. These factors attempt to measure how the students performed before they got there, what resources were available to them while they were there, how likely they were to graduate, and how much money previous students have given to their alma mater. But those factors don't seem especially likely to lead to the enhancement of the students' judgment, discretion, or conscience.
Such rankings aren't merely a harmless pastime of magazines seeking subscribers. I can personally attest to the effect that these polls have on schools that finish (or want to finish) near the top. I attended graduate school at what was once called the Yale School of Organization and Management, where I got a Master's of Public and Private Management. It was an interesting school because it studied management and organizational development and behavior as broadly-based fields of study that could be broadly applied. Rather than taking the ad hoc, case-based approach of the Harvard Business School, the School of Organization and Management sought to develop intellectual frameworks that were robust and flexible enough to be used for any case. The assumption seemed to be that graduate school was a time away from the world where such frameworks could be developed that could then be applied to a professional lifetime of cases.
But this approach didn't merit a sufficiently high ranking in the Business Week ranking of business schools (not least because the School of Organization and Management wasn't a business school). Not being highly ranked by Business Week had no negative impact on the quality of the educational experience, nor did it reflect any failure by the school to achieve its educational goals. Yet the management of the school were driven to distraction by the ranking. So the school became the Yale School of Management, dropping the emphasis on organizational development and behavior and offering a Master's of Business Administration, just like thousands of other business schools in the country. The school lost much of what made it distinctive and valuable (its competitive advantage, if you will), and, ironically, its ranking hasn't improved all that much. As of 2000, it was still ranked only 19th.
I don't mean to present this as a tragedy--I'm not especially worried that the future millionaires attending Yale are suffering. But if a university as well-regarded and well-endowed as Yale will bow to such concerns, what hope do less fortunate schools have of developing a distinctive educational approach? Education of all sorts is increasingly judged as a manufacturing process on the basis of objective inputs and outputs (in some places, even high schools are being judged in this way), and education is responding to that judgement by becoming a manufacturing process. Since judgment, discretion, and conscience aren't objective outputs (and seem to be less and less likely to be taught elsewhere), I'm concerned that learning will not serve to make the best use of all of the knowledge that we've managed to acquire.
12:58:33 PM 
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