I actually decided to pick up Save the World on Your Own Time because of an off-hand remark in Dockery’s Renewing Minds pertaining to Fish’s literary views. Unsurprisingly, in this book Fish disagrees with a great many of Dockery’s ideas of what higher education should be meant to accomplish, and argues in a much more succinct, logical, and persuasive way.

Dockery, along with many of my professors, believes that the university should be a place dedicated to training men and women of character in a great many things beyond academics. Fish, on the other hand, believes that the only thing the university can reasonably expect to accomplish is the one thing it is actually designed to do: transmit knowledge and skills to its students.

In general, after 90 years of reform-minded Ed school graduates pouring into the system, dreaming romantically of “fostering growth” and “encouraging creativity”, we still seem to be completely nonplussed when it comes to defining the purpose of schooling or education. That, or we speak on and on, assigning to the schools every duty from making sure graduates are “productive members of society”, to “fostering tolerance and understanding”, but never getting to an actual purpose. In Philosophy & Education, George Knight referred to this as “mindlessness.” We seem not to know what particular good things to pursue, so we pursue them all, without focus.

Everyone agrees there are problems with the system, but the two prominent sides can’t seem to agree on what they are. As a result, our efforts at solving them are going nowhere, but Fish thinks we’re going about it all wrong. Everyone seems to think the schools aren’t doing enough—everyone except him: “…the problems pretty much go away when you understand and act on a simple imperative—do your job—which comes along with two corollary imperatives—don’t do somebody else’s job and don’t let someone else do your job.”

Early on he differentiates between higher education and “professional instruction” (“if you want to make something, here’s how to do it”), he cuts into university mission statements that promise things we all know they can’t possibly deliver with any regularity (“I don’t know what ‘an appreciation of the world’ means, and ‘individual group beliefs and traditions’ is a pathetic and incoherent attempt to sit on the fence…”), and lays down a simple, limited, and difficult task for the university: Introduce students to new bodies of knowledge and inquiry, and equip them with the skills to engage in those fields.

All the rest are “contingent effects”, which can’t necessarily be planned, and “shouldn’t be aimed at.” The limited nature of the academic task, the fact that it has only one focus – “the mastery of intellectual and scholarly skills” – is what makes it “partially achievable”. Teachers and professors aren’t trained to deal with all the world’s social and political and personal issues. There are people trained for those things: social workers, politicians, psychologists, clergy.

In distinguishing education from other fields, Fish argues, educators must be emphatic about keeping other groups out of the academic enterprise. While many people believe that schools have many constituencies-businesses, parents, politicians, society as a whole, etc.-but Fish essentially says, “No, the university is its own constituency.” It has its own standards, methods, and purposes, which only incidentally cross paths with those of other groups; they don’t know the enterprise well enough to meddle, and their expectations are sometimes at odds with the purpose of schooling.

One Focus

In the end Fish’s point was simple: education has a single focus, and that is the transmitting of knowledge and skills to students. The [secular] school has neither the time nor the training to engage intentionally in character building, consciousness raising, or social vocalizing. These things are better left to other groups who have more skill and practice -perhaps because the people who trained them stuck to the point – and will do a better job. Giving those things up has the happy and fortunate consequence of allowing more time for the practice and improvement of teaching and learning.