What are Universities for?
The university of the future will do that which today’s schools and universities do not do: teach young people the art of self-knowledge, of self-discovery to become masters of their own lives. There’s nothing more important and more compelling.
We are so used to talk about them, to send our children, to work, study and teach in those dusty temples, that we take for granted the answer to this thorny question — core of the academic mission and perhaps of the future of our civilization.
The universities, born to be forges of men of integrity, schools for individuals, conditions of survival for every civilization, are reduced to schools of dependence, factories that produce a subjugated species, afraid and unprepared men and women; unprepared not only because they have no idea of what happens in the real world, but above all because they don’t know who they really are.
How could the actual universities ever transform themselves in Socratic schools? Which divine force will inscribe on the eardrums of modern schools the eternal Delphic motto: Know Thyself?
As far as we can see, the European school of Economics is the only example in which the philosophical research, self-study and self-mastery are for each student an integral part of the academic program, at the heart of economic and international finance studies, so that it can loudly declare that the Art of self-discovery is the central and most important factor in the education of the future.
The bitter conclusion is that, despite scientific and material progress, we’re behind in respect to the marvelous project of the Academy and of Plato’s “dream.”
That school model, those higher education institutes that much later in medieval times would be called universities, were schools of thought born around a master, presuming closeness with his disciples in enchanting places chosen for the magic of their history near water sources or rivers. Water, besides being a symbol of life and conscience, was used for ablution. In these schools the culture of the spirit and the body were two profiles of the same reality — indivisible.
