Disenchantment in education, or: ‘Whither art thou gone, fair world?’–Has the magic gone from the ivory tower?

Abstract

With reference to the current debate surrounding the humanities in the West, this paper draws on subsequent theoretical explorations of disenchantment to analyse what numerous observers describe as the ‘crisis’ of our universities. Engaging both Jungian thought and the Frankfurt School to understand the psychological dynamics of ‘disenchantment’ as experienced on campus, it investigates Adorno's notion of the ‘totally administered society’ and — more broadly — surveys some of the arguments proposed to explain this decline. Moving beyond, on one hand, the lamentation and hand-wringing nostalgia for a long-lost past and, on the other, what some have termed a ‘new managerialism’ that inhabits an acronym-ridden climate of control, it tries to discern, in what is undoubtedly a political and an economic problem, the contours of a psychological crisis, whose resolution cannot ignore the archetypal dimension of the collective soul.

Keywords:

• analytical psychology
• education
• Frankfurt School
• émerveillement
• Vergely