Optimism is a heady drug. Americans, especially the liberal, enlightened ones, love to be optimistic. One thing people are particularly optimistic about is college education. Not only can anyone “get it,” but ideally, everyone should get it.
But when we say “college education” what do we mean? Is it just a diploma that allows for a higher paying job, or does college still have its erstwhile goal at heart, the improvement of the mind?
College is not simply four years between high school and a job. We need to recognize that the improvement of the mind is more important than the improvement of a resume.
I believe that the University of Puget Sound, as a small, exclusive, liberal arts college, has the rare chance to promote the college experience as a training ground for the life of the mind. I fear, however, that it will go a different route, becoming an expensive and glorified vocational school.
Several months ago, in his state of the union address, President Obama declared, among other things, that our country needs to out-educate his rivals. As a White House Press Secretary fact sheet made clear, however, Mr. Obama’s idea of education is a promotion of “science, technology, engineering, and math—key skills for the best jobs in America.” Mr. Obama means for the improvement of our educational system to be for the purpose of improving the quality of our labor force, so that we can compete with China, India, Brazil or other rapidly growing nations.
Of course, we need to eliminate structural employment to bolster the efficiency of our workforce and to maintain our standard of living, but isn’t something else important in addition to grooming highly skilled workers?
Students too often break college into classes that are practical or impractical. Math, science and business—these will be applicable in “real life.” Literature, arts, philosophy—these are nothing but, to use the ridiculous term, “mental masturbation.” In retrospect, after college, the days spent reading Spinoza or Edmund Spencer become hazy, idyllic, useless.
Indeed, many colleges have done much to break down the boundaries between college and the real world. Business students at Ohio University, for instance, oversee some one million dollars of the university’s investments. Finally, it is said, students can actually do something important, something that matters. Already, immediately after graduating, students will be able to wave their resumes high and say with pride, “Yes, I have managed investments! Yes, I can do that!”
Yet we at the University of Puget Sound should be wary of following this trend. We should produce students who can think, not simply do. We should return to an older idea of college, an inherently more intellectual idea. As an anonymous columnist put it in the Atlantic Magazine, college used to be “a place to condition one’s mind with four years of intellectual crunches and sets and reps.”
In this more intellectual view of college, the idea of college for everyone is problematic. It may leave a bitter taste of snobbery in the mouths of equal opportunists, but not everyone is cut out with the sufficient intuitive reasoning skills or desire or ambition to make it through four years of intellectual rigor. Not everyone is able to grapple successfully with the Coase theorem or Baudrillard’s idea of simulacra or the Many Worlds interpretation.
But then again, the University of Puget Sound doesn’t let just anybody in. Already we exclude vast portions of people simply because they lack the academic ability to succeed here. I say we make the most of this exclusiveness and make Puget Sound a breeding ground for the life of the mind. Let us embrace intellectualism, let us celebrate the fact that for four sweet years we have time away from the humdrum mediocrity of reality to improve our mental faculties, to masticate complex theorems and paradoxes with our well-greased, synthesizing molars and our sharpened, analytical canines.
There is too much beauty in the life of the mind for us to concentrate only on becoming highly skilled workers. Mr. Obama should know that in addition to rising GDP, intellectual institutions are a point upon which Americans should pride themselves, over our economic competitors. Far from merely well trained, let our labor force also be the most insightful and the most well-read.
[Photo Courtesy / Daniel Pendleton]