The Call of Higher Education: Purpose, Passion, and Patience
Image by F. Roman
Why are you here at university? Why do you care or have you been coerced into caring? What’s your rationale for desiring a degree? Do you care about what you study? Have you lost track of your passion? These are some thoughts that frequent the thick mire of my preoccupied mind.
“I want to drop out and be a ski bum,” my roommate would frequently proclaim in a spirit of rebellion and animosity toward his homework. He, being an incredibly gifted student, was nothing like me. I had to work to get the grades I wanted. His grades were a consequence of his genius. Though being told by an MIT faculty interviewer that you are the best candidate out of hundreds can make you feel above the supposed need for higher education, you aren’t Steve Jobs. For those that aren’t making a multi-billion-dollar product in their garage, the desire to pursue higher education after high school is a pure, conscientious, well-meaning opportunity to position oneself as a unique candidate in the job market or in higher education itself, and it makes sense to do so.
If the job market was the focus, American colleges, nearly 150 years ago, were right when they saw the decrepit tree of higher education and decided it needed pruning. During the late 19th century, some higher education leaders wanted to do away with allowing the clergymen to control American colleges in teaching their dated classical curricula. Desiring to make college more attractive, education leaders backed the establishment of schools such as Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School, Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in hopes of teaching the practical skills needed in a developing world. The grip of Enlightenment era thinking had infected an adolescent America’s taste for critical thinking and caused it to praise the empty, mechanistic process irrespective of the educational system’s telos.
Following the Industrial Revolution, academics swapped the sacred and sublime for the scientific. The spirit of progress designated a classical education as unconducive to its expansion, so in chopping off these “dying” branches, new offshoots of empirical studies would flourish. Though this sentiment continued to grow, the defense for Classical Liberal education held firm. Yale president Jeremiah Day articulated it this way:
“The models of ancient literature, which are put into the hands of the young student, can hardly fail to imbue his mind with the principles of liberty; to inspire the liveliest patriotism, and to excite to noble and generous action, and are therefore peculiarly adapted to the American youth.”
Do not the classics and scientific studies both engage their pupils in healthy critical thinking? It can be argued that the classical liberal arts education stands in pure solidarity in the preservation of the anthropology of ideas, not in the opposition of analytical studies but in the accentuation of it.
The 21st president of Harvard University, Charles Eliot, was keen on this mission of preserving classical studies. In 1909, he set out on a mission to compile what is regarded as one of the most comprehensive anthropologies of all time, whilst existing as a complete liberal arts education within a 50-volume series of books called the Harvard Classics. In speaking liberal education into creation, Eliot defined its existence as “so ample and characteristic a record of the stream of the world’s thought that the observant reader’s mind shall be enriched, refined and fertilized” . In simple terms: If you read Harvard Classics, then you will be enriched. The value here lies in the way to view and apply ideas; to build off the ideas that came before you and thus live out the abstraction of historical thought realized within a Classical Liberal education.
In recent years, an oversaturated job market has made a bachelor’s degree as requisite as a customary high school diploma. Those in college seem to cite their rationale for choosing a major as a means of escaping the purgatory of minimum wage. High school seniors and incoming first-years now may equate their major of choice as the end-all be-all, final determinant of their professional life which will cement them into a permanent state of affairs following graduation. While there is virtue in the pursuit of career, career is titular, and life is not the summation of your titles on Linkedin.
We’d all like to become leaders after our first job, but that requires experience. We’d all like this world to change overnight, yet it doesn’t. We’d all like wisdom instantaneously, but it is slow. Impious toward the past, the Zeitgeist of careerism impedes on the idea that an education takes time, and development takes even longer. Stacking up our merits, we disregard the waiting involved in maturing and wisdom involved in attentiveness. Simone Weil writes about a patience that, in honest pursuit of an answer, waits upon it.
“Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it…The cause is always that we have wanted to be too active; we have wanted to carry out a search…We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”
Life remains vibrant, overflowing in significance, asking you to take part and engage meaningfully, while the temptation may be to snuff out the ember of reflection in exchange for the imminent world as it is, nothing more. Is the point of an education to solely prepare you for the workforce and that’s it? Does there have to be more to it than that? Is there another aspect of being a functioning member of society apart from your aptitude within your profession?
I am in no way telling anyone to drop out. Neither am I advocating for everyone to be homeschooled and never go to college. I believe college has been a wonderful, life-changing experience during a crucial period of human flourishing. During these short years of your life, your brain chemistry is changing, your trajectory in life is heavily affected, and you’re turning into the person you will be for the rest of your life. The impact is real, and it can be dulled if you want it to be. Pay attention. Thoughtfully consider. Take college up on the offer of molding you holistically, and don’t discount the opportunity while it’s in front of you, staring you down, waiting for you to act upon it.
That’s the call. I hope you have an answer to it when it beckons to you every waking hour of your life. I couldn’t help but wonder at Annie Dillard’s answer; a sobering realization having been pinched till your skin breaks and bleeds or assaulted by unforgiving freezing water to the face:
“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”
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