“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do, and I understand.”Over the past year, I’ve spent several hours a week writing editorials about the moral complexities of my college experience. I've only begun to understand it.
-Confucius
Whenever we talk about the value of higher education, we seem to reach an impasse at what academia is designed to do. Academia should let us 1) describe texts, and 2) evaluate them. The third step – figuring out what they mean for us – is hard to accomplish in the classroom.
This sentiment comes from professors who have far more knowledge than us, but also more experience working with it. Even if I disagree, it makes sense that I should learn the way they learned. Right?
When I think of the academic alienation at Carleton, I think we need to take a step back. Why are we here in the first place, spending $53,000 a year?
Our teachers seem to harbor a solipsistic optimism that when handed a text, any 18-22 year old will have grandiose moments of intellectual or spiritual (ah, same thing, right?) epiphany as often as they did. It’s something to strive for.
But with most students' busy schedules, that “outside the classroom” time for discussing the meaning of life – it doesn't exist.
So we drift from activity to activity, searching for fulfillment that never comes. We fall into a cycle of “work hard, play hard,” complaining about our workloads and perpetuating a massively destructive drinking culture, simply because work and play are the only guarantees.
We have been asked to wait. It will all be worth it at graduation. Like magic, we will have become better people.
When does this happen? After a year? A term? A class?
The truth is, most freshman haven't thought too much about the purpose of education. We like learning, we probably enjoyed books as children, we’re generically ambitious. But we’re here because it’s the next step. College is what 'successful' people do after high school.
So this assumption that all learning is unmitigated good – it's lazy, and risky.
Let’s accept the notion that there is no such thing as an evil idea, only evil ways to use it. For example: Hitler used Darwinism to justify genocide.
But imagine if the first time Hitler encountered Darwinism, it was in a classroom where he was encouraged to think about his own life – his experience getting rejected from art school, his poverty, his family’s misfortunes. In this context, it may not have been such an attractive concept. What if that classroom included Jews who were also sharing personal insights?
Once you take an idea away from the human lives it claims to understand, it becomes much easier to use against them.
I’m not proposing that we turn every class into a group psychoanalysis session. But I think the level of abstraction we've reached in humanities classes is counterproductive. When you’re afraid to bring up concrete examples of ideas, you can't make vivid connections to your previous experiences. And neurobiology suggests that’s actually how learning takes place.
The fatigue of analyzing texts with total detachment can lead to two unhealthy outcomes. One, we stop believing that what we do in class has any bearing on our lives. In the extrinsic-motivation-based system of grades and diplomas, we stop caring about our moral compass because it comes second to success. Two, we latch onto whatever idea grabs us first. Hitler did that; so did Sarah Kofman, a French philosopher who killed herself on Nietzsche’s birthday.
College shouldn't be a cerebral dream from which we wake up lost and cynical. If we don’t start connecting the theory of life to the practice now, when will we start? When there are no grades at stake? When it’s our employees, our students, our children?
