| so i'm applying for the job at a school in south korea. i was
supposed to have an interview this evening, so i dutifully left
rehearsal early, set up a landline in my room so i wouldn't be on my
cell, and waited. i was expecting a 90 minute interview.
instead, i got a five-minute talk, a list of essay questions, and the
instructions that i had 90 minutes to write an essay on one of the
topics. i chose education. bear in mind that this was
written on the fly for people who teach english language, not
literature. but enjoy...if you can keep your eyes open long
enough.
Education
3. In the past, character development was
considered one of the chief goals of a well-rounded education. Therefore,
students were often required to study ethics, religion, and morality. In recent years, the role of education seems
to have shifted to the point where many people consider the provision of
marketable skills to be the sole role of education. What do you believe should be the primary
role(s) of education and why?
then again...why do i feel like i missed the question?
My school, the University of Pennsylvania, is renowned for its ability to produce
top-notch businesspeople and place them in high-paying jobs within the American
corporate structure. About a quarter of
the people at my school are undergraduate business students. They have useful majors like Finance,
Accounting, and Operations and Information Management. They look down on people who major in
“fluffy” subjects like Communication or Management, have some respect for those
in Engineering or Economics. So it
causes not a little bemusement when I announce my own highly useful major:
Classical Studies. (“What are you going
to do with that?” said one fellow in International Relations. “I’d be more worried about what you’ll do
with IR,” I said, “because you are flubbing interpersonal relations.”) They, after all, have labored through four
long years to end up in a cushy I-Banking job on Wall Street. I, on the other hand, have blown time and
opportunity on the useless, and they cannot figure out why.
Even as I sit and contemplate my
future in the lower economic rungs of society, I cannot help feeling that
somewhere, deep down, I have not really gotten it all wrong. Is education really about learning specific
skills to be specifically applied to specific careers or tasks? Or is it about creating a mental fertility
within a student that encourages growth and new ways of thinking long after
that individual is no longer a student? Once,
when I was a sophomore, I was having one of my moments of self-doubt – the kind
that Liberal Arts people get when they think that maybe they should just give
in and transfer into the business school – and I bumped into Al, a
seventy-year-old retired psychiatrist who had audited my Jewish Folklore class
the semester before. I told him that I
was worried that I had made the wrong decision, that I was having too much fun
in my fluffy major, and that I was worried about the future. I have not forgotten the advice he gave me:
“The best part about my Penn education was that it made me want to keep
learning. I graduated from here almost
fifty years ago, and not a day goes by when I don’t learn something new. I wouldn’t want it any other way. Now wouldn’t you say that that is the mark of
a good education?”
When I reveal my major to people in
conversation, I find that I am more surprised if they do not say to me,
“Oh. What are you going to do with
that?” It is simply expected, because
most people think of education along very literal lines: you study something,
you go on to work with that something.
So if there is no direct skill to be derived, clearly the study was not
worthwhile. To be fair, a marketable
skill is certainly a safety net in case of unemployment. For instance, when I told my father that my
best friend Lisa had majored in Accounting, he said that that was wonderful and
that Lisa would definitely be able to find work in a wide variety of
locations. On the other hand, who says
one necessarily has to do what one started out doing? Law schools, for instance, are a favorite
place for graduates with BAs in Philosophy, English, and, yes, Classics. In fact, I have heard the dean of the Penn Law School say that most students have already worked a
few years before applying, and very few took any kind of pre-Law as
undergraduates. The majority of
students in MBA programs are not going to be undergraduate business students,
by virtue of the fact that most schools, unlike Penn, do not have undergraduate
business schools. Businesses like consulting
firms claim to encourage people with non-business backgrounds because they
bring perspective to the quintessential “box”.
On a broader level, I think it fair to say that because people in America today live longer and work longer, they are
more likely to shift careers throughout their working lives. Who says that you have to finish exactly
where you started?
Still, one might argue, a pragmatic
education is a way of ensuring employment throughout one’s lifetime. But I think that there is a great difference
between learning a specific skill for a specific task and developing one’s
cognitive abilities not only to be adept at picking up skills, but to innovate
on them. I like to think of it as being
a bit like basic Keynesian economics: you can temporarily fix an economy by
addressing putting more money into circulation; but you can change the entire
standard of living in the long-term by investing in research and
development. My mother, for instance,
came to her first law firm with a background in tax law and had to be trained
by the firm so that they could put her into estate law; this was the short-term
fix. However, my mother’s undergraduate
degree in English enabled her to think critically, write critically and
intelligently, and ultimately be very successful when she eventually moved into
corporate law. In short, there are many
skills that a company can teach its workers to address its specific needs. But if it has workers who have been educated
to analyze, to process, and to innovate, it has already raised the standard of
its workforce.
Finally, I truly believe that the
best sort of education is the one that fosters a lifetime of education. One can argue that in making this assertion
that I am being selfish; after all, a proliferation of so-called “thinking
subjects” like Classics means that someone like me, who does want to make a
career from this, will have employment along the way. I own up to that charge, but I was brought up
in the belief that intellectual curiosity was a virtue and not a waste of
time. Furthermore, I believe that anyone
who has the interest in self-education will find that he is not so far away
from the things he considered merely practical.
Once, I was having a dormitory dinner with a professor of business
ethics who was discussing whether the outsourcing of jobs was ethical. As I listened to both sides – those who said
one ought to because one could, and those who said that it simply was not right
– I realized that I had just had the same discussion earlier that day. Only, it was about a section of Plato’s Republic. What irony it was for me to discover that in
educating myself in a pragmatic discipline, I found myself learning more about
my own discipline!
As a devotee of the Liberal Arts, and as one who professes love for an
impractical subject, I find myself disturbed by the recent trend of practical
education. After four years of my own
education, I have learned that its primary goal is indeed infuriatingly
intangible: it is about teaching the mind to think for itself, and fostering
the continued process of learning. In
this light, it is frighteningly literal to say that one must simply learn the
task that one must do, and nothing more.
There are millions of intelligent, successful, educated people who are
proof that this is so. If I ever doubt
this, or myself, at least I know I can go talk to Al.
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