What’s the Point of School?
On an incredibly stormy, dreary, and cold December afternoon my dad and I braved I-45 with water halfway up the tires and visibility about 30 feet ahead. We survived our trek to NRG Stadium in downtown Houston and I stepped out of the car, umbrella shielding me from the downpour as I desperately tried to keep my cap and gown dry. Not knowing where I was supposed to go, I followed all the others dressed like the Party City version of medieval monks and ended up inside the stadium in my chair ready for my undergraduate graduation ceremony.
After three and a half years I had earned my History degree (even though during my final semester I didn’t take a single history course). Countless papers on the Norman Conquest, essays over the Crusades, research projects on the French Revolutions (yes, there were several — I’m very passionate about this), pointless BlackBoard discussions over literally nothing, French oral exams, and being told to read Faulkner and simply not, it all led to this. But what had I actually done?
As I write this, my degree is sitting on my desk behind my computer — unframed, leaning against a cork board, propped up by various things I have on my desk. It sometimes falls face down, I should really frame it and put it on the wall. It’s almost been a year, frankly I’m just glad it hasn’t been bent yet.
What was the point of my attaining this degree? Décor?
Definitely Not the Purpose of Education.
First and foremost I simply must disillusion people that hold the errant belief that education — especially higher ed — is meant for job training. Job training is what jobs are for. If your boss isn’t going to train you to do the job they want, then they aren’t someone you should want to work for.
Even as a high school kid I didn’t buy the line that we all simply must “go to college, get any degree and it will get you a ‘good-paying job’ afterwards” that we were all told every day for 18 years. The idea that it takes a specialized four-year degree to be granted access to the workforce at an entry level position moving numbers around on a spreadsheet or transferring phone calls simply does not make any sense if you think about it for five seconds.
It’s all just credentialism.
Hiring managers and HR folk either can’t or don’t want to do the legwork of deciding if an applicant will be able to do the work they need. It seems that holistic decision-making has been practically eradicated in the workforce and left to school admissions offices. If you can be accepted and commit to a four year degree then you can be trusted to stick with the monotonous day to day life in a cubicle, and hey you might have even learned a thing or two as a bonus.
Businesses just want to make sure they are making a good choice for who they hire, and a college degree is usually a good indicator of some level of competence. Wouldn’t it be better, however, if instead of a four year degree just to enter the workforce we instead moved certain disciplines into a more independent certification program? If all these types of hyper-specific degrees are doing is getting its holder a job, wouldn’t it be easier to separate the College of Business from the broader campus and replace these degrees with certifications in Accounting, Finance, Banking, Marketing, etc? They would likely cost less, and take less time to complete because all the general education that is tacked on to a typical bachelor’s degree would be removed. We already do this for the skilled tradespeople who attend vocational schools, why not expand it to the professional skills too?
Education as merely job training is such a dreary outlook on higher ed. Learning ought not be reduced to nothing more than a cost-benefit analysis or simple return on investment.
Life is much richer than making a good salary, and so too is education.
Education is about Virtue.
So if it’s not about job training then what is it for? I say it’s to understand ones own natural freedoms. To elevate the mind towards that which is greater, and to do good with that knowledge. In essence, education ought to espouse virtue.
Universities were founded by medieval Catholic monks and originally studied grammar, rhetoric, canon law, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, etc. These were not institutions meant to make the financially impoverished wealthy— and they certainly didn’t include business accounting on their curriculum (I’m fairly sure that would’ve been usury anyways). They were designed to bring the unenlightened to come to know their own freedoms and obligations to themselves, to their fellow man and to the Almighty. Somehow we tacked on job training in the intervening thousand years.
Education is disciplinary, insofar as it forces the student to discipline themself by attending lectures on a proper schedule, doing appropriate study and research, and by properly demonstrating the truth they are taught. It is also disciplinary in the sense that education pushes out the falsehoods of ignorance and replaces them with the truth. Ideally, at least.
The Greater Things.
It doesn’t take much to ask the question “Why do I exist?” or “What am I supposed to do with my life?” but it takes thoughtful deliberation and instruction to answer them.
It is here that I find the true purpose of higher education. We know we exist, we’ve all heard the cogito, therefore what are we supposed to do next? Things exist around us, but they don’t necessarily tell us what to do with them. A rock doesn’t say to a person that it can be used for skipping on water, building a wall, or for making tools. We must use our own judgement to make these decisions. But how do we come to hone our sense of judgement?
This is what education is for. Teaching people what to do with the incredible amount of freedom they experience in life. We must inculcate a society of virtue in order to flourish— a society of liars, thieves, and murderers tends to not bring about Utopia. In order to become a fully actualized human individual we must learn good from bad, and to train our wills to want and act on the good at all times.
Spreadsheets don’t typically have such heft.