Education and Purpose

"I wish there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!"
~Franny, in J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zoey

"Why don't all of us—the teachers and the students—try to take these books to heart, not just analyze them and then go on to the next book. We may be smarter, but are we better?"
~A student in Robert Cole's The Call to Stories

"Objectivity has come to be simply the academic uniform of moral cowardice: one who is 'objective' never takes a stand."
~Wendell Berry


Knowledge for knowledge's sake. I used to believe in it, but not so much anymore. Don't get me wrong: I love to inquire, to read, to discuss, to write. But only when there seems to be a connection to the life that I am living. I have little desire to hide in the corner of a library and read boring, detached academic journal articles whose meaning doesn't seem to connect in any way to my life. Sometimes, as a grad student, that gets me in trouble because I am more likely to express my disgust than I am to "play the game" well. There's usually a class per semester that challenges me in this way (and this semester is no exception).

One of the moments I recall that began to plant seeds toward a changed perception was a conversation a few years ago with a mentor who possessed a PhD. He does quite a bit of writing, speaking, and teaching, but has never pursued a tenured professorship. "Why not?" I asked him. I've never forgotten his answer.

He told me it was because too much of university life exists on an island. In books, classrooms, and blocked off from the world by aesthetic gates. People live one life before college, another life in college, and an altogether different one after college. "There have been opportunities," he told me. "But I was always afraid I'd get too detached from real work and real people."

"You don't think you can find those things in the university setting?" I asked him.

"Too many times, no," he said.

As one who teaches and does much of his current work in adjunct cubicles, I know what he means. In academia we say things that would never fly outside our own walls, and that's sad. We try to get students to separate out their own life from the material they are studying: an impossible task and harmful one at that. My response to this kind of pedagogy, more often than not, is boredom.

But this is not to dismiss academia altogether. It plays an important role in life, mostly always has (in some capacity), and probably always will. It will undoubtedly be a part of my own professional pursuits in the future.

So what is the alternative vision? Let me first illustrate with an anecdote. As an undergraduate student at Anderson University, I took a microeconomics course, most of which definitely challenged my own ways of thinking. That is to say, I've always been a lot more interested in what something means than the scientific or the mathematical aspect of whatever that thing was. It's partially a weakness, I'll admit. But this particular professor made a habit out of writing two words on the board after solving various problems. "Who cares?" he would write. In other words: what is the point? why does this matter? what does it mean? And then he would go into his own diatribe of an answer.

What he was doing was connecting the objective to the subjective, the scientific to the humanities, the skill to the knowledge, the order to the wisdom. Rather than isolate, he believed in coherence. If it didn't mean anything than it wasn't worth learning. Not knowledge for knowledge's sake, but rather, to borrow the student's idea from quote in the Coles' book, knowledge to become better. Now that is a vision for education that I can live into for the long haul.