Imagine the scene: It’s two in the morning, and you are at the bottom floor of Clemons Library with 50 of your closest friends, all of whom are as bleary-eyed and groggy as you are. There’s a mess of papers in front of you and a halfway-finished paper on your laptop screen. Sleep tempts you like a cruel mistress. Maybe some words from Faust come into mind: “What matters our creative endless toil?”
Once my friends and I were waxing philosophically on why we are going to college, and one of them — the philosophy major, of all people — gave quite an undeniably practical reason: “I’m going to college and doing stuff I don’t want to do, like writing papers, so after I graduate I can get a good job.” You can stuff the unemployed philosophy major jokes somewhere else, as the guy is also pre-law. Perhaps it’s crassly worded, but I think it is evident that everyone holds this sentiment, especially when it’s two in the morning and you’re still hacking away at Clemons. At a certain point we shed the vague purpose of attending college “to get an education” and understand that attending college is a contract for material reward.
If you think I am about to bash this notion and perform a dramatic monologue on the merits of learning as an end in itself, I’m not. In fact, I think that it is quite foolish to ignore your career prospects after graduation. At the same time, however, I am worried that we focus on the idea of education being a means to the exclusion of the idea that it is also an end, and that singular focus colors our actions during our time here at the University. The obvious consequence of treating college as glorified job training is that you treat college like a job. You will not be interested or have any passion for the courses you take; whatever is in lecture or discussion stays in lecture or discussion, and once you leave the classroom you cannot care less what the professor has talked about, except for when you have to take a midterm or do a problem set. Rinse and repeat this process for four years, and at the end you get a fancy piece of paper to prove you survived its tribulations. This is not learning. It might look like it prima facie, but in this case you have only remembered facts and figures. Learning takes personal engagement in the material. It is a transformative process; if you have not changed your opinions and beliefs from the time you entered here as a first year to the time you graduate — or at least have gained the capacity to do so — then you are not learning.
This of course is a privileged idea — your parents certainly do not pay thousands of dollars so that you can “find yourself” or to learn for the sake of learning. For them, it’s simply a matter of an investment for material success in your future. If you are a good child, then you will honor that sacrifice and take advantage of the opportunity of being here; but at the same time, you can do much more than that. Not only do you have an opportunity to partake in glorified job training, but you have access to the great fruits of civilization: math, science, philosophy, literature, basically all modes of human thought. I don’t know about you, but to me that is a profound idea. It makes me want to attend lecture and pay careful attention, even if lecture is 9 o’clock on a Monday morning. Note that this notion of genuine learning does not detract from the notion that college is glorified job training — all it takes is a bit more effort and personal engagement from you.
So to answer the Faustian question: “What matters our creative endless toil?” The qualified answer would be this: that doing well in college brings material reward, but at the same time having interest in whatever you are learning will change you into a person with an expanded capacity for thinking. Remind yourself this anytime you get existential during study sessions in Clemons, and all will be well.
Rolph Recto’s column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at r.recto@cavalierdaily.com.
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