To a College Student on Education and Its Insane Cost
An Earnest Look at a Proper Education
by
Eric Paul Nolte
I'm laid up this week, following some recent adventures in surgery and recovery, and I was able to write at some length because I am a temporary invalid, tamped and bolstered back in my sick bed, with nothing to do for the moment but tilt at windmills, listen to the cat's warmly lopsided purring, and indulge my other fancies, whimsies, grudges, and curiosities! I read a few of my heroes for inspiration, and then a couple of my worst villains, who are nevertheless important figures in the world, so that I might engage and do battle with my own confirmation bias (the awful tendency in all of us to be deaf and blind to anything we do not already believe as true and right.) I also read my villains so that I may be better equipped to understand the worthiest opposition in the world.
What follows began as excerpts from a letter to a college student on education, and how to think about its value in a world where the dizzy, overwhelming cost of education on conventional American college campuses has risen twice as fast as the general rate of inflation.
* * *
Now, to address your cheerful wish that your letter would find me bored and in a letter-writing mood ... I am in my usual blabbermouth mode, happy to offer up thoughts on anything to do with life, love, and the cosmos ... but I must tell you that I am never bored! Well ... of course, it's a good thing to be bored ... if you're an airline pilot, like me, and want the flight deck to stay drearily predictable and routine! But otherwise I hate to admit that I have ever been bored elsewhere because I believe boredom is probably something like a crime against ourselves.
This thought on boredom is directly related to the importance of an effective education!
Boredom is perhaps the needless admission of defeat by a mind grown so encrusted with intellectual barnacles that it cannot stay open to the ever-shimmering light of awe and astonishment at the cosmos.
And should not the cultivation of this living capacity for amazement and wonder be a major goal of a proper education?
Boredom is a sad confession that we just can't pay the right attention to see the endlessly fascinating workings of the cosmos, and the web of creative love and cleverness that Homo saps can bring into the world! (and thereby turn our attention away, for just a moment, from the stinking morass of malevolence, madness, and mayhem that Homo saps also bring into the world!)
* * *
Now, there are questions on the nature, the content, and the importance of effective education, but we live in a culture where a college degree has become perceived as essential to putting together a good life.
I challenge this notion about a college degree and the good life, but you are already committed to the project, and now you are banging your head against the wall, trying to shake some more money out of the rafters or the branches. I have a couple thoughts that may help you:
Here's a key point: if you keep coming up short of information, if no one knows what to tell you, then the right question is: do you know anybody who might know the answer? No? Then who might know somebody who might know? Don't know? Then who else might know somebody who might know somebody who might know? Somebody who doesn't have the answers for you might nevertheless know somebody who can indeed help you. Keep asking. Keep driving down that road that leads down to just six degrees of separation between us and anybody else on the planet. You may be able to get some good answers just by persisting in asking the right questions.
I got some of this idea from Charles Lindbergh's memoir about putting together the deal that stunned the whole world in 1927, and thereby allowed him to win the Orteig Prize for the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris. The trick is to imagine the dream attained, and then works backwards, filling in each step of the way by this means of asking who knows, or else who might know someone who might know how to make the thing happen.
* * *
We need some financial wisdom to make good choices about how much and on what to spend money for college. The stupefying rise of college costs over the last half a century has backed us into the need for making these ruthless cost/benefit analyses. I myself am having to think about these matters too, as I near my mandatory retirement from the airlines in a couple years, and ask myself if more formal school could be an answer for me.
So what financial wisdom counts here? Of the world's financial wisdom, which aspects might be most cogent for thinking about college costs?
Einstein was right: the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. Well, he was joking here, of course, but if we learn to understand compound interest, this will go a long way towards allowing us always to keep the Wolf on the right side of the door. Failure to understand compound interest can lead one to become a pathetic charity case at the tender mercy of others. Sorry, but it's true. Nobody can care more about your situation than you yourself. And all political blather about our "being in this together" is nonsense, unless we are each first committed to being self-responsible to whatever degree this is possible.
Charging interest for money loaned is not a sin, contrary to the bible and many other sources, it is the legitimate fee for providing the valuable service of making money or goods available today that would otherwise not be available unless one spend considerable time saving up the funds required. Money available today is objectively worth more than the same money deferred until enough time has passed to save it for ourselves. This disparity of time value and the convenience of having the money now is the basis for charging interest.
To say, "Buy low, sell high," does not capture the essence of a good deal, because this formulation does not rule out fraudulent deals and allows for giving our blessings to the predatory, "I win-you lose" deal, which may make the predator happy for a moment, but inspires rage and indignation on the part of the poor schlemiel who was thus unfairly ripped off, and sets the stage for revenge and an unfolding dilemma of a Hatfields and McCoys feud (or a Sunni v. Shia feud too.)
No, the basis of a truly good deal is the trade of one valuable thing for another, like money for a sandwich, an exchange entered into voluntarily because each party expects that the trade will result in each party feeling better off for having made the deal. This transaction will normally embody the goal of profit, of buying low and selling high, according to one's own subjective judgment, but it is crucial to understand that this is also a win-win trade. It is an "I win and you win" transaction; it is the very beating heart of why free markets (that would be free markets) work well and are an embodiment of good morality. The absence of this spirit of "win-win" also explains why bureaucratic central planning of everything by sanctimonious, meddlesome, Big Brother government regulators works poorly, even when the process does not always create outright economic chaos. Bossy government always embodies an immoral ethos as the basis for how human beings should deal with each other, namely, that of coercion and force, versus freely chosen trade entered with the expectation of acting to mutual advantage. Free trade to mutual advantage is not a zero sum game, one person does not have to win only at another's expense. Free trade adds to the sum of wealth in the world. It creates more wealth than there was before the trade, as measured by the valuation of each of the traders (assuming that the trade went as it normally does) because both parties feel that they received something of more value than what they gave away in trade.
Incidentally, this astonishing dynamic of trade to a mutual advantage that leaves all parties feeling richer, is still very misunderstood in the world, as a widespread feature of the fabric of daily life. That people trade for profit, i.e. to mutual advantage, is still widely condemned as selfish. I recommend Ayn Rand to straighten out the raft of crazy confusion over self-interest and virtue.
These formulations of win-win trade and of cost versus benefit have everything to do with the crazy direction in which college costs have skyrocketed away from sanity in recent decades and how we need to think about it if we're to avoid getting sunk in life. One of the most common problems of frightened new college grads is the sudden insight that paying back the loans can easily cost more than the money you can earn at the jobs for which you are just then qualified. So here's another life-serving nugget of financial wisdom is always to spend less than you earn. It's a little late to think about this upon graduation, but it is oh, so vastly better late than later!
No matter how large the vessel, any leak uncorrected, or any leaking in excess of bailing water, will eventually sink the ship; you can bet your life on it.
You can see that I have arrived at the idea that ultimately the situation with schools has backed us into a corner where we have to look with withering hardness at the cost/benefit ratio of this great, bloody big pile of debt we accumulate by going to college. It seems that the most important thing now is to focus with steely eyes on the return on investment, if any, that we may expect to make as a consequence of paying for our degrees.
The whole situation for higher learning has changed so much since I was in college in the 1970s and early 1980s!
In the name of making money more easily available to students, the government has once again produced another sprawling, unwieldy, intractable monster that creates a flood of perversely unintended consequences. In college education, the result now is that money is available, not so much by a market-driven increase in customer (student) demand, but by politically driven increases in money made available to students, with the result that colleges are happy to capture this money by raising prices. The result, according to figures compiled by the College Board, is that the costs of college have been rising at around twice as fast as the general rate of inflation, and have been doing so for the last half a century. This is not a situation that can continue forever. What physically must stop, will stop eventually. It's another bubble, like the dot-com tech bubble of the 1990s that burst in the spring of 2000; like the housing and financial bubbles that burst in 2007 and 2008. And like the earlier bubbles, it is a creature of the central bank, of monetary policy, of political largesse.
This educational situation is the sad question of whether the benefit we can expect from our degree is worth the pile of debt we incur in getting it.
How can we answer this question?
I still believe that the value of one's education is not entirely a matter of any direct correlation between the college degree earned and any particular expected return on this investment, although we can no longer afford to blow off any rational thinking about the expenses, and then go major in the softest of the soft humanities (dare I mention ethnic or gender studies and social justice?), at huge expense, incurring crushing debts, and then reasonably expect to find a well-paying job in industry.
Why go to college at all?
I was deeply influenced in my choice of college by Mortimer Adler's, How to Read a Book, which for me is a deep and inspiring polemic on the value of a classical liberal arts education. For what it's worth, here is Adler, on an index card:
Adler asserts that we need to learn enough to listen to what he calls The Great Conversation, namely, the dialogue between the greatest minds, conducted in the hall where human knowledge is accumulated, across the millennia, and disciplines, and cultures. This conversation begins with Philosophy, the mother of everything, because every field depends on answers to the Big Questions found there. What is all this?--one might ask, sweeping one's arm ostensively across the whole universe? How does all this come to be? What is its nature? Is is regular? Or random? Can we expect things to behave reliably? Or capriciously? Did a god create it? What's a god? Whose god? What is the stuff of existence? What is life? Who are we? Where did we come from? Are we puppets dancing on the fingers of the gods? Do we have free will? What is free will? What is determinism? Is the universe finite? Infinite? How would one know the difference? What is Truth? What is false? What is right? What is wrong? What can I expect of others in the way they treat me? How should I treat others? Is my life mine? Do I belong to others? Others to me? What is property? What are rights? What is art? Above all, how do we even begin to know any of this? What is knowledge itself and by what standards do we come to establish these things?
Wrestling with these questions and dozens more, in dialogues between all the great thinkers across the ages, when combined with our own independent engagement with these questions, will give us something like X-Ray vision into the body of thought we hear yammering away from all quarters in the world today.
Philosophy is the arena in which the best minds have spoken with each other across time, in order to make any sense of life's enduring mysteries, of our place in the cosmos, and our grasp of any of it. Without life-serving answers to these big questions, we have no ability even to begin to distinguish truth from false, right from wrong, and above all how we begin to know any of these things. What of competing and contradictory propositions? Of mutually exclusive claims? Philosophy ... it is both a cause of the problem and its cure.
Footnote here on how philosophy can be simultaneously insane and yet of crucial importance. I know I will not be a very inspiring salesman for philosophy if I tell you that in my humble opinion, both philosophy and religion (which I believe to be an early draft of philosophy) are in a vertigo-inspiring state of backwardness and confusion. Nevertheless, this confusion makes the subject no less crucial. Philosophy is indeed the discipline that ought to work as a solvent to clean all the bushwa and crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses out of the crevices of the mind. Yes, I say again that philosophy remains the primary source of these crazy ideas. That philosophy purveys a dizzying array of crazy ideas is a fact. That we need life-serving ideas by which to distinguish truth from falsehood is also a fact. Without a few crucial answers to what is true and right, even if these answers are held in a patchy and confused way, we would all be dead in a day. I believe the solution to the problem lies in the problem, just as the answer to the problem of high prices at the grocery store is those same high prices, because the problem inspires producers to bring more of the thing to market, the short supply of which has caused the prices to become high. In a free marketplace of ideas, the better ideas eventually seem to win because it is these ideas which are most effective and life-serving to us. I underscore the modifier eventually! Never forget that slavery mostly ended without violence. Why? Because, apart from the moral horror of the matter, slave labor turns out to be vastly inferior to the labor of people whose very freedom unleashes their best energy, inspires their creativity and whips up gales of ambition and intelligence. End footnote.
Back to Mortimer Adler's liberal education on an index card: next we need to know some history, so we can have a clue about where this whole antic human project has come from.
We need languages too, so as to know that the word is not the thing named, and to see wider truths about the things these words attempt to name.
We need science and math, because the language of natural science is mathematics, and without these we have no language by which to distinguish the most astonishing human accomplishments in science and technology from outright magic, as Arthur C. Clarke once put the matter.
The appeal of a classical or liberal arts education is to nurture a deep perspective on humanity, a basic understanding of the enduring issues with which the best minds have argued and engaged with each other since the day humans learned to write and thereby began to accumulate our knowledge, and to learn how to learn.
It is difficult to inculcate such a slow, contemplative approach to knowledge as the classical liberal arts, when one is made to feel that every hour in the classroom is leading to a Macy's Day Parade, with your float rolling down the street, festooned with long rolls of print-outs of bills for the current-day's hideously high college expenses.
How can one find anything like the repose for thought which is required to engage mindfully and carefully with the big questions, and get a perspective on this unique experience of being human?
And then there is the problem on campus of so much philosophical lunacy, political thumb-sucking, indoctrination against all things essentially human ...
... okay, this is veering into deeply unwarranted overgeneralization, but everywhere on campus I see in the background the neon sign of debt flashing: $ $ $. How can we not be scared out of our wits to pile on debt without some assurance that it will eventually pay off and not bankrupt us, or flatten us financially for decades to come?
I understand that you have some ideas about how to make your way in the world, so this may just be my own worry. With a child of my own still in college, studying a soft science, the question of cost-benefit analysis is sometimes whispering in my ear at night.
So, knowledge, always the crown jewel of humanity, remains as valuable or more than ever. An education, a real education, is golden.
A conventional college education, at a bricks-and-mortar institution, purveyed in an atmosphere of political correctness, and a misanthropic mist of covertly (and not seldom overtly) Marxian indoctrination about everything, all while purveyed at chilling expense, is not something I believe in anymore.
This mist of the far leftist ethos is what I myself experienced at New College of Florida. It provided me with what nowadays passes for a top-drawer liberal arts education, and there were good aspects of my education I celebrate to this day, but I must underscore the fact that education, especially as an in-state student, was not yet so chillingly expensive.
Did you get that? That I no longer believe in a conventional college education, except for special cases.
The huge price tab today has shifted the terms of the equation radically. Except for those who need a credential, as with science, medicine, engineering, and scholarly studies, I'm not sure college is worth it anymore.
AND, the education bubble is going to burst!
What goes up must come down. The rate of tuition inflation is wholly unsustainable, and outfits like the Khan Academy and open catalog programs at MIT are going to be the pins that prick this terrible bubble and begin to promote its replacement with affordable, workable places and methods of acquiring a real education.
As always, the key to everything is how we think.
What do you want? What are all the things you want? Write them down, develop a plan to pursue them. Rate them, make a decision tree and make decide what to do next, then follow through on your decisions, the painful choices. Put your choices in your calendar, make deadlines ("a dream is a goal with a deadline," said a wise person) and then track your progress in writing! Behavior observed is behavior that can be consciously changed.
Remember that to decide comes from a Latin root, decidere, meaning literally, "to cut off."
For everything in our decision matrix, we should ask: how does it stack up against our other goals and resources? I'm not saying you shouldn't pursue this, that, or the other. I'm saying that you should be able to demonstrate to yourself how you expect the time and resources you spend on pursuing any one thing you want will serve the unfolding of your ultimate, rational self-interest better than any other use of your resources, in the context of this moment.
For example, if you want to be an airline pilot, there are prerequisites that must be accomplished in a reasonably timely fashion with the resources at your disposal. There are options at every step and half-step, but a matrix is being created by setting a goal, and everything must add up and be pointed roughly in the same direction as everything else.
We are not machines, and recreation, entertainment, rest, love, and friendships, all have a place in putting together a life of meaning, purpose, and joy.
But having decided to become an airline pilot, if you then decide to take ten years off to go live in the highlands of Tibet so you can learn how to levitate a magic carpet ... hmm ... this might sound like it has some relation to a life in aviation, but, nah, it ain't gonna work!
And then again, maybe a life in Tibet is really what you want after all. The point is to live your life rationally so that you stand a chance of achieving the happiness that you want your life to be about, and this requires consistent, daily focus, action, and planning.
Decide what you want. Write down these goals and make a plan to pursue them. Track your actions every day. Reevaluate periodically, as necessary.
Read Martin E. P. Seligman's new book on Flourishing. This provides proof positive that nearly all of us are capable of creating flourishing lives of joy, engagement and meaning!
Again, to the point here: a good life requires certain knowledge. That knowledge is a proper education. A proper education is a set of ideas that can be acquired through many opportunities available in the world and in cyberspace today, and therefore it is no longer true--it was never true--that a conventional, bricks-and-mortar school is essential to a good education that will serve your life very well indeed, as you unfold your talents into the best and happiest person that you, yes, you yourself, can be.
E P N
2014.0923
Boredom is perhaps the needless admission of defeat by a mind grown so encrusted with intellectual barnacles that it cannot stay open to the ever-shimmering light of awe and astonishment at the cosmos.
And should not the cultivation of this living capacity for amazement and wonder be a major goal of a proper education?
Boredom is a sad confession that we just can't pay the right attention to see the endlessly fascinating workings of the cosmos, and the web of creative love and cleverness that Homo saps can bring into the world! (and thereby turn our attention away, for just a moment, from the stinking morass of malevolence, madness, and mayhem that Homo saps also bring into the world!)
* * *
Now, there are questions on the nature, the content, and the importance of effective education, but we live in a culture where a college degree has become perceived as essential to putting together a good life.
I challenge this notion about a college degree and the good life, but you are already committed to the project, and now you are banging your head against the wall, trying to shake some more money out of the rafters or the branches. I have a couple thoughts that may help you:
Here's a key point: if you keep coming up short of information, if no one knows what to tell you, then the right question is: do you know anybody who might know the answer? No? Then who might know somebody who might know? Don't know? Then who else might know somebody who might know somebody who might know? Somebody who doesn't have the answers for you might nevertheless know somebody who can indeed help you. Keep asking. Keep driving down that road that leads down to just six degrees of separation between us and anybody else on the planet. You may be able to get some good answers just by persisting in asking the right questions.
I got some of this idea from Charles Lindbergh's memoir about putting together the deal that stunned the whole world in 1927, and thereby allowed him to win the Orteig Prize for the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris. The trick is to imagine the dream attained, and then works backwards, filling in each step of the way by this means of asking who knows, or else who might know someone who might know how to make the thing happen.
* * *
We need some financial wisdom to make good choices about how much and on what to spend money for college. The stupefying rise of college costs over the last half a century has backed us into the need for making these ruthless cost/benefit analyses. I myself am having to think about these matters too, as I near my mandatory retirement from the airlines in a couple years, and ask myself if more formal school could be an answer for me.
So what financial wisdom counts here? Of the world's financial wisdom, which aspects might be most cogent for thinking about college costs?
Einstein was right: the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. Well, he was joking here, of course, but if we learn to understand compound interest, this will go a long way towards allowing us always to keep the Wolf on the right side of the door. Failure to understand compound interest can lead one to become a pathetic charity case at the tender mercy of others. Sorry, but it's true. Nobody can care more about your situation than you yourself. And all political blather about our "being in this together" is nonsense, unless we are each first committed to being self-responsible to whatever degree this is possible.
Charging interest for money loaned is not a sin, contrary to the bible and many other sources, it is the legitimate fee for providing the valuable service of making money or goods available today that would otherwise not be available unless one spend considerable time saving up the funds required. Money available today is objectively worth more than the same money deferred until enough time has passed to save it for ourselves. This disparity of time value and the convenience of having the money now is the basis for charging interest.
To say, "Buy low, sell high," does not capture the essence of a good deal, because this formulation does not rule out fraudulent deals and allows for giving our blessings to the predatory, "I win-you lose" deal, which may make the predator happy for a moment, but inspires rage and indignation on the part of the poor schlemiel who was thus unfairly ripped off, and sets the stage for revenge and an unfolding dilemma of a Hatfields and McCoys feud (or a Sunni v. Shia feud too.)
No, the basis of a truly good deal is the trade of one valuable thing for another, like money for a sandwich, an exchange entered into voluntarily because each party expects that the trade will result in each party feeling better off for having made the deal. This transaction will normally embody the goal of profit, of buying low and selling high, according to one's own subjective judgment, but it is crucial to understand that this is also a win-win trade. It is an "I win and you win" transaction; it is the very beating heart of why free markets (that would be free markets) work well and are an embodiment of good morality. The absence of this spirit of "win-win" also explains why bureaucratic central planning of everything by sanctimonious, meddlesome, Big Brother government regulators works poorly, even when the process does not always create outright economic chaos. Bossy government always embodies an immoral ethos as the basis for how human beings should deal with each other, namely, that of coercion and force, versus freely chosen trade entered with the expectation of acting to mutual advantage. Free trade to mutual advantage is not a zero sum game, one person does not have to win only at another's expense. Free trade adds to the sum of wealth in the world. It creates more wealth than there was before the trade, as measured by the valuation of each of the traders (assuming that the trade went as it normally does) because both parties feel that they received something of more value than what they gave away in trade.
Incidentally, this astonishing dynamic of trade to a mutual advantage that leaves all parties feeling richer, is still very misunderstood in the world, as a widespread feature of the fabric of daily life. That people trade for profit, i.e. to mutual advantage, is still widely condemned as selfish. I recommend Ayn Rand to straighten out the raft of crazy confusion over self-interest and virtue.
These formulations of win-win trade and of cost versus benefit have everything to do with the crazy direction in which college costs have skyrocketed away from sanity in recent decades and how we need to think about it if we're to avoid getting sunk in life. One of the most common problems of frightened new college grads is the sudden insight that paying back the loans can easily cost more than the money you can earn at the jobs for which you are just then qualified. So here's another life-serving nugget of financial wisdom is always to spend less than you earn. It's a little late to think about this upon graduation, but it is oh, so vastly better late than later!
No matter how large the vessel, any leak uncorrected, or any leaking in excess of bailing water, will eventually sink the ship; you can bet your life on it.
You can see that I have arrived at the idea that ultimately the situation with schools has backed us into a corner where we have to look with withering hardness at the cost/benefit ratio of this great, bloody big pile of debt we accumulate by going to college. It seems that the most important thing now is to focus with steely eyes on the return on investment, if any, that we may expect to make as a consequence of paying for our degrees.
The whole situation for higher learning has changed so much since I was in college in the 1970s and early 1980s!
In the name of making money more easily available to students, the government has once again produced another sprawling, unwieldy, intractable monster that creates a flood of perversely unintended consequences. In college education, the result now is that money is available, not so much by a market-driven increase in customer (student) demand, but by politically driven increases in money made available to students, with the result that colleges are happy to capture this money by raising prices. The result, according to figures compiled by the College Board, is that the costs of college have been rising at around twice as fast as the general rate of inflation, and have been doing so for the last half a century. This is not a situation that can continue forever. What physically must stop, will stop eventually. It's another bubble, like the dot-com tech bubble of the 1990s that burst in the spring of 2000; like the housing and financial bubbles that burst in 2007 and 2008. And like the earlier bubbles, it is a creature of the central bank, of monetary policy, of political largesse.
This educational situation is the sad question of whether the benefit we can expect from our degree is worth the pile of debt we incur in getting it.
How can we answer this question?
I still believe that the value of one's education is not entirely a matter of any direct correlation between the college degree earned and any particular expected return on this investment, although we can no longer afford to blow off any rational thinking about the expenses, and then go major in the softest of the soft humanities (dare I mention ethnic or gender studies and social justice?), at huge expense, incurring crushing debts, and then reasonably expect to find a well-paying job in industry.
Why go to college at all?
I was deeply influenced in my choice of college by Mortimer Adler's, How to Read a Book, which for me is a deep and inspiring polemic on the value of a classical liberal arts education. For what it's worth, here is Adler, on an index card:
Adler asserts that we need to learn enough to listen to what he calls The Great Conversation, namely, the dialogue between the greatest minds, conducted in the hall where human knowledge is accumulated, across the millennia, and disciplines, and cultures. This conversation begins with Philosophy, the mother of everything, because every field depends on answers to the Big Questions found there. What is all this?--one might ask, sweeping one's arm ostensively across the whole universe? How does all this come to be? What is its nature? Is is regular? Or random? Can we expect things to behave reliably? Or capriciously? Did a god create it? What's a god? Whose god? What is the stuff of existence? What is life? Who are we? Where did we come from? Are we puppets dancing on the fingers of the gods? Do we have free will? What is free will? What is determinism? Is the universe finite? Infinite? How would one know the difference? What is Truth? What is false? What is right? What is wrong? What can I expect of others in the way they treat me? How should I treat others? Is my life mine? Do I belong to others? Others to me? What is property? What are rights? What is art? Above all, how do we even begin to know any of this? What is knowledge itself and by what standards do we come to establish these things?
Wrestling with these questions and dozens more, in dialogues between all the great thinkers across the ages, when combined with our own independent engagement with these questions, will give us something like X-Ray vision into the body of thought we hear yammering away from all quarters in the world today.
Philosophy is the arena in which the best minds have spoken with each other across time, in order to make any sense of life's enduring mysteries, of our place in the cosmos, and our grasp of any of it. Without life-serving answers to these big questions, we have no ability even to begin to distinguish truth from false, right from wrong, and above all how we begin to know any of these things. What of competing and contradictory propositions? Of mutually exclusive claims? Philosophy ... it is both a cause of the problem and its cure.
Footnote here on how philosophy can be simultaneously insane and yet of crucial importance. I know I will not be a very inspiring salesman for philosophy if I tell you that in my humble opinion, both philosophy and religion (which I believe to be an early draft of philosophy) are in a vertigo-inspiring state of backwardness and confusion. Nevertheless, this confusion makes the subject no less crucial. Philosophy is indeed the discipline that ought to work as a solvent to clean all the bushwa and crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses out of the crevices of the mind. Yes, I say again that philosophy remains the primary source of these crazy ideas. That philosophy purveys a dizzying array of crazy ideas is a fact. That we need life-serving ideas by which to distinguish truth from falsehood is also a fact. Without a few crucial answers to what is true and right, even if these answers are held in a patchy and confused way, we would all be dead in a day. I believe the solution to the problem lies in the problem, just as the answer to the problem of high prices at the grocery store is those same high prices, because the problem inspires producers to bring more of the thing to market, the short supply of which has caused the prices to become high. In a free marketplace of ideas, the better ideas eventually seem to win because it is these ideas which are most effective and life-serving to us. I underscore the modifier eventually! Never forget that slavery mostly ended without violence. Why? Because, apart from the moral horror of the matter, slave labor turns out to be vastly inferior to the labor of people whose very freedom unleashes their best energy, inspires their creativity and whips up gales of ambition and intelligence. End footnote.
Back to Mortimer Adler's liberal education on an index card: next we need to know some history, so we can have a clue about where this whole antic human project has come from.
We need languages too, so as to know that the word is not the thing named, and to see wider truths about the things these words attempt to name.
We need science and math, because the language of natural science is mathematics, and without these we have no language by which to distinguish the most astonishing human accomplishments in science and technology from outright magic, as Arthur C. Clarke once put the matter.
The appeal of a classical or liberal arts education is to nurture a deep perspective on humanity, a basic understanding of the enduring issues with which the best minds have argued and engaged with each other since the day humans learned to write and thereby began to accumulate our knowledge, and to learn how to learn.
It is difficult to inculcate such a slow, contemplative approach to knowledge as the classical liberal arts, when one is made to feel that every hour in the classroom is leading to a Macy's Day Parade, with your float rolling down the street, festooned with long rolls of print-outs of bills for the current-day's hideously high college expenses.
How can one find anything like the repose for thought which is required to engage mindfully and carefully with the big questions, and get a perspective on this unique experience of being human?
And then there is the problem on campus of so much philosophical lunacy, political thumb-sucking, indoctrination against all things essentially human ...
... okay, this is veering into deeply unwarranted overgeneralization, but everywhere on campus I see in the background the neon sign of debt flashing: $ $ $. How can we not be scared out of our wits to pile on debt without some assurance that it will eventually pay off and not bankrupt us, or flatten us financially for decades to come?
I understand that you have some ideas about how to make your way in the world, so this may just be my own worry. With a child of my own still in college, studying a soft science, the question of cost-benefit analysis is sometimes whispering in my ear at night.
So, knowledge, always the crown jewel of humanity, remains as valuable or more than ever. An education, a real education, is golden.
A conventional college education, at a bricks-and-mortar institution, purveyed in an atmosphere of political correctness, and a misanthropic mist of covertly (and not seldom overtly) Marxian indoctrination about everything, all while purveyed at chilling expense, is not something I believe in anymore.
This mist of the far leftist ethos is what I myself experienced at New College of Florida. It provided me with what nowadays passes for a top-drawer liberal arts education, and there were good aspects of my education I celebrate to this day, but I must underscore the fact that education, especially as an in-state student, was not yet so chillingly expensive.
Did you get that? That I no longer believe in a conventional college education, except for special cases.
The huge price tab today has shifted the terms of the equation radically. Except for those who need a credential, as with science, medicine, engineering, and scholarly studies, I'm not sure college is worth it anymore.
AND, the education bubble is going to burst!
What goes up must come down. The rate of tuition inflation is wholly unsustainable, and outfits like the Khan Academy and open catalog programs at MIT are going to be the pins that prick this terrible bubble and begin to promote its replacement with affordable, workable places and methods of acquiring a real education.
As always, the key to everything is how we think.
What do you want? What are all the things you want? Write them down, develop a plan to pursue them. Rate them, make a decision tree and make decide what to do next, then follow through on your decisions, the painful choices. Put your choices in your calendar, make deadlines ("a dream is a goal with a deadline," said a wise person) and then track your progress in writing! Behavior observed is behavior that can be consciously changed.
Remember that to decide comes from a Latin root, decidere, meaning literally, "to cut off."
For everything in our decision matrix, we should ask: how does it stack up against our other goals and resources? I'm not saying you shouldn't pursue this, that, or the other. I'm saying that you should be able to demonstrate to yourself how you expect the time and resources you spend on pursuing any one thing you want will serve the unfolding of your ultimate, rational self-interest better than any other use of your resources, in the context of this moment.
For example, if you want to be an airline pilot, there are prerequisites that must be accomplished in a reasonably timely fashion with the resources at your disposal. There are options at every step and half-step, but a matrix is being created by setting a goal, and everything must add up and be pointed roughly in the same direction as everything else.
We are not machines, and recreation, entertainment, rest, love, and friendships, all have a place in putting together a life of meaning, purpose, and joy.
But having decided to become an airline pilot, if you then decide to take ten years off to go live in the highlands of Tibet so you can learn how to levitate a magic carpet ... hmm ... this might sound like it has some relation to a life in aviation, but, nah, it ain't gonna work!
And then again, maybe a life in Tibet is really what you want after all. The point is to live your life rationally so that you stand a chance of achieving the happiness that you want your life to be about, and this requires consistent, daily focus, action, and planning.
Decide what you want. Write down these goals and make a plan to pursue them. Track your actions every day. Reevaluate periodically, as necessary.
Read Martin E. P. Seligman's new book on Flourishing. This provides proof positive that nearly all of us are capable of creating flourishing lives of joy, engagement and meaning!
Again, to the point here: a good life requires certain knowledge. That knowledge is a proper education. A proper education is a set of ideas that can be acquired through many opportunities available in the world and in cyberspace today, and therefore it is no longer true--it was never true--that a conventional, bricks-and-mortar school is essential to a good education that will serve your life very well indeed, as you unfold your talents into the best and happiest person that you, yes, you yourself, can be.
E P N
2014.0923
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