Some see education solely in terms of professional training. College, so they think, will prepare them for a job -- and the more money the better. There's another element, far more important, behind and beyond the professional nature of college education. I call it the personal element.
Here's a common situation for me: a student will tell me that his (or her) parents don't want him (or her) to major in BTS (Biblical and Theological Studies) because he (or she) can't make any money doing that or that he (or she) won't be able to find a job (unemployable). What I say in such conversations is this: "Maybe BTS isn't a professional degree, but I'm sure a future interviewer will be impressed if you are a mature person, regardless of the subject of your major. Employers yearn for people with character." (We've not kept stats but I can say that our majors are all over the world in all forms of service and employment.)
Here's my big point, and I'd love your response:
The most important element of a college education is what it does to us instead of what it does for us.
If we treat our classes as something to get through, assignments something to get done, tests something to pass, and college something to get out of, we're treating college professionally.
However, if we simply (big term for me) let each class -- even Biology! -- be what it should be, and if we do our best to let its questions be our questions, and its solutions ours, and if we absorb the knowledge and relationships and do our best to let subjects interact with one another, and if (at the same time) we relate to people and grow with other people -- college will do something to us and not just for us.
Education will mature (if you accept that as a verb) us; we will grow up; and when we walk away with our graduation diploma and tassle, we will be someone new -- someone bigger and better. That is ... if we let it do to us what it is designed to do.
College lasts four years (or if we're lucky five) -- we make the most of it if we let it make the most of us.
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Becky R #48.
Agreed, cavemen drew before they could count. But if they hadn't learned to count, they would still be just cavemen with great taste. I'm an art lover myself, and I agree there should be a place for it. But kids will always want to take art because it's fun, and yes, it's easier than calculus. They need no encouragement. Not so with math and science.
I gotta disagree on one point John (and I think we've gone waay off course on this art thread). You might be surprised at how many people can not draw a person and come out with something that would be accepted in the local art world. For some, to draw a person well can be as hard as calculus. Anyone can learn it, but not all do it well. Just like with math - all can learn it, not all do it well. There are some who take calculus because they think it's fun. I have a friend with a math degree. He does with numbers, what I do with colors.
Leonardo Da Vinci.
Didn't read all the comments, but agree with the post. A good reminder that college-as-a-means-to-a-job is one of the least questioned beliefs and most problematic ones when it comes to what most institutions of higher learning think they're about.
I remember reading somewhere that in the early stages of the industrial revolution there was a united effort to, in effect, standardize public education not so much as to truly educate and form people, but to "dumb down" people so that they would be content in boring factory jobs. Too much education, it was thought, would produce an unhappy, activist population, which government and industry heads didn't want. That could be part of the cause of the "education for a job" mentality.
I bounced out of two different undergrad schools before finding a happy home in a third, from which I graduated. The first was a big state university, the second a small alternative college, and the third a private Ivy League women's college.
It was in the third that I finally discovered what real education is: training of the mind to think through, analyze, and verbalize in clear writing virtually any subject, see the connections between things, get to the deeper implications of things, and identify how they relate to other things. It was as hard as any athletic training I've done, forcing my brain beyond its usual limits, treating it as a muscle to be developed in all kinds of ways, but it really paid off.
Didn't matter what the subject of my degree was; I've used those thinking skills profitably ever since in every setting I've found myself in, and use them now as a Christian studying and writing about Christianity. I wish every educational institution could deliver such training to its students – we’d be living in a very different world if they did.
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