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News, commentary, opinion on politics, government, books, social trends, American life, travel, cycling, books, other stuff
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I left college after four years feeling unfulfilled. (Actually, it was eight semesters over four and a half years, to be technical about it.) It is not surprising that I left in that state, having picked a college that was less than suitable to my interests and talents and then having been unable to transfer due to a job I got in my second year that made moving inadvisable. (It was a good job, with lot of potential, see.)
When I contemplated college, I thought it would be an intellectual feast. I imagined myself taking on really big subjects with big thoughts. (Naive, I know.) The message to incoming freshmen at most colleges is this: you really aren’t ready for big thoughts. Like many other things one undertakes to do in life, the reward is expected down the road. It is always delayed, always somewhere over the rainbow.
If you are really smart and work hard, you’ll be able to go to graduate school. Then, maybe, you can practice your deep thinking. Except, in reality, most people who go to grad school learn to narrow their focus in order to please the faculty and not endanger their degree chances by “overreaching” for something that is too big to fit well into a thesis. More gratification delay, in other words.
My first semester freshman history class was not a disappointment, however. The professor challenged us to write on this subject: was the Civil War inevitable. Now, decades later, I see full well that I did not have enough information to tackle that huge imponderable, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is an interesting, challenging and perhaps impossible question to answer. (Unless one takes the easy way and answers yes.)
As a college student, I was a curious species regardless of where I might have attended, save a very few, small schools that actively encourage student participation and open, free flowing discussion. I had a near complete “audiographic” memory: when I heard something, I could commit it to memory immediately, almost word for word. I was weak on language study and while math and other science related topics intrigued me, the humanities were my natural home. My family had dragged me and my older brother to eight different school districts by the time I was eight, then deposited us in a rural school so backward and isolated that it was a bit like missing grades 3 through 8 entirely. After that, we moved back to Pennsylvania where the schools were much better. Mildly dyslexic as a child, spelling was a serious challenge. Unchecked, it made the papers I turned in seem a product of an unformed mind.
Beyond this, I might have been described as a quick learner eagerly interested in many topics that bored fellow students. I had picked up elementary concepts like the fundamentals of economics from wide reading in high school, so taking intro classes in subjects like that early on was no challenge at all. My reading for the last two years of high school included the Sunday New York Times, New Yorker magazine and Time magazine, in the latter case, cover to cover, everything. I dropped Sports Illustrated before my last year of high school, but I had earlier been devoted to that, too. As a freshman, I took a current events test with the entire journalism department and got the highest score. I was a habituate at the Reading Public Library, which I reached pre-driver’s license by public bus and putting out my thumb. That library remains a shrine of my youthful days.**
As the comments about Gore Vidal from the London Telegraph indicate, leaving college with a sense of not having gotten a full meal has advantages. I have been looking for that meal ever since. I, too, consider myself something of an autodidact in that I have worked toward specific learning goals without having to submit to courses of formal training or being directed by others. In fact, having sat in recently on some graduate business courses, I realized I kind of resent being guided to everything, spoon fed, in other words.
Committing one’s life to a randomized course of study is a wonderful state in which to live, but it can be dangerous, too. Thinking that one knows too much, or has the ability to dive into a subject and reach important conclusions can lead to many false assumptions and an excessive belief in one’s private abilities. We all know people who think they are the smartest people in the world and want to show it, all the time. Reaching premature conclusions that are not the product of rigorous study and contemplation is another danger. All in all, however, if one is able to do it, self guided study is probably more satisfying and can be ultimately more rewarding than the more formal, step by step kind. You just have to know where you want to start, have an idea of where you want to go and do so with some rigor and dedication to the task. The greatest failing, however, comes in whether one is able to take on a big subject, study it thoroughly and then be prepared to act on the conclusions reached. Studying on your own, however, has the advantage of being directed entirely by your interests, not those of others.
College is both underrated and overrated as a life experience. Too many people these days try to slide by in college, doing the minimum work to get the B or A grade and then not really caring what is passing before their eyes and brains. Meeting the requirements becomes the goal, not getting something worthy and lasting from the experience. Yet, to be able to spend four long years in study and contemplation is an utter joy. At the more selective colleges, however, so much work is piled on students that many don’t get a chance to think independently and certainly don’t get to do, or want, any outside reading. When I was in college, I read the entire plays of Eugene O’Neill, something that never came up in any assignments. I studied, informally, the early work on the development of fiber optics and other technologies, something that became part of my professional life and passion, communications, all the while I was a history major. As Malcolm Gladwell has said, there are advantages to be had by NOT going to the very best school. One advantage is not being constantly compared to other very smart people who might have intellectual abilities that differ from one’s on, creating a sense of inferiority, and who might have benefited from a much richer preparation for the college years. Come to think of it, there are advantages to be found in almost every experience in life, even the negative ones, if one is open to the possibilities.
Doug Terry, 1.29.14
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**In those pre-Internet days, it could be said that magazines were a primary form of education for me. One that made a particularly strong impression was The Reporter, a monthly that emphasized critical views of popular beliefs and examined major problems from a different, analytical slant. (Thank you, Douglass Cater.) Of course, I gravitated toward the big deal thought magazines, The Atlantic and Harpers, but that was generally after high school. The snobbishness of The New Yorker, which offered no table of contents in those days, meant the reader was supposed to know how to find what he needed. It offered no introduction, but required a kind of thoughtful submission to its ways. This represented a challenge that many were eager to meet, myself included.
Being visually oriented by nature, as soon as I was old enough to grasp the value of it, I watched television news, but it was clearly a supplement to newspapers and magazines. (Having been isolated in a rural area for five critical years as a child, I never fully accepted the intellectual disdain for the mass media nature of television. I came to recognize the brainwashing aspect of consumerism pushed relentlessly in commercials, but the ability to see and experience what was happening elsewhere in the world had great value, especially on an intuitive level.) I tried my hand at reporting by sixteen (on radio) and could call myself that by employment before finishing high school. Naturally, that too increases one’s interest in the larger world. In my mind, it didn’t matter if I was reporting for a medium size town radio station, I was a reporter out in the world and determined to find out what as going on.
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Writer Walter Kirn has a wonderful, eloquent passage about how his real education began, after he had finished his degree at Princeton. He had gone home to his parent’s house prior to leaving on a scholarship in England and, feeling ill with a bad cold, he paused before his mother’s bookcase filled with “classics for the masses” and began to read. “...I did something unprecedented for me: I carried it (Huckleberry Finn) to my steamy bedroom and actually let is absorb me, page by page. “
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“And so, belatedly, accidentally, and quite implausibly and incredibly, it began at last: my education. I wasn’t sure what it would get me, whose approval it might win, or how long it might take to complete (forever, I had an inkling), but for once those weren’t my first concerns. Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.
I wanted to find out what others thought.”
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From Walter Kirn’s book, “Lost in the Meritocracy”, subtitled, “The Undereducation of an Overachiever”, published by Doubleday, 2009.
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 “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
Albert Einstein
Read more quotes from Albert Einstein
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French economist Thomas Pinketty, quoted in the NY Times about scholarship in his field. What he expresses, however, applies more generally, too:
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Academic economics is so focused on getting the econometrics and the statistical interpolation technique correct, he said, “you don’t really think, you don’t dare to ask the big questions.” American economists too often narrow the questions they examine to those they can answer, but sometimes the questions are not that interesting,” he said. “Trying to write a real book that could speak to everyone meant I could not choose my questions. I had to take the important issues in a frontal manner I could not escape.”
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London Telegraph
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“...almost uniquely among public intellectuals, Gore Vidal was an autodidact who didn’t go to university. One consequence of this seems to have been that his hunger for knowledge never diminished. If anything, it grew, along with his library there at Ravello (in Italy). So many people give up on education once they have graduated, feeling they have been there, done that. Not so Vidal.”
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What happens to kids who start out a lap behind in the competition for, 1, admission to college and, 2, learning generally? The “top schools” will be glad to take you if you start out a lap down and finish two laps ahead. If you come from a poor family or one that doesn’t value higher education, and still do relatively well, they want nothing to do with you. Your progress from your starting point doesn’t, in most cases, matter. (There have been more recent efforts at inclusion, but these are small steps, on the margins.)
The real trick of the elite colleges, including the Ivy League, is that who they admit is more important than the education they provide. They endeavor to create an atmosphere of scholarship and all around smarts by taking the smartest high school and private school graduates. If you are in with a lot of smart people, some of it will rub off. You will have a choice, too: accelerate your comprehension and thinking or drop off the bus. As one renowned Ivy graduate is reported to have told her mother when the mom expressed concerns about her grades: “We’re to meet each other, not to worry about grades.”
The fundamental flaw in all of this is the assumption that those who are fast learners, who are quick mentally, will always be quick and those who are slower will also be just that. The prediction in admissions tends to become self fulfilling as the grads of the “best schools” are given the best opportunities and those from lesser schools are shunted aside.
No one has done a long term study of a representative sample of a generation to find out if the predicted performance of those who get good grades and score high on tests actually plays out that way in life. Further, who is to say that someone who learns something very quickly is necessarily better than someone who takes longer? Who is to say that a modest learner will not have some brilliant insight at some point in life? IT DOESN’T MATTER if the game of life and work can be fixed around ideas that have not been tested and proven to be true. Over time, the prediction carries the value of truth through general acceptance, except where it doesn’t, except where the individual assserts and realizes a different reality.
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From the book “You Are Not Special” by David McCullough, Jr.(teacher)
“With their electronic enthusiasms and cultural encouragements, teenagers today seem to be abdicating both imagination and knowledge.”
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