Truly and righteously screwed

Mark Edmundson has written a compelling essay on why college students should want a substantive education and how they should go about getting one. (Courtesy A&L Daily.)

So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place runs, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and building another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yale University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.

So why make trouble? Why not just go along? Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights for you. You’ll get a good job, you’ll have plenty of friends, you’ll have a driveway of your own.

You’ll also, if my father and I are right, be truly and righteously screwed. The reason for this is simple. The quest at the center of a liberal-arts education is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest. If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I am not exaggerating. For you risk trying to be someone other than who you are, which, in the long run, is killing.

 

My only concern with the inspiring essay is that after arguing how life will be more rewarding if one follows one heart, he offers a probably false hope of fame and fortune for those who do. Rather, he could have emphasized the smaller ways living a satisfied life of following one's heart's desires would make a better world. But perhaps eighteen-year-olds still require the illusion of fame to spur them...