Some things are mere shadows of what they could be or what people want them to be. I think the four-year college experience may be one of those things, and it is because we have chosen the shadow over the truth.
There is a general understanding about the college experience that, with the help of the media, has ripped its way through the fortress that guards our culture to ensconce itself right in middle, next to alcohol and patriotism.
It is a universal understanding that, when looked at with the appropriately pessimistic light, can appear to be perpetuating the evil that college is actually designed to fight.
Basically, everyone thinks that college is about getting a job and planning for a stable economic future. I think that’s dead wrong.
It is about finding yourself and figuring out why it sometimes seems like everyone is just bluffing, while also–in the meantime–picking up concrete skills to allow you to contribute to society. The last part of that, about contributing to society, is what has got everyone so confused.
Mark Edmundson, an English professor from the University of Virginia, wrote an essay called, “Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?” Edmundson does a fantastic job explaining the misunderstanding of what college is all about and the unfortunate ubiquity of this misunderstanding. I’m including a quote because I seriously don’t feel I could say this as well as he does without plagiarizing.
“If you want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institutions that you find yourself in,” Edmundson writes.
And, “The students and the professors have made a deal. The students write their abstract, over-intellectualized essays; the professors grade the students for their capacity to be abstract and overly intellectual.”
And, “Education has one salient enemy in present-day America, and that enemy is education—university education in particular. To almost everyone, university education is a means to an end.”
The college years should not be the unfortunate shadow of what they could be that Edmundson is explaining. These years should be a time where 18-22 year-olds learn what is truly right and wrong and that a lot of life is unknown.
It should be a time to realize that bad things are almost always caused by someone who is just taking things way too seriously. And more than anything, it should be a time to realize that we all put way too much of ourselves into things we don’t love.
Every college campus is a freakin’ oasis of knowledge. There is so much of it.
All college students literally live in the middle of an oasis of one of the most important resources in the world. But most of us don’t take much of the it.
Instead, because of a somehow perpetuated misunderstanding, my peers and I continue to utilize our obvious proximity to the most important type of oasis in a strictly utilitarian way.
Every morning we squeeze into mud-boots, trudge to different depths and sift frantically through the oasis’s murky bottom hoping to find gold as the water stirs up into a temporary brown.
Until night falls and we all march to shore, store our personal catch of gold, and proceed to repress the sobering reality of our muddy lives with friends and alcohol as the water settles. This repeats daily. Some of us dream of swimming in the water or drinking the water, especially during those particularly beautiful days, but we have all been exhaustively told—by teachers, mentors, relatives and friends (and continue to be told by some professors)—that swimming and drinking don’t produce anything tangible, and tangibility is all that matters!
So we sift, tirelessly, voluntarily blinded by the knowledge that one day we will be able to exchange our gold for a paper-ticket out of the oasis and finally move back to that glorious desert.
Don’t get me wrong, we should get dirty and search for gold sometimes. There is respect in dirt and you need gold to survive.
But we shouldn’t be dedication the vast majority of our time right now to planning for a time down the road.
Dylan Morrill can be contacted at
dmorrill@keene-equinox.com