Thursday, May 22, 2008
Preparation for a good life
Linda Whitlock
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
At most colleges and universities, spring graduations have come and gone. Parents, happy and no doubt relieved, have watched their children "walk." Tassels have been turned, mortarboards tossed in the air. Armed with degrees (and in too many cases weighed down with debt), these newly minted graduates now have to find their way in the world. Question is, how prepared are they to do so?
When it comes to making a career, they may be well prepared. When it comes to making a life, I have my doubts.
We get a degree to make a career. We get an education to make a life. I sometimes write those two statements on the board in my developmental writing classes as a writing prompt or discussion topic. My students hardly know what to make of them. To them, like, duh, getting a degree is getting an education. It wasn't always thus.
Today, students go to college for many reasons but primarily to prepare themselves for the workforce. Nothing wrong with that. A body's got to eat, after all. And buy gas. And pay the mortgage. But college once was more than just a place to obtain training in a set of job skills. Historically, college was also a place to figure out how to go about living not just "the" good life but "a" good life, as well. Many would argue that it still is. I'm not so sure.
Students arrive at college well-versed in the politically correct mantras of our day but ill-equipped to think for themselves. Despite both the SOLs and the value teachers place on critical thinking, many students have a weak knowledge base, little historical perspective and few skills in logic, reason and argument. Worse, they have no coherent framework within which to make sense of what they learn.
They also expect anything they're required to learn to be immediately relevant either to their future careers or to their present lives. If they can't see the connection (even when it's there), they become restless and bored. History, literature, philosophy, even writing can generate those reactions. Those subjects are critical to making "a" good life, but students focused on "the" good life don't consider them important.
Instructors, as a result, constantly look for ways to convince students a particular subject or skill will benefit them -- if not now, at least in the future.
I often tell my writing students I was sure I wouldn't need the typing class my dad insisted I take in high school. Typing was for vocational students. I was college-bound. What use did I have for typing? Hmm. Those papers I'd need to write in college, maybe? My totally unforeseen 17-year banking career? The computer age? The point: We don't always know what skills and knowledge will be relevant to our lives.
Writing is a practical skill. Students may not like it, but they can be persuaded it can help them acquire "the" good life. Literature is a harder sell. So I take a different tack with my early American lit students. I try to show them literature can help them live "a" good life -- in the long run, a far more significant accomplishment.
We start by exploring five basic questions. How did we and everything else get here? What distinguishes humans from other species? What's our purpose? What's the difference between good and evil? What implications do these questions have for how we ought to live?
Our answers provide the moral framework for living a good life. Actions, choices and moral stances all hang on this framework. That was no less true for our forebears. The better students grasp how their moral frameworks inform their own thinking, the better they can understand how their forebears thought.
For group projects, students research various "isms" -- rationalism, romanticism, humanism, etc. Through their research, they learn how the philosophies that influenced early American writers still shape our world today, proving, as Faulkner said, that "the past isn't dead; it isn't even past."
By semester's end, students aren't sure if they've been in a literature class, a philosophy class or a history class. If they've begun to see all three as relevant to their lives, that's just fine by me.
Whitlock, a Roanoke Times columnist, is an adjunct English professor who lives in Salem.
