Saints and Sinners: Putting education at the front
Depending on how long the recession lasts, we may find fewer people going to college in the future. According to an Oct. 22 article by Los Angeles Times staff writer Rebecca Trounson, a year at Harvard, including tuition, room, board and other expenses, now costs about $36,000 a year.
As it is, there may be too many young people going to college today who would be better off learning to be good plumbers, cement finishers or carpenters.
At least, that’s an opinion I remember someone saying once. This fellow’s idea was to “let the dumbheads be dumbheads.” By this, he meant let them quit school when everybody can see they aren’t cut out for the academic life. Society only turns them into troublemakers by keeping them in school.
I see his point, but I don’t agree. He must have been depressed when he said that. I sometimes say things like that when I am depressed. But after a good night’s sleep, I see how poverty-stricken such a point of view is.
It is possible, of course, to feel as this person does even after a good nights sleep. That is because two false ideas about happiness have become so ingrained in us that we believe them not only when we are tired and discouraged but when we are bright-eyed and optimistic.
Those false ideas are as follows: 1. Happiness is getting what you want when you want it, and 2. Happiness is owning at least a quarter-acre of land, going bowling, having a good job and beer, and sex after dark.
Because we actually believe that, when a teen-age boy who doesn’t like school wants to quit and get a job and earn some money, we are inclined to say that might be the best thing for him. Or, if we don’t go that far, we feel the answer is vocational education — studying a trade in school and never mind about learning to write good English or reading Shakespeare.
I never thought of quitting school or learning a mechanical trade. (I still have a scar on my thumb where the saw slipped in seventh-grade home mechanics.) But I would gladly have dispensed with Shakespeare if I had been given the choice. I’m glad now I wasn’t.
I once wrote an essay for English literature class in high school in which I defended my proposition that if any poet deserved to be immortalized, it was British-born American journalist Edgar A. Guest, not Shakespeare. My main line of argument was that at least you could understand Guest. I also mentioned that I wanted to be a sports writer and what good would Shakespeare be to someone covering the Cleveland Indians or the Ohio State football team? The only Shakespeare I cared anything about was at that time playing halfback for Notre Dame.
I am sure my teacher, Miss Marie Spiess, must have been as upset with me as she had been when I referred to Joyce Kilmer, the author of “Trees,” as “she.”
But she gave me a “B” and said nothing more.
I am inclined to think that philosopher and educator Mortimer J. Adler is right when he said in an essay entitled General Education versus Vocational Education, that: “Specialized vocational training which does no more than fit a man for a limited task in the industrial process is not education in the human sense at all. It contributes to the production of material goods, not to the development of human beings.”
The whole issue is, at root, a religious one. Does a man’s life consist in the abundance of things he possesses?
Religion has always insisted that it does not. But at the same time it has often failed to make things of the spirit and the mind sufficiently attractive so that we will want to put them first in our lives.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)