zonkered.net

There’s a post on Jezebel today on college students with entitlement complexes, and as usual when it comes to posts on Jezebel, the subject has gone away from the subject at hand and onto the broader issues – in this case, the purpose of higher education in the United States.  Several people are postulating that education should, simply, be for self-actualization, for the pure pursuit of knowledge, be about learning what you love.  It’s not that I disagree with this, per se; it’s a nice idea.

Maybe I’m just cynical.  Maybe I’m a product of my midwestern middle class upbringing, where money was was tight – or at least tighter than my classmates – and when I went off to college, a major part of my major-choosing decision was based on the consideration of what would help me find employment in after graduation.  This was expected, even if it was for the most part unspoken (my brother quadruple majored in accounting, finance, and two other business fields whose names escape me, and my sister, like me, has a degree in economics); if I had majored in what I loved rather than in what I hoped would get me a job, I would have a degree in East Asian history, not one in financial economics.  For the most part I don’t regret my choice; it allows me to understand at least some of the economic disaster we’re in now, and its a great help at work, but let’s face it:  if the history department had been as diligent as the economics department in providing students with examples and contacts for post-graduation employment, it’s pretty damn likely I would have dropped econ like a hot potato.  But they didn’t, and this was unfortunately the way most of the humanities departments worked – they didn’t give the students or the prospective students much of an idea of what they could do with their degree once they finished it.

And while finding out what you love and enlightenment and self-actualization are all extremely important parts of education, so is employability.  And employability – especially for those who come from strained financial circumstances, or even those like me who just had to weather times that were more difficult than my classmates – this is a huge deal.  Huge.    It’s a major worry, and it’s not necessarily about doing what you’re “supposed” to do by getting a job and a house and a car and 2.5 kids.  It’s about being able to live comfortably.  And living comfortably is almost as big a deal for me as any sense of enlightenment is.

So if you want to reform society and education so that the education is more important than the end product, have at it.  I hate No Child Left Behind just as much as the next child of two teachers, and I think we’ll be far better off if more of an emphasis is placed on learning and less on testing.  But while we’re doing this, we can’t forget that what happens after college is still important.  And it still needs to be part of education too.