Education is about expanding yourself and your horizons

bad thing to hope to bring about positive effects through one’s education.

Why should you go to college?

It depends on whom you ask. If it’s your Uncle Bob, complete with his red MAGA hat, at the family reunion, he’ll probably tell you that college is useless, nothing but a steaming pile of garbage served on a silver platter of white people’s hurt feelings.

Perhaps this time a pragmatic parent, will say that you should go to school to make more money, but only if you take a STEM degree or commit yourself to the rigors of medical or law school.

Still others, maybe the hippy Gender Studies professor who Uncle Bob hates, tells you: “You’re here to change the world” as if the formulas revealed by Critical Theory unlock the secrets to the universe and world peace. (They don’t.)

Maybe it’s some mix of all three. None of these reasons or lack thereof to go to college are totally wrong: there are good reasons not to go to college; there are good reasons to prioritize a financially rewarding degree, and it’s not a

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But not all of them are completely right. If we avoid all situations that challenge us, we never grow or mature. If we just chase money, we lose the beauty and wonder of education for the sake of itself; and it’s a bit unrealistic to think that we can all change the world. There’s only a finite number of Bill Gates lying around, after all.

Why go to college? The obvious answer is education. But what does education mean?

These days education largely means rote memorization and performance-based examination structures designed to make students cram in facts and data without knowing why only to have their brain dump what they just learned to prepare for the next test.

But that’s not what education always was. From a practical perspective in classical antiquity, at least in Aristotle’s version, it meant more or less the instilling of virtue, courage, temperance, patience and friendliness, among others. It meant being a good citizen. In early modern philosophy, for Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, education meant learning those things that made a young, middle or upper-class man into a gentleman fit for polite society.

More fundamentally and perhaps more romantically, these classical and early modern systems were aimed at guiding students to a more spiritual transformation aimed at peeling back the layers of immediate experience to reveal the transcendent values of the good, the beautiful and the true, the three things that the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates identified as the “transcendentals,” or those things that bring us closer to the divine.

What is required, though, to see these heavenly ideals is an arduous journey, one that questions one’s preconceived notions and biases to see that the world isn’t what it seems: it is vastly more complex, full of nuance and color, replete with paradoxes and head-scratching complexities. In essence, it’s a challenge.

It’s certainly possible to discover the transcendentals in the hard sciences, or in medicine or law. STEM can, for instance, reveal the microscopic intricacies of the world unseeable to the naked eye. The raw humanity intrinsic in practicing medicine, in which one sees the emotions and tribulations of ill patients desperate for medicinal therapeutics, extends the world beyond oneself and shows that the human experience isn’t always easy or pretty. Knowledge of the law, too, demonstrates the complexities of human tradition and the inherent reasonableness we as a species carry to have the wisdom to create customs and mores to protect us from ourselves and pursue justice.

Education can inspire us to change the world as well, but it can also temper our desires to focus more precisely on those things that we can change – those things that we can tangibly touch throughout our day-to-day lives. We may be inspired by the great men of the past, like Gandhi or Napoleon, whose life forces brought some of the most powerful countries and empires in history to their knees – but we can also learn from quieter, less dramatic men like Aristotle that the first point of contact we have as humans is through the family, the original locus of political life, which in turn brings us to value the heritage handed to us at birth. So, why go to college? To be challenged, no doubt. To prepare us for our careers, to be sure. To allow us to help our communities, absolutely. But also to bring us closer to the most essential parts of human life, the joy and wonder of life: the good, the beautiful and the true.

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