Albert Jay Nock on teaching college students

Albert Jay Nock reflecting on his experience of teaching college students - a useful reminder for students to (a) have some purpose or intention behind the course of studies they choose, and (b) make the most of their educational opportunities:

"What struck me with peculiar force was that only one out of the whole batch was taking work with me because he wanted to learn something about my subject. Most of them were taking it as a filler. They sat where they did because they had to sit somewhere in order to meet some requirement in an intricate system of 'credits,' and the most convenient place for them to sit happened to be in my lecture-room. Some were there for purposes connected with their prospective ways of getting a living. The majority, however, for all I could make out, were there because they were, at the moment, nowhere else; they put me in mind of the cheerful old drinking-song which we used to sing to the tune of Auld Lang Syne: We’re here because We’re here because We’re here because We’re here."

--Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (free e-book available here).

Education-related excerpts from Jacques Barzun, "From Dawn to Decadence"

(Note: I am posting additional excerpts, less related to education, from From Dawn to Decadence on my general-interest blog; you can find these here if you are interested.)

In a post I wrote a couple of years ago on Wide Awake Minds, I noted that "some books are an education in themselves" because of the breadth of topics they discuss and the seriousness of their insights about the world and about human life.  Historian Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present unquestionably meets that standard.

Barzun is one of the most erudite writers I have ever read. This New Yorker article describes Barzun's routine as he approached his 100th birthday in 2007, and comments on the range of his interests and knowledge:

"(Barzun's) idea of celebrating his centenary is to put the finishing touches on his thirty-eighth book (not counting translations). Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology."

Here are a few excerpts from what I've read so far:

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Anything that can be said about the good letters implies the book, the printed book. To be sure, new ideas and discoveries did spread among the clerisy before its advent, but diffusion of manuscripts is chancy and slow. Copying by hand is the mother of error, and circulation is limited by cost. ...Speed in the propagation of ideas generates a heightened excitement. ...To the modern lover of books, the product of the press is an object that arouses deep feelings, and looking Durer's charcoal drawing of hands holding a book, one likes to think the artist felt the same attachment. The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

...The first generation of international publishers did not merely make and sell books; they were scholars and patrons who translated the classics, nurtured their authors, and wrote original works. Their continual redesigning of letter forms gave rise to the new art of typography.

...People were now reading silently and alone. ...Books, books everywhere, like home computers today. ...Print brought a greater exactness to the scholarly exchange of ideas - all copies are alike; a page reference can kill an argument by confounding one's opponent out of his own words. A price is paid for this convenience: the book has weakened the memory, individual and collective, and divided the House of Intellect into many small flats, the multiplying specialties. In the flood of material within even one field, the scholar is overwhelmed. The time is gone when the classical scholar could be sure that he had 'covered the literature' of his subject, the sources being finite in number.

Interview: Polyglot and self-educator Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D. (Part 2 of 2)

(This is part two of my two-part interview with Alexander. The introduction and first part of the interview can be found here. Thank you, as always, for reading.)


Wide Awake Minds (WAM): Your educational accomplishments, style, and scholarly output seem to be quite different from those of most people in academia. For instance, it seems like you may have originally chosen your particular Ph.D. program (in History of Religions at the University of Chicago) because of what you wanted to learn and know rather than because of your desire to join that particular field as a scholar. Is that true?


Alexander Arguelles (AA): Yes, it is true that I never aspired to join the particular field of history of religions as a scholar. Right after college I did have some other reasons for ending up there, but the main one was that I believed I could do more comparative historical philological work there than I could anywhere else, and I think I was right in that. Quite frankly, I don’t see a Ph.D. as a certificate to be a specialist expert in the narrow realm where it was minted, but rather as a license to learn, and as proof that one has completed the whole formal schooling process. That’s what going there meant to me – completing the schooling process. I discovered when I was quite young that getting good grades was easy and brought many rewards (such as scholarships) in terms of both being taught some things and being given the freedom to teach oneself even more, so that is what I kept on doing as long as I could.

Unfortunately for me, my concept of what a Ph.D. represents is rather rare, and as a result my own academic career has definitely suffered. I was happy to head out into the wider world to get actual exposure to languages when I was a bit younger, but now I would be quite content to go “home” and have an office on the Quads or in Morningside Heights or any other Ivy League town. It doesn’t seem I’ll ever get one, though. I’ve applied for a fair number of professorships advertising for people with international experience and innovative approaches to foreign languages, but I’ve never been gotten any interested responses. It appears I have published in the wrong way – I’ve been told that full-length books like my multilingual dictionary and my analytical guide to Korean verbal conjugation - which I think are far more scholarly than my dissertation and which certainly took a lot more time and energy – are “just reference works” and that they “don’t count” – the only thing that counts being articles in scholarly journals.

I clearly remember my first advisor at the University of Chicago telling me to enjoy my graduate school years because, once I was a professor, I wouldn’t have nearly as much time to continue to explore and learn new things. As I’ve since had occasion to observe, he was all too often right. Many of my colleagues, instead of continuing to widen their horizons throughout their careers, only have time to delve deeper into their specific area of specialization. I think that is a shame, for I believe the primary duty of a scholar ought to be to continue to learn and study new things throughout life. Particularly in the area of foreign language learning, I think it is a travesty that linguists conduct research by theorizing and by testing on and observing others rather than by learning languages themselves so that they know first-hand what works and how that process works.

Interview: Polyglot and self-educator Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D. (Part 1 of 2)

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl

Featured self-educator: Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D.

Self-educator’s position: Language Specialist, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization

Date: 21 December 2010

A "polyglot" is a person who knows many languages, and Alexander Arguelles is one of the foremost self-taught language learners in the world. In many ways, Alexander embodies the ideals of self-education and liberal education that are promoted on Wide Awake Minds. He has spent countless hours over the years on self-directed education with the aim of developing an "encylopedic mind," and he sees the learning of languages as his "passport" on a lifelong educational journey.

Alexander grew up hearing his father, another self-taught polyglot, teach himself languages by reading aloud from foreign language texts. By the time he was completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University, Alexander had been exposed to the "Great Books" method of liberal education and had "obtained a solid foundation in six languages: French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit."

After graduating from Columbia, Alexander pursued a Ph.D. in History of Religions at the University of Chicago, where he wrote a dissertation on Old Norse and developed his abilities in a number of other ancient and modern languages while making the decision to work systematically at becoming a polyglot later in life. After graduate school, Alexander gravitated away from traditional academic research and toward a career of language learning and teaching. During one five-year period, Alexander devoted himself nearly full-time to the study of languages.

Alexander's website reports that he has achieved his goal of being able to comfortably read classic books in their original languages with little or no use of a dictionary in over 30 languages, but he has a considerable knowledge of many others as well. He has managed to build a personal library of language learning resources for over 150 languages, and he has reviewed different language learning materials in a series of YouTube videos. His published books include a multilingual dictionary as well as reference materials on Korean, German, and French. His website, www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com, is a treasury of resources on language learning, great books, and liberal education, and self-education.

Here is a video of Alexander demonstrating some of his language learning routines to Michael Erard, a writer who profiles polyglots (among many other fascinating projects); my interview with Alexander begins below the video:



(This is part one of my two-part interview with Alexander. The second portion of the interview will be posted in the next few days. Thank you, as always, for reading.)


Wide Awake Minds (WAM): When did you first take an interest in learning? Why did you decide to make it your goal to "develop an encyclopedic mind," as you put it - and what do you mean by that term?

Alexander Arguelles (AA): I have always loved learning. I have been an inveterate reader from my earliest years, and from boyhood onwards I have always carried several books around with me wherever I go, together with a notebook for writing down quotes as well as my own observations and reflections. By early adolescence, I had developed a taste for both serious literature and for histories of all sorts: chronicle-type (important names, dates, battles, events, dynasties, etc.), historiography, the history of ideas, histories of philosophy, histories of literature, other cultural histories, etc.

I don’t remember just when I first consciously articulated the desire to develop an encyclopedic mind in those precise terms, but it was certainly a long time ago, and even before that I was working in the same direction.

What do I mean by the term? There are three main components: first and foremost, I want to have a wide ranging and well organized knowledge of facts; second, I want to have a deep understanding of both the true connections between those facts that are actually related and also of the patterns that are represented by those that are merely parallel phenomena; third, I want to digest all of this, to have it available for immediate access right inside my head.

Why? Well, I suppose I am simply enamored of the idea of making my brain a repository of knowledge, a primary reference source that goes with me wherever I go and in which I have facts ready at hand without needing to look them up in external sources. What do you do with all the footnotes at the bottom of the pages of an annotated scholarly work? I suspect most people tend to skip them altogether, but if you do read them the first time you read the work, and you then read it again, it is simply a much richer and more meaningful experience upon that second reading because you already know the content of the explanatory footnotes. Going through life with an encyclopedic mind is rather like that, that is, a more satisfying experience when you know most of the context that you otherwise have to get by reading footnotes if you even bother to look at all. Conducting yourself in the conscious light of what others have done and thought is more fulfilling than living without that awareness.

There is so much to know that there is always something new to learn, and while it is always wonderful to do so, still it is somewhat mortifying to first realize that you are completely ignorant of something. I mean, when I first learn the name of an important historical personage or of an ancient civilization, I am excited to add that information to my encyclopedia, but I also feel a twinge of shame that I knew nothing about it before.

In reality, whenever I move around the world I ship a large physical library around with me, but I really like the idea of having no possessions, and I think it would be nice to have nothing physical, but to still have a full rich world of knowledge inside my mind. I haven’t written it yet and maybe I never will, but I have a fleshed-out dystopian novel in my head in which exactly that is all that is left – what is inside our heads. I fear that for most people that would leave them with very little indeed, but I think it would be magnificent to be able to sit down and write out an encyclopedic work such as Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Maius.

Interview: Self-educator Hoossam Malek

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl

Featured self-educator: Hoossam (Sam) Malek

Self-educator’s location: Baltimore, Maryland

Date: 4 March 2010

I met Sam Malek three summers ago, when the two of us were summer interns at Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, in Chicago. Sam has one of the most incredible minds I have ever encountered: his worldview is informed by a deep understanding of mathematics and economics as well as an insatiable curiosity and drive for growth, understanding, and academic and professional excellence.

The son of first-generation Syrian immigrants, Sam is proficient in Arabic, English and French. After earning a B.A. in Economics at Princeton, Sam spent a year working with the American Red Cross through AmeriCorps VISTA in West Baltimore City. He then worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, VA for three years while taking advanced courses in mathematics. He enrolled in the full-time M.B.A. program at the Chicago Booth School of Business and graduated towards the top of his class while also earning an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies. He began a career as an emerging markets bond analyst at Lehman Brothers in the turbulent late summer of 2008, and has since moved on to another firm where he focuses on high-yield Middle Eastern bonds.

WAM: On Wide Awake Minds, I promote a vision of education as a lifelong process in which certificates and degrees are important thresholds or signposts, but not signals that we have become "educated" persons with no need of further intellectual growth. You are someone who has gone far beyond the requirements of your profession and continued to pursue new learning opportunities at every stage of your life.

SM: What you are saying about thresholds - that you don't just cross a threshold and then be done - is, I think, very important. Human beings, especially here in the United States, are sometimes encouraged (unfortunately) to see life as a series of doors that you go through for whatever reason. Even that - to stop and think about that and reassess it may be very uncomfortable for some people.

Why learn? Why have a job? We have to put food on the table, we need to exist. We need knowledge to do our work as human beings. God puts you on this planet, and if you're lucky you have health - but education is supposed to take us beyond that and help us thrive in a difficult world. We don’t just get an education to check it off the list, but to survive and thrive.

It's kind of like the saying: "The truth can set you free." Life can be pretty oppressive at times. But education can prepare us for that by giving us foresight, the ability to be proactive, the ability to manage our passions, and the ability to see clearly in spite of whatever is going on around us. We are sentient people, not just rational creatures that see everything clearly - education can help us channel our emotions and not be slaves to them.

For example, you and I both do some of our work remotely, over the Internet, and I sincerely believe that that's the future of a lot of labor markets. This idea of making a living without waking up and going to a physical office building will be very uncomfortable for a lot of people. But there are ways to make the prospect of an uncertain future and new work environments more manageable and exciting; some of these ways include being aware of the world, seeing things, reading things, knowing things - in short, education.

And some people seem to be driven to go beyond the basics of what they need to know. Earlier tonight I was reading a friend's blog - he is in the field of bioengineering, but he really wants to be a philosopher. His post was explaining to his readers what an "axiom" is. Not everyone wants to be that thoughtful about the world around them, but some people need to - for these people, learning itself is a powerful need.

WAM: What you said about your friend's blog is very interesting - do you see anything significant about the fact that he was using the format of a blog? For example, was he "working" as a philosopher or exploring his identity as a philosopher? Was he self-educating by clarifying his thoughts on an issue and distilling these thoughts into a blog post? Was he performing the function of an educator, teaching his readers about a topic important to him?

SM: Absolutely, his use of the blog format is very significant. He has 800 friends on Facebook and seems very Internet-savvy - not only can he test the waters as a philosopher or public intellectual, but he can try to create a market for his ideas and attract a readership for his views. If readers with limited time feel compelled to go to his blog and read his writing, then he may be on to something that he can use to build new opportunities.

One good thing about technology is that it creates these marketplaces of ideas - not just for testing ideas, but for communication. If you feel passionate about something, you can go online and talk about it with others. Passion and sincerity are contagious - people will sense them in your writing and respond. My friend is lucky because the invention of blogs and the Internet gave him the opportunity to experiment and branch out beyond the narrow function of his career.

A glimpse into a great mind: Jonathan Z. Smith

[Editor's note: One of my purposes in writing Wide Awake Minds is to publicly recognize and draw attention to intellectual and academic achievement. In the coming months, I hope to highlight the achievements of many thinkers and self-educators by sharing excerpts from their books and interviews that highlight their love of learning, their commitment to education, and their individual learning styles and research methods.]

Jonathan Z. Smith is a historian of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

(Via his faculty website:) Smith's research has focused on such wide-ranging subjects as ritual theory, Hellenistic religions, nineteenth-century Maori cults, and the notorious events of Jonestown, Guyana. Some of his works include Map Is Not Territory; Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown; and To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual.

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From Smith, Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion:

All of these inchoate musings became clearer when I accidentally came across a copy of a journal with (Ernst) Cassirer's 1945 article, "Structuralism in Modern Linguistics," in a 10 cents barrel in a Fourth Avenue used bookstore. ...I don't think I had ever been as impressed with a mind at work as I was with Cassirer's.
...
The more than thirty years I have spent teaching at the University of Chicago has defined my work. ...The University's commitment to letting a mind go where it will resulted in a diversity of appointments, until the ultimate freedom, granted in 1982, of being without departmental affiliation as the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities.
...
Moving to Chicago in the late 60s was to enter into Mircea Eliade's orbit at the height of his influence. Eliade had been, for me, a model of what it might be to be a historian of religion. He seemed to have read everything to be able to place the most variegated data within coherent structures. While a graduate student, I set out to read nearly every work cited by Eliade in his extraordinary bibliographies in Patterns in Comparative Religion, hiring tutors to teach me the requisite languages. These readings constituted my education in the field.
...
It was during this period of "playing in the stacks," supported by a Yale Junior Sterling Fellowship, that, having read John Livingstone Lowes's description of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's reading habits (Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination [1927; reprint, New York, 1959], 30-36), I developed a set of reading rules I have followed ever since. These include: always read the entire chapter of a book in which a reference you are looking for occurs, then read at least the first and last chapters; always skim the entire volume of a journal in which you are seeking a particular article, then read the tables of contents for the entire run of the journal; after locating a particular volume on the shelves, always skim five volumes to the left and to the right of it; always trace citations in a footnote back to their original sources. ...Later, I added: do not teach or discuss a figure unless you have read the total corpus of their work as available to you.
...
The label 'historian' is the one I am most comfortable with.... Whether global in their reach or preoccupied with one limited segment of human activity, historians share an uncommon faith in the revelatory power of a telling detail, a small item that opens up a complex whole and that thereby entails a larger set of intellectual consequences.

From Smith, "The Necessary Lie: Duplicity in the Disciplines":

When we conceal from our students (the hard work of academic research), that which is actually the way we earn our bread and butter, we produce a number of consequences. I remember testifying once before the California state legislature and facing a legislator who wanted to know why professors should be paid to read novels, when the legislator himself read novels on the train every day. Well, that was the price of our disguising the work that goes into things.

There are, I think, more serious educational consequences. If we present the work as perfect or as work without a revisionary history, then we present a work that no student could hope to emulate. Indeed it serves, if it serves at all, as a standard for how far below that standard the student falls. If we present the material without displaying the effort that goes with it, students tend to conclude that things are true or false, or alternatively, that it's entirely a matter of their opinion whether the object is exemplary. In that case, what we have is a contrast between his or her feelings and my feelings. Thus, in the name of simplification, what we really end up doing is mystifying the objects we teach at the introductory level.


Excerpts from an interview with Smith conducted by Chicago Maroon reporter Supriya Sinhababu on 6/2/08:

SS: How about e-mail?

JS: I've never used a computer.

SS: Never?

JS: No.

SS: So do you typewrite all your papers?

JS: Yup. Or handwrite them. ...I take Marx very seriously, I think [the computer] alienates the worker from his production.... With a typewriter, I hit a key, and it goes bam. I understand that: I made that letter happen.

SS: What got you interested in the religions that you study?

JS: Because they're funny. They're interesting in and of themselves. They relate to the world in which I live, but it's like a fun house mirror: Something's off. It's not quite the world I live in, yet it's recognizable. So that gap interested me. And so I specialized in religions that are dead, which has the great advantage that nobody talks back. No one says, "That's not what I heard last Sunday!" Everybody's dead. And I like that. Now, I sometimes have to deal with religions that keep going. And they're more problematic because then you deal with people who believe things.
...
I also think that whether you like it or you don't like it, (religion has) been a part of the world, and remains a part of the world that has a lot to do with what people do. And so I think if you think it's a worthwhile task to try to understand other people, then you probably haven't given up on trying to understand yourself. ...Whether (or not) an individual sees themselves as religious, there is still enough embedded in the culture in which they live (that), to some degree, the eyeglasses through which they look at the world are shaped by those religions.

SS: You mentioned that your teaching style is peculiar. Can you describe what you mean by that?

JS: ...I try, I suppose, very hard — someone once said religion is a topic you have to un-teach before you teach, because in some sense, everybody comes in with an idea in their head, so they're obviously sure that they know something about it. Your job is to suggest, without being incredibly in their face, that they don't. So you have to take it apart, respectfully, but nonetheless take it apart.
...
For (students) the word belief means only religious. I'd never quite realized this before. They don't have beliefs about science, or beliefs about Obama or beliefs about War and Peace. They only have beliefs about religion. If you say "what do you think about..." that's not beliefs! So somehow beliefs isn't about "thinking about," first of all; that's the first thing I learned from my students.
...
SS: So do you consider yourself one of those people who's in-between [in terms of religious belief]?

JS: Oh, I would hope so. In between is where you always are. If you want one word from me I'm a translator. That's what I do. I translate in both directions.
...
Martin Luther says, "What think you of Jesus Christ?" is the only question! Well that's the only question, but what hundreds of questions are wrapped up in that question?
...
SS: I don't know if you if you've heard of this website — probably not, but it's called Ratemyprofessors.com, and your reviews are glowing.

JS: I've never heard of such a thing. And I don't like the idea. ...

Well I think [Ratemyprofessors.com] is an awful idea. And what good does it do? I mean, I've been married for nearly 50 years, I'm not on the market. What other reason would one have for such a thing? ...

No, I've been spared much by never—I've never seen the Internet. And my son endlessly explains to me that I should say that rather than "I've never seen the Web." I haven't seen that one either! He says I sound very ignorant if I say I've never seen the Web....

One (college) major is bad enough. I would like to abolish majors altogether. So two is unbelievable. ...Majors I think are of no use to anybody.

In defense of generalists and polymaths

Many of the most innovative thinkers and writers in history have been polymaths, individuals who were well-versed in several fields of study rather than focused on a single one. There is a long tradition of respect for the contributions of generalists to human knowledge: generalists have been called - forgive the gendered language - "Renaissance men," "men of letters," "humanists," "philosophes," "essayists," and "public intellectuals (or simply "intellectuals")."

Individuals in this tradition have included, to list only a few, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and other leading lights of the American Revolution, philosopher Bertrand Russell, essayists Michel de Montaigne, Susan Sontag, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Mann's fictional character Settembrini. I have listed a few others on the sidebar of this blog, in the section "Self-educators, polymaths, and lovers of learning." The list is potentially endless, and it includes many religious and conservative as well as secular and liberal individuals. The work of many generalists and public intellectuals in recent centuries has been rooted in Enlightenment values of reason, inquiry, the exchange of ideas, and a belief in the power of education, communication, and the written word.

Even in an era in which scholarly labor is divided and academic and economic specialization is the norm, generalism lives on in the form of the traditions of liberal education, of opinion columnists (David Brooks, Chris Hedges, Christopher Hitchens) who draw on resources from many disciplines, of scholars like Cass Sunstein, Peter Berkowitz, and Martha Nussbaum whose work moves fluidly across disciplinary boundaries, in broad-minded publications like the Economist, the New Yorker, and the American Scholar, and in institutions like the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

There is a close relationship between generalism and self-education. Those of us who are interested in several or many subjects cannot realistically get an academic degree in each area that we want to pursue, so we have to pursue most of our learning on our own initiative, for no grade or diploma.

Personally, I am interested in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including politics, literature, history, philosophy, religion, education, and law. I also hope to read as many "great books" (and good books, as I like to call deserving works that have not made their way into the canon) as I can manage, and I enjoy studying languages.

Is this realistic - or is having too many interests a surefire path to dilettantism and amateurism? Reasonable minds will decide differently. Certainly, you can't be an expert in everything, but is it possible to be a competent generalist? I think that the individuals and traditions I mention above suggest that it is possible for generalists to contribute effectively to the human conversation.

None of this is intended to denigrate specialists in any way. Academic specialists, regardless of their level of public engagement, are called to increase the sum of human knowledge through rigorous, methodologically-sound inquiry into their academic fields. They do the difficult, often lonely work of building the disciplines themselves through extensive research, writing, and discovery. And the disciplines they build are what we know. All I am suggesting is that specialization is not the only way to make a real and meaningful intellectual contribution to the world.

The way to pursue a variety of interests at once is as a self-educator committed to taking advantage of learning opportunities wherever they occur, reading a wide range of high-quality material in one's areas of interest, and engaging with the worlds of scholarship, journalism, and the arts.

But why bother? The self-educators I have been interviewing on this page have offered their own reasons, but speaking personally, I want to see the world through as many lenses as possible. I want to be able to draw on many diverse sources from across times, places, cultures, and disciplines in my writing and teaching. And I want to engage fully in the humanist project of "cultivating our garden" and creating a better, happier, freer world through political and social engagement and the spread of good ideas.

Interview: Self-educator Peter Behr

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl

Featured self-educator (interviewee): Peter S. Behr

Self-educator’s location: Chicago, IL

Date: 15 October 2009

On his website, Peter Behr introduces himself by saying: "I'm Peter Behr, and I like to make things." That's an understatement. He is a computer programmer, artist, photographer, language learner, and translator. He maintains a website at http://pbehr.com/, and his recent artwork can be found at Stemleaf Studio: http://stemleafstudio.com/.



WAM: You have a lot of interests and activities, professional and personal. What are your currently "active" projects? How are you spending your days and evenings this fall?

PSB: Recently I have been programming more and doing a few web applications as a motivation to learn Python, which has been fun. I've also been renewing my efforts in learning Chinese in anticipation of a possible return to China, and developing my design and art skills by learning digital techniques and delving into photography. I have trouble focusing, I suppose, so I try to make that a strength.

Like a lot of people, I've also been looking for a new job since I returned to the states after a few months in Europe. It's an odd process but also a fascinating problem to solve, the whole idea of packaging yourself up into small, polished bits and sending them to people you don't know in an effort to get them interested in your work. My goal is to find an opportunity in China or on the West Coast involving one or both of my two main interests: language and technology.

WAM: Your projects include creating works of art, designing new web applications, and learning languages, among other things. What makes you decide to undertake these projects? Why not just watch television?

PSB: It's funny because a few weeks ago we got a huge TV with cable, so I've actually been spending time getting into football and also the Food Network. It's a guilty pleasure, I guess. But it is true that I always have a long list of projects to work on, and to be honest I'm not sure where that comes from.

WAM: What is the source of your creativity? How long have you been interested in "making things"? How did this habit of yours manifest itself in your childhood and in high school?

PSB: I've wanted to find things out and create new things since I was little, and I'm sure that has more than a little to do with my upbringing, in which I was always encouraged to read books and be creative. Actually, I think when I was much younger my parents tried to limit me in that somewhat, because I'd have a tendency to get absorbed in my own little bubble and never interact with people. Now I suppose that I'm in the process of learning how to balance the practice of creativity, which in my opinion is fundamentally independent process, with collaboration. The two feed off each other, but are also opposed in some ways; to develop some ideas you need time for uninterrupted focus, but you also need time out from that focus so that the idea can interact with those of other people. Making that distraction come neither too early nor too late is a challenge for me, and that's what I'm working on right now.

As for the source of creativity, I don't think I have an interesting philosophy on that. What matters to me is that it's there, and that something needs to be done with it. But I do like what Elizabeth Gilbert says in one of my favorite TED talks, which is that it might be a good idea to think of it as a kind of external and inscrutable force which you do not have complete control over, something which was prevalent before the Renaissance.

I'm trying to take that idea and merge it with the knowledge that improvement in technique requires no inspiration, only consistent effort. I am making an effort to find a point of view which makes me feel more at peace with the whole idea of striving to create new and original things, an incredibly hard thing to do, much less understand.

WAM: You are fluent in Mandarin Chinese and have worked as a freelance translator, but you just started learning that language in the summer of 2006. What made you decide to start learning Chinese? What methods did you use to study it? Are you still working to improve your ability, or have you moved on?

PSB: The whole process started when my brother and I visited China in 2006, knowing practically no Chinese. We had both wanted to start learning a language and Chinese became our choice because of how different it is from other experience, and its utility. My brother also needed to learn a non-Indo-European language for his linguistics major, so it all came together that we'd compress a year's study in a summer, then take the 200s back in Chicago. This worked out, and I went back the next year. Since then I've done what I can to keep my efforts alive, including studying with tutors and doing translation work. Recently I've gotten more work in translation, which is nice, and of course my goal is to go back to China again so that I can be back in the immersive environment. There's really no substitute for that.

You could say I just can't let go of the language, so yes, I've been trying to maintain and improve my reading, writing, speaking, and comprehension, but it's tough work on the side. Reading and writing inevitably get the focus, but I'm still not at all at the level where I could do professional work from English to Chinese. Eventually, I'd like to have that level, but time will tell if I'll succeed in finding the necessary environment. My fingers are crossed.

WAM: You do work in advanced computing, including programming, web design, and graphic design. Why are you interested in computers and the Internet? What would you say to traditional types who believe that we should focus on book-based education and keep computers out of classrooms? What can the average person do to learn more about computers and the Internet and grow beyond their computing comfort zone?

PSB: I don't know how much traction such traditionalists have, but I agree with the idea that skills such as reading and writing and mathematical ability or not drastically improved by teaching digitally rather than from books. But I don't think they're worsened, either, and eventually I think digital media will form the backbone of curricula. That doesn't bother me because of the added convenience, portability, and the fact that books will no longer require such quantities of physical resources. And we'll be able to take advantage of the fact that suddenly all of our information at hand is truly at hand, instantly accessible and capable of being processed by machines.

Keeping that trend in mind, I think what is missing in curricula is instruction in technology at a depth that will allow us to not be overtaken by the transformation of (parts of) our lives into a digital medium. The transformation opens up all sorts of possibilities of using programming to augment the speed at which you can manipulate massive quantities of information. The longer we wait to teach children how to control computers 'under the hood,' the further behind we get. Kids are curious and if you show them a system they'll play with it and learn it, and that's why I think it's important to get them interacting with computers in a direct way, not just with the layer that allows computers to emulate what books and televisions and mail are able to.

WAM: Your art portfolio includes both traditional and computer-assisted works. What do you see as the proper relationship between computers and art? Why does art matter, and what role can art play in a person's education and growth?

PSB: Heh, I don't have a very strong belief in that word, 'proper.' If it's a medium, art will be made in it, and there will be the possibility of that art being done well or being done poorly. I like to be a generalist and explore both kinds of media, but some people like to focus. That's okay, it's the effort that matters to me.

Art's role can be anything. I feel very anti-prescriptivist here, and can only say that it's important to realize that though taste and art in general have subjective facets, they are also very concrete areas of endeavor where effort and attention to detail really matter. If someone has the desire to express themselves and to be devoted to it, they should be encouraged. And I also think that it's harmful when people view the natural human inclination towards beautiful things and good art as an indulgence.

WAM: Wide Awake Minds highlights the work of self-educators and lifelong learners. Is it fair to say that many of your educational accomplishments have resulted from your own initiative? Do you consider yourself a self-educator or lifelong learner?

PSB: I would say that most education relies on personal initiative, though it can really be influential when somebody with certain interests and skills sees you have a shared interest and can closely encourage it to develop.

But when it comes to labels such as 'lifelong learner,' I hope that I don't sound facetious here when I say that every human can be called that.

WAM: You majored in mathematics at the University of Chicago. Why did you choose math? What would you say to the otherwise talented and motivated high school student who sees math as a pointless stumbling block? What are some of the benefits and pleasures of studying high-level mathematics, mathematics beyond basic calculus?

PSB: Mathematics is a rigorous and logical way of thinking. I think everyone should be shown the mechanisms of mathematical proof and encouraged to study it, because it sharpens and expands your ability to solve logical problems. That said, if someone doesn't (and I consciously used that word instead of 'can't') see the utility or beauty of mathematics, that's okay. But acquiring facility in fundamental arithmetic, geometry, combinatorics, and statistics are necessary for functioning fully in society. I think that's obvious, even though my mind is yelling at me, 'Prove it!'

The vast majority of people are never even exposed to logical proof. I certainly wasn't impressed with its significance until college, which made for an enormously uphill battle in studying math. I think math was what happened when I found physics too full of approximations and almost sloppy, also there was certainly familial influence involved since my dad, aunt, and uncle are all mathematicians. Even though I finally came to the conclusion that I don't want to be a pure mathematician, I still don't regret having committed to learning what I did, even though I could have gone in may other directions. If I could do it again, I would only want to do it better and with more depth.

WAM: Any advice for current and future college students?

PSB: This certainly doesn't apply to everyone, but I think that a lot of people with strong creative tendencies get paralyzed sometimes when presented with something like college. It's a huge opportunity for creative work, but there are so many possibilities and the whole structure and time period is vaguely defined. You can only understand it backwards, and not forwards. If I were giving myself advice, I would say to never forget to look for what I like to do, seek out smart people, ask lots of questions, and to study and work when in doubt. Repetition is so valuable not only because it makes you better at whatever activity you're targeting, but because each time around you understand what you're doing in a different way, and you might suddenly see a different path.

Instead of trying to cover a thousand things, which it sometimes seems you're forced to do, fight that and maybe pick a hundred to do at least once and ten to do a hundred times.

WAM: Any other thoughts, observations, or advice for others who love to learn, think, and make things?

PSB: There are many places I could crib from, but a modified Zen saying might do: 'When you are hungry, eat; when you are thirsty, drink; when you are sleepy, sleep; when you are curious, learn.'

WAM: Thank you, Peter, for your time and for the good work you do.

PSB: Thank you Ryan, best of luck to you.

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Interview: Self-Educator Race Bannon (Part 1 of 2)

(Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of interviews Wide Awake Minds will be conducting with educators and self-educators. If you enjoy these interviews or other material on this blog, please consider linking to us, mentioning us on Facebook and Twitter, and emailing and sharing our articles. If you would like to share your story as an educator or self-educator, please contact me and I’ll send you a questionnaire. Thanks for reading!)

Wide Awake Interview #1: Race Bannon

Interviewer: Ryan McCarl
Featured self-educator: Race Bannon
Self-educator’s age: 55
Self-educator’s location and/or hometown: San Francisco, CA
Self-educator’s website: The Art of Self-Education: http://www.artofselfeducation.com/

Date: 29 July 2009

Thank you for sharing your story and taking part in this exciting conversation.

Does the description of the self-educator’s mind as a “wide-awake mind” resonate with you? Why?

Using the “wide-awake mind” imagery for how self-educators live their lives is an excellent way to describe those of us that pursue education on our own terms and with our own styles. It also points out the innate curiosity that seems to be pervasive among self-educators. The very nature of self-education is that we must be open to the world of ideas and the vast possibilities of the modern knowledge base in order to focus our learning efforts appropriately. Self-educators do not have the restriction of having someone else define what it is we need to learn. That is up to us, but that is the power of self-education. By defining our learning objectives ourselves we are much more invested in the process and more likely to engage fully in the learning undertaken.

Why should we be curious? What ought we to be curious about? What forms does your own curiosity take? If you are curious about something – say, an academic subject or the way something works – do you follow up on that curiosity by studying?

A lack of curiosity is a key indicator of a lackluster life. To be curious is to be human. It is our natural state and the further we move away from robust curiosity, the further we move away from our humanity.

We ought to be curious about everything. We may not necessarily pursue education for everything about which we’re curious, but the self-educator tends to find all of life fascinating and worth study, even if we choose not to study a particular topic.

My own process for learning is not linear or regimented at all. About the only consistent method I use for learning is books. When I become particularly curious about a topic and I know I plan to learn about it in some depth, my first course of action is to read a good book on the subject. The web and its countless resources supply an equally important source of research. When I can talk to someone with some expertise on the topic, I always do. Nothing can replace talking with someone who knows a subject well. They provide a “real life” perspective to knowledge not always easy to see when learning in other ways. I also listen to lectures and speeches, watch DVDs, stroll through the library, consult magazines and professional journals, and occasionally join groups who discuss the topic. On rare occasion I’ll sign up for a workshop or class, but this is not my preferred way to learn.

Do you use the Internet or other technology to self-educate or expand your intellectual horizons?

The internet and related technologies are the tools that have catapulted us into the era of self-education again. Once upon a time all education was primarily self-education. Then we created the modern school system to feed the needs of an industrialized society and we quickly suppressed the natural self-education urge. Now the internet and technology are allowing the pendulum to swing again to empowering the self-educator. The cat is out of the bag and I don’t see formal institutions ever again maintaining the sole dominance on the learning culture again.

What is your profession? (Or, if you are retired, what was your profession?) Did you self-educate on the job or as part of your job? Did you see your work as complementary to or a distraction from your interests and education? If your self-education took place largely outside of the workplace, how did you make time for it?

Although my professional life has been varied, my current profession is managing a team of technical writers, instructional designers and marketing writers for a large software company. I’ve worked in fields related to both writing and computers for much of my life and this profession combines those two worlds in an interesting way for me. I’ve been in this latest professional incarnation for the last 10 years.

Virtually everything I use in my current profession (and most past professions) has been self-taught. And throughout my years in this profession almost everything I’ve learned to further my career has been through self-education. One of the things I try to do at my current job is to evangelize self-education (usually termed informal education in the corporate world) and I’ve been able to garner significantly more respect for such learning within my company. The software business, due to constantly changing technologies and business trends, is one of those industries that more readily understands that formal education can’t possibly serve all of the ongoing educational needs for their employees. So informal education is more warmly embraced than it might be in other businesses. Other businesses could learn from the software industry’s example.

I’m lucky that my current profession complements my self-education interests and efforts. Perhaps that’s because I have one of those ideal corporate positions that offers me stimulation, growth and autonomy in ways not many enjoy in their jobs. I know I’m lucky.

Some of my self-education takes place at work and some outside of work. My interests are too varied to be entirely satisfied as part of my daily work life.

Who are your educational, intellectual, artistic, and moral role models?

Without a doubt, my father. As a young child, even before I entered first grade, my father was fostering the hunger in me for self-education. My father was an esteemed Ph.D., professor and practitioner in his field with an extensive education and many academic honors. That wasn’t what made an impression on me though. Rather, it was his constant desire to learn, and to learn about all sorts of things, that acted as my model and motivation to do the same. My father is a superb self-educator and I recall loving the process of learning in all sorts of ways alongside him or as inspired by him.

My father also set the tone for my moral compass. I never saw my father act unethically. Never. That had a profound influence on me.

What is your formal educational background? How did you feel about your formal education? Did you in some ways benefit from the constraints and parameters it provided? Did your classes often bore you? What is the relationship, in your opinion, between formal education and self-education? What role do you see, if any, for teachers and tutors in self-education? What changes do you think should be made to America’s system of formal education, or to the way we think about education?

I went to an excellent religious grammar school for grades 1 through 8. Was it entirely enjoyable? No. The religious dogma I learned never really resonated with me very well, but apart from that I probably received a far better academic education than most kids in grammar school, then or today. And while the value of learning such basics as reading, writing, basic math and science can’t be underestimated, the school structure and process strained against my own personal educational process.

Probably because I was an excellent reader and a quick study (thanks again to my father), I made it through grammar school with excellent marks without really studying too hard. Instead of attending to my school studies as expected, I worked just hard enough to get decent grades and then I put school work aside and began to learn and explore things of far more interest to me.

High school ushered in a time that was more social and with an even greater array of interests. Again, I stuck with my regular studies to the extent necessary to receive good marks, but that was it. As soon as I’d complete an assignment I’d dump the schoolwork and replace it with the latest book I was voraciously reading or the pursuit of my latest hobby, sport or social group.

Then came college. Forces strained my relationship with college from the start. My disillusionment with college athletics (part of my reason for going to my college at the time) was part of it. So was my similar disillusionment with the educational path I was expected to follow in college. Add to that coming into adulthood and wanting to spread my wings more than college would allow and the end result was me leaving college during my third semester.

I was, in fact, encouraged to leave by a visiting professor (I’ll never rat her out though – thank you again to her for the push). Early in college I left my lifetime sport of gymnastics and that left me with a void for physical activity. On a whim, I took a physical education dance class. I was good at it. Quite good. Within just a few classes the teacher took me aside and asked how much dance training I’d had. I had none. When I told her of my gymnastics background my aptitude made more sense to her. She encouraged me to try out for the dance department. At the time I was an accounting major with the goal of adding a law degree to that later. Needless to say, dance had never been part of the equation. I auditioned for the dance department and got in. During a visiting dance professor’s class she pulled me aside and told me I was a good dancer. She asked me if I wanted to dance professionally. I said yes. She told me to get out of college, that my years as a dancer would be few and that I should start doing it now. I left school the following week.

For me, the most important value formal education can give to individuals is to provide the necessary foundation knowledge and skills to foster self-education in the future. I think formal education could do this better than it does, but that is what I consider its primary mission should be.

With all that said, there is no more nobler profession than that of a teacher. My concern is not with the teachers, but with the curriculum and process they are forced to adhere to. If we elevated teachers to the professional stature they deserve, compensated them accordingly, and let them create their own approaches to educating their students, we’d end up with much better educated students. We’d no longer be educating to the lowest common denominator. Eliminating standardized approaches to teaching is the single most valuable thing we could do to improve the formal education environment. Unfortunately, we live in the “credentialed society” and this might be extremely hard to do, but do it we must if we’re to truly improve formal education.

At the same time, we must begin to promote the concept of lifelong learning beyond simply adult continued education within the setting of formal educational institutions. It is only by honoring the value of self-education that formal education will blossom into its greatest potential for benefiting individuals and society.

Ideas from Northrop Frye's "On Education"

We hear much about the increased numbers of students coming to universities.... Most of these students will, inevitably, be processed rather than educated, and for the really keen student in the future the great difficulty will be, not to get to university, but to get his proper education instead of processing. I say difficulty for the student, because the initiative will be up to him. [ed. note: see the post below, "A few of the things you can do in a great university," for more on this].
...
The university can best fulfill its revolutionary function by digging in its heels and doing its traditional job in its traditionally retrograde, obscurantist, and reactionary way. It must continue to confront society with the imaginations of great poets, the visions of great thinkers, the discipline of scientific method, and the wisdom of the ages, until enough people in the democracies realize that a way of life, like life itself, must be lost before it can be gained.
...
It is impossible to teach the humanities properly if we think of them as ornaments or graces of ordinary social life. They have their laws and disciplines like the sciences, and must be taught as impersonally as the sciences, despite their emotional and aesthetic connections.
...
(The high school student) is becoming aware of an underlying conflict in his situation. On one side of him is his ordinary social environment, the world of his television set, his movies, his family car, advertising, entertainment, news, and gossip. On the other side is the school, and perhaps the church, trying to dislodge him from this lotus land and prod him into further voyages of discovery. ...

The school has only five hours a day in which to fight the influences which keep soaking into the student from the rest of his experience, and which usually command an authority that the school cannot command. As a rule, therefore, the world of technology and rhetoric wins out, whether the student goes on to university or not. ...

The education theories generally called progressive tried to abolish this conflict my making the school the agent of society. Education thus became a matter of social adjustment to the world one must live in. But this world, in itself, provides no real standards or values. It stands for immaturity and a cult of youth, for social values rooted in entertainment and advertising, and for emotions rooted in the erotic. Besides, the world, unlike nature, always betrays the heart that loves her. It changes very rapidly, driven on by forces that the socially adjusted cannot comprehend, and can only cope with by the fixations of prejudice and stock response. Thus understanding the world, if made the goal of education, is forced to become an acceptance of the world, and that in turn becomes increasingly an acceptance of illusion. The forms of illusion are familiar: there are the illusions of slanted news, and the illusions of entertainment....

(The student) should understand what he must do to live in his society; but he must understand too that that society has no criteria for judging itself or one's actions within it. The criteria (or at least the secular criteria) can come only from the arts and sciences, the co-ordinated vision of the greatness and accuracy of human imagination and thought.

Northrop Frye
--"The Critical Discipline," in On Education

Self-Education: A Manifesto

I am currently writing my first book - The Wide-Awake Mind: An Invitation to Self-Education - and I ought to clarify what I mean by the term "self-education."

Self-education is at once a mindset, a lifestyle, and an action. It is both something that can be engaged in unconsciously and a habit that can be cultivated. For instance, a person can self-educate by going to the coffeeshop with a stack of books and reading, or by unconsciously choosing forms of entertainment that happen to be educational – say, high-quality films, travel, theater, lectures, backpacking, or deep conversations. Just as you can develop the habit of healthy eating or exercise, you can develop the habit of regularly reading, becoming more alert to and curious about your surroundings, and seeking out educational experiences beyond the confines of your comfort zone.

To be a self-educator does not mean to turn away from teachers. It means to embrace teachers and learning opportunities wherever they occur – whether in the classroom, in family settings, at work, with friends, in nature, or anywhere else. Embracing self-education as a philosophy and a lifestyle means growing beyond the idea of education as schooling that you may have inherited from society; it means understanding that education is a lifelong endeavor. It is not primarily the means to a degree or a job, although it may also play that role. Instead, it is both an end in itself and a means to and method of a more fulfilling life, a life that embraces the wide world of knowledge and ideas that moves beneath the surface of daily existence. The self-educator chooses the option of engaged participation in this world and rejects the option of disengaged apathy.

A self-educator strives to experience life and the world as a beautiful gift rather than as simply “what is given,” the “way things are,” and he or she realizes that the proper stance toward the world is one of curiosity and openness. Such a person can discover beautiful things in literature, in mathematics, in science, in art, in music, or in architecture that are not disclosed to those whose eyes have been closed by apathy or by a belief that their education is “complete” because they have earned some slip of paper (whether a diploma or a doctorate).

And the fields of knowledge are not a finite source of beautiful things, but an infinite source; the books and poems and monuments and recordings of the world constitute a far greater pool of knowledge than anyone could learn in many lifetimes, and worlds of knowledge are constantly changing, expanding, and being discovered. In that sense, we are at an especially fortunate moment in human history: the processes of globalization and the modern world’s advances in economics and technology, though their negative consequences must be faced squarely and fully understood, have given us a situation in which those who are a part of the “connected” world have unprecedented access to sources of knowledge in cultures across the world. Ideas and people are more mobile and accessible than ever before.

Self-education is not usually or necessarily a solitary endeavor, and the best self-educators make the most of whatever resources are at their disposal – including teachers, courses, and traditional schooling. Self-educators who are enrolled in a K-12 school or university should learn everything they can from their teachers, professors, and fellow students. At the same time, they should always remember to see beyond the structures of the school and keep in mind that they are getting only fragments and tastes of the world of ideas, and that however much they learn, the totality of what they know will always pale alongside the infinite weight of what they do not know. No degree or academic achievement can change that basic fact.

The decision to become a self-educator can transform a person’s experience in school. Graduation comes to represent not the end of one’s education, but simply one stepping-stone on a journey that ought to last until the end of one’s life. “Down-time” in and between classes comes to represent a rare, treasured opportunity to study one’s own interests. And grades, once a thing to be dreaded, come to be seen as what they are – not a reflection of your personal worth or ability in a subject, but a sorting mechanism that classifies some as more or less promising students for the purposes of getting jobs and admission to academic programs. Education is infinitely more than that; it is not something reducible to school attendance, grades, degrees, or other features of contemporary schooling.

Becoming a self-educator means cultivating the habit of lifelong learning, that is, cultivating a wide-awake mind. A wide-awake mind is a mind alert to educational opportunities in everyday life, a mind curious and eager to explore these opportunities, and a mind disciplined enough to follow through on its curiosity by making time for extended study of the areas it is interested in.

Please email me to share your self-education stories; as part of my research for The Wide-Awake Mind: An Invitation to Self-Education, I plan to interview self-educators of all ages and backgrounds. Their stories will appear on this blog and in the book. Thank you for reading, and please help spread the word about Wide Awake Minds by linking to this site and passing it on to others who might be interested.

A few of the things you can do in a great university

I believe that one way we can get more high schoolers interested in college is to give them more information about what college is and what possibilities it holds. The fact that they will probably make more money and have more career options if they go to college can only be one argument among others, and not necessarily the most important one. We should be giving students college marketing materials in 8th or 9th grade - and never mind the fretting about kids "growing up too fast" - in order to make the idea of college more real to them, and to help them understand that there is a relationship between the way they approach high school and what their future opportunities will be.

To that end, I offer an incomplete list of things that can be done in great universities. I believe that what we teach kids in high school should pave the way for them to have the opportunity to do the sort of things listed below.

Things you can do in a great university

-Spend a summer, semester, or year learning a language - any language - and living with a family in a country thousands of miles away. When you get home, the experience will have transformed you, and your knowledge of another language and culture will be something you carry with you for the rest of your life.

-Discuss some of the greatest books ever written with professors and graduate students who are devoting their lives to understanding these books.

-Take advanced courses in art, film, literature, or music, and never look at these in the same way again.

-Learn to do, and actually do, research in a field that interests you. In addition to learning things that others have figured out and written down for you to memorize, you'll be a participant - in labs and seminars - in the creation of knowledge.

-In the four summers before you graduate, travel, volunteer, read voraciously, or get internships doing important work that you will remember and learn something from. Don't get a "job" over the summer - get an experience and an education.

-Learn Chinese, Arabic, Ancient Greek, or Egyptian hieroglyphics. Take four years of classes in a language; when you are done, you may be able to read newspapers, letters, and literature in that language, and an entirely new world of people, communities, ideas, travel opportunities, and careers will be open to you.

-Develop your own voice and the voice of others by joining or starting a publication as a writer or editor, or hosting or participating in an art exhibition, play, or concert.

-Build your focus, physical capabilities, maturity, and self-discipline while making lifelong friends by participating on an athletic team; if the team is on the varsity level, you will also be able to travel and compete around the country. (Many club teams travel as well, of course).

-Increase your literacy and reading fluency as well as your ability to write persuasively by taking four years' worth of classes in the humanities and social sciences.

-Do independent study work with graduate students and professors who are brilliant people and experts in their field.

-Attend lectures by experts in every field, politicians, judges and lawyers, writers, and others.

-Discover the complexity and importance of politics, and learn to think beyond the headlines. Discover your political voice.

-Attend concerts, museums, and exhibitions that include work by some of the most talented artists and musicians in the world.

-Learn to create professional computer programs, websites, or documentary films.

-Have access to the resources of enormous research libraries and cutting-edge research technology.

-Surround yourself with some of the brightest and most creative people of your generation.

-Graduate and have the freedom to choose your career - including the most desirable careers in the world. Have access, through your alumni network, career center, skill set, and educational background, to practically any social or professional network in your field. Be a credible and desirable job applicant with economic opportunities around the country and the world.

-Enjoy four years of relative freedom - a time you can easily squander, if you wish to do so, or an opportunity, if you will seize it, to become an educated person. It can be four years of throwaway job-training or four years of stimulating and unforgettable intellectual experiences.

If students want to make the most of their school years in general and their college years in particular, they must take ownership of their education and elect to do what is difficult. The alternative is to take an easier, clearer, purely pre-professional path - a path that is all-too-often paved with banal classes and textbooks, and that often doesn't actually do much to prepare you for your first job (the pre-medical track is a significant exception). You can work toward entering a profession while getting a great education along the way.