Educational Evangelizers
by Jeff Neidt
When Gertrude Stein called Hemingway and his coterie of Left-Bank writers “a lost generation,” she was referring to precocious talent, excessive drinking and the disillusionment brought on by WWI. The ambling ways of the writers left them unable to enjoy the art and beauty they set into the world. Nearly 90 years later, American college students find themselves as the neo-Lost Generation. We are drifting aimlessly in a sea where our education and knowledge positions us for lofty voyages, but the economy and apathy tethers us to the shore.
Today’s twenty-somethings are the most educated group in our history. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, we are attending college in numbers never seen before: Enrollment has increased by three million students in the past six years. These same statistics show that 29.3 million students now trot through ivy-shrouded academic buildings and live on a diet of pizza and malt beverages annually.
We aren’t just sending more students to college: We are learning more as well. Gone are the days of learning solely about dead white men; today’s college students are as likely to read Shakespeare’s sonnets or Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” as they are Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss” or Khalid’s “The Secret Life of Things.” These divergent views create “worldly” and “globally minded” students (to borrow two buzz words of college admissions offices), who not only know that Khalid is Sudanese, but also could find Sudan on a map. Students who not only know about the conflict in Sudan, but also care.
More and more colleges of today are teaching students to be active learners, to seek out their own questions, to find their own answers and permissions. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see things that are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” The modern college grad no longer sees the world in a dichotomous black and white but in a multi-hued gray.
What today’s college grads don’t know – and let’s face it, it’s rare to find something that college graduates don’t know – can be Googled, Facebooked or Tweeted in nanoseconds. I, for instance, don’t know much about cobalt. But a simple Google search lets me know the atomic weight of cobalt, the color of cobalt paint at Menards and the price it would cost to have someone named Cobalt come clean my house while wearing a spacesuit. There is little in the world today a resolute individual can’t learn in less time than it takes to go the bathroom.
But this wellspring of knowledge comes with a price. In what amounts to a great paradox, the more students who attend college, the more the price of college stretches to the stratosphere. I was more than a little surprised to see my alma mater, St. Olaf College, and its more than $40,000-a-year tuition listed as “a best education value” by the Princeton Review. Finding that milk is a dollar off at the grocery store or that Old Navy is doing a “buy one, get one” sale is a good value. Calling the Mercedes-a-year tuition a “value” is an egregious misuse of the word.
There is a memorable scene in the movie “Good Will Hunting” where Matt Damon’s character chastises a jaunty grad-school student by saying, “Someday you are going to realize ya dropped $150, 000 on an education ya coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library.”
I hear that and two things come to mind. First, man, college was cheap in 1997. And second, Damon (a near Harvard grad) is slightly off in his calculations. I estimate that by the time I’m done with my undergraduate and doctorate my brain will be worth $325,000. And that doesn’t count items such as books and other peripheries. My brain is a nice condo in a trendy neighborhood. When I drive my 11-year-old car to the grocery store to buy discount-brand noodles, I may want to cash in some of that $325,000.
But I can’t say that my education is solely what I learned from books and lectures. There is an understated element of college that money spent can’t measure. There is the knowledge gleaned from participating in an academic community, the lessons learned from engaging and debating students from around the world.
Today’s students are coming out of college much like me – loaded with education, braggadocio and debt. This is a more burdensome load than one might imagine. We think we know everything and are ready to paint the world with the broad strokes of our learning. We are ready to live a life that people erect statues for. However, much as Jay Gatsby found in Fitzgerald’s opus, “The Great Gatsby,” the world is ferociously indifferent to the drums of our destinies. The world doesn’t care. And that hurts.
So what do college grads do in a world that doesn’t care about their destinies, in jobs that they are too educated for? The answer is simple. They do good in the world. Instead of stockpiling ill will and animosity toward the world, we should sprinkle bits of good over a world thirsting for altruism.
Imagine a world spilling over with college-educated individuals who want to do good. Educational evangelizers. Individuals who see that something is hopeless and won’t stop until it is otherwise. This doing good – whether it is volunteering as a job or during free time – may require that we put our monetary pursuits and ambitions on hold. In the same way that college can’t be quantified in terms of tuition, our lives can’t be quantified in the money we make. What matters is that we use our education to correct injustice when we see it. Modern superheroes fighting a world of apathy, one good action at a time.
No matter what the action, doing good in the world is the only way we can take the lofty ideals we spent all those years and all those dollars learning and not call it a waste. If we do that, we can cut the tethers of a downtrodden economy and apathetic world and sail on those lofty voyages for which our learning has already chartered the course. Go now – we are ready.
Published 3 August 2009. All Rights Reserved.